“Blessed be Your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise!” (Nehemiah 9:5, NKJV) 

Our journey through Nehemiah has been like a trek through wetlands. Throughout we have beheld flowing streams and standing pools of prayer. Now as we round the bend to the ninth chapter we find a vast body of water deep and wide with prayer. 

The people are assembled not with heads held high but with faces bowed in sin and shame. “Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, in sackcloth, and with dust on their heads” (Neh. 9:1). 

They stood to confess their own sins and the sins of their fathers. The bright light of God’s Law had exposed the stain of sin and the penetrating heat of that Law had melted the hardness of their hearts. 

The first words out of their mouths, however, are not penitence but praise, at the instruction of the priestly tribe of Levi. “Stand up and bless the LORD your God forever and ever!" 

Isn’t that how we should begin our confession of sin, by regarding the One against whom we have sinned? We do not sin in a vacuum. We sin against. Sin is rebellion against God. It is transgression of His Law and violation of our vow to keep His commandments. 

We sin in respect to God and so we want to begin by acknowledging Him. He is the Lord our God. He is the LORD who lovingly and graciously entered into relationship with us. He deserves our obeisance and obedience. He is our God; we are His people. He is our Father; we are His adopted children. Our fear of Him is not to be fleeting but is to endure forever and ever. 

In response to the call of the Levites, with one voice the people acclaim: “Blessed be Your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise! You alone are the LORD; You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and everything on it, the seas and all that is in them, and You preserve them all. The host of heaven worships You. You are the LORD God” (Neh. 9:5–7). 

In a moment the prayer will take up the theme of God’s love set on Abram and turn to God’s marvelous work of deliverance in the Exodus. But even in this salutation we find the seed of these things in the name Yahweh (LORD), an assertion of relationship between the living God and an undeserving people, a relationship initiated, sustained, and certified by God. 

This LORD is none other than the one true God, the Maker of heaven and the earth, the Creator who is to be forever praised. In these opening words, heaven and earth meet; the eternal and the temporal intersect in steadfast love. 

It is against this backdrop that the people will confess their sin, their faithlessness and waywardness. At issue is their forsaking God. In essence, they are taking ownership of what led up to the exile and testifying to the abiding love of God as the reason for their return to the land. 

Confession of sin draws on these dynamics. We see it in Psalms 32 and 51. We see it in the nines of those weighed down by exile (Dan. 9, Ezra 9, Neh. 9). We see it in the instruction of 1 John 1:8-2:2). Ours is the sin. God’s is the Son who is the sin-bearer, the provision of promise by Him who remains faithful. 

Why should confession of sin begin with confession of faith? 

If you have found this meditation helpful, take a moment and give thanks to God. Then share what you learned with a friend. This is how the grace of God spreads (2 Cor. 4.15). 

Except as indicated, all Scriptures are taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.