Confessing for All

There are two very interesting stories of confession in the Old Testament. Nehemiah and Daniel are both disheartened about the slow rebuilding of Jerusalem, after the Babylonian captivity. Daniel is watching Jeremiah’s prophetic seventy years wind down and seeing no end of captivity in sight. Nehemiah knows many Jews have already gone back home and are supposed to be rebuilding, but little progress is being made. They both decide to fast and pray, and both do some serious confessing. But it is not what we are used to today.

Daniel, in particular, has reason to worry. God has sent him a vision of many days. Now Babylon has fallen to the Medes and Persians. He gets that part. They are now in the silver, two-armed section of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. But he still can’t understand the vision of the evenings and mornings. “There was none,” he says unhappily, “to explain it.” (Dan. 8:27) Surely they aren’t going to have to delay the return and rebuilding of the temple for 2,300 years!

Not that they don’t deserve it. Daniel 9 is one of the most beautiful and poignant prayers in Scripture. In it, Daniel, one of the few people in the Bible for whom no sin is recorded, “speaks and prays and confesses his sin and the sin of his people Israel, presenting his supplication before the Lord his God in behalf of the holy mountain of his God.” (Daniel 9:20) “We,” he says, “have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and ordinances. Moreover, we have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name.” (Verses 5-6)

“We,” who? Of course Daniel was a sinner. We all are. And no doubt his sin was before him as he spoke this prayer. But this was the man who had stood for God for decades, through the reigns of several kings in two different nations, and at the risk of life and limb. Yet he confessed. His hands were, whether figuratively or literally, raised in both surrender and praise.

Note what kind of speaking together was going on here. Most obviously, Daniel was speaking together with God. This is always the first One to go to in any situation, good or bad. (“Against Thee, and Thee only, have I sinned,” said David, despite the fact that his sin had materially affected Bathsheba, Uriah, the baby born of the sin, Nathan, the servants, and the whole nation.) But more than that, Daniel was lumping himself together, speaking together, you might say, with his whole nation. He was even taking on the weight of sins he had by no means committed. He was, on the behalf of others, though he knew he himself would never see the Promised Land again, begging God’s forgiveness and restoration; not because they deserved it, but “for Your own sake, O my God.” (Verse 19)

This was no list of transgressions. There were large categories mentioned, but Daniel knew it would be impossible to tell all they had done. In fact, it is clear that he understood their condition to be far worse than simply having racked up a particularly long list of rule-breakings. “We have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled.” That ought to cover it. These are all the varieties of sin from mistakes and missteps to deliberate, knowing rebellion. And yet Daniel seeks, and apparently expects—despite the fact that “open shame” belongs to them—full forgiveness. Why? Because “to the Lord our God belong compassion and forgiveness.” (Verse 9) Daniel knows his Lord. He has been speaking with Him for a long, long time. And he is not disappointed. God’s response is (as always) even more beautiful than the prayer. “O Daniel,” says Gabriel gently, “I have now come forth to give you insight with understanding. At the beginning of your supplications the command was issued, and I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed.” (Verses 22-23) Daniel never got to go back home to Jerusalem. But he will be truly at home in the New Jerusalem. He learned to speak together with God and with the human community.

One hundred and fifty years later, Nehemiah prayed a similar prayer. In his case, a friend from Judah had come to visit, and he had asked for news from home. The Judean told him that the people who had survived the captivity were in great distress and the walls of Jerusalem were still down, the gates burned with fire. (Neh. 1:3) Nehemiah “sat down and wept and mourned for days; and … was fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” (Verse 4) He did the same thing Daniel had done. He raised his hands and begged the “great and awesome God” to listen as he prayed on behalf of Israel, “Confessing the sins of the sons of Israel which we have sinned against You; I and my father’s house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against You and have not kept the commandments, nor the statues, nor the ordinances.” (Verses 6-7) Then Nehemiah claims specific promises. Remember, God, You promised through Moses that if we sinned and were scattered, and we turned to You and confessed and kept Your commandments (he’s referring to the promises found in Deut. 30:1-5), You would take us back to “the place where [You] have chosen to cause [Your] name to dwell.” (Neh. 1:9) In the case of Nehemiah the cupbearer, God chooses to work through the king he serves to send him and another contingent of his countrymen home to rebuild the walls and the temples of Jerusalem.

From these two stories it is clear that confession of sin can be something far different from what we usually envision. It seeks more than a punishment befitting the crime, a sort of never-ending wash, rinse, repeat. True confession seeks a genuine righting of things, which only God can accomplish. There were no penances set in either of these stories. In fact, the consequences of the sin involved had already been faced, and they were natural ones. Despite the fact that the Bible gives the responsibility for the captivity to God—He is seen as using Nebuchadnezzar to His own ends in bringing a guilty people to a realization of their condition—these consequences were entirely predictable results of their repeated seeking after the gods and kings and actions and values of the nations around them. And, most tellingly of all, these negative situations don’t appear to have brought the people in general to repentance! It was these spiritual leaders, the ones who were trying to obey, the innocent bystanders (there must have been thousands) who had to go into captivity even though they had not “bowed the knee to Baal,” it was these men who saw the true situation and went to their knees to make confession, to confess on behalf of their people, “We have sinned.” They had the courage to speak with God on behalf of the sheep-without-shepherds nation they loved. And it was the reforms of Nehemiah himself, along with Ezra the scribe that finally taught the Israelites to stop, once and for all, hankering after the idols of the next-door neighbors.

What they did next was to make an idol of their own religion. But that’s another story, except for one point, apropos here. Confession, like everything else, became a ritual part of a rote, feeling-divorced religious system with rules upon rules about rules. The main job of the high priest was to go before God for his people, to confess over the head of the Atonement Day scapegoat “all the iniquities of the sons of Israel and all their transgressions in regard to all their sins.” (Lev. 16:21) That’s not exactly what Caiaphas was doing several centuries later, but the verse continues, “and he shall lay them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who stand in readiness.” Caiaphas did do that, after all. And he never even knew it.