Personal Confession of Sin

From Lesson 201 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charlie Clough

So in Exodus 29 here’s the installment. Verse 1, “Now this is what you shall do to them to consecrate them to minister as priests to Me…. Verse 2-3, it’s all these priestly things that are going on in this section of Exodus.

In verse 4 here is the use of that Hebrew word to “wash” and it’s translated in the Septuagint as the word to “bathe.” “Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons to the doorway of the tent of meeting, and wash them,” bathe them, “with water,” from head to toe, this was total washing. Verse 5, then “you shall take the garments, and put on Aaron the tunic and the robe of the ephod,” etc. They had to be completely washed from head to toe. That’s bathe, that’s the word that is used in John 13 when Jesus says “he who has been bathed needs not wash except his feet.”
Now that we’re in Exodus let’s see if we can find a use of the word for wash the feet. In verse 4 we have just noticed an incidence of the verb to take a bath, total immersion. Turn to the next chapter, Exodus 30:18, we deal with the issue of washing the feet and cleansing. Out in front of the tabernacle they had a place, once the guy had been washed, he was installed as the priest, now verse 18-20 say before he goes into service look what happens. “You shall also make a laver of bronze, with its base of bronze, for washing; and you shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it. [19] And Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet from it; [20] when they enter the tent of meeting, they shall wash with water, that they may not die….” But notice it’s not a bathing, it’s just washing their hands and their feet.

So there are clearly two different kinds of washing going on here in the ceremonial aspects of the Levitical system. The Septuagint translators picked up on this and that’s why when they turned the Hebrew into Greek, they made this distinction. With that background now we come back to John and we look again at John 13. What Jesus is doing here, particularly in John 13:10 is He picks up this difference in these Greek verbs and He makes a very, very fascinating and interesting point. He says “He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean, but not all of you,” meaning Judas Iscariot of course.

So the Lord Jesus Christ distinguishes two kinds of cleansing. Aha, so every time you see the verb cleanse it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be salvation cleansing, it can be temporal cleansing. How do we know that? Because the ceremonial law structures that way. So now we have cleansing number one and cleansing number two. Cleansing number one—salvation cleansing, God forgives us our sins, credits Christ’s righteousness to our account, over an instant of time at the point of regeneration and justification. But cleansing two is that which occurs during time because we have personal sin that happens that has to be dealt with and fellowship with God is broken. Just as Aaron the high priest, Aaron and his sons, couldn’t go into the Tabernacle without cleansing, so what Jesus is arguing is that if you’re dirty, the fellowship is ruptured here. And all this stuff that He’s teaching them in John 13 is preparatory to John 14 when He’s talking about the indwelling Holy Spirit.

What’s He talking about in chapter 15? Here’s one of these imperatives now that requires an either/or response. He’s talking about abiding. This abiding, we either abide or we don’t abide, and it’s given to the disciples. “Abide in Me,” [verse 4] he says, remain in me, in fellowship with Me. In verse 10, “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in my love; just as I have kept My father’s commandments and abide in His love.” Who is hearing John 15? It’s not a mixed multitude here, He’s talking to disciples. So He’s saying to these men “Abide in me.” This is John’s background, this is the vocabulary of the author of 1 John so now we go back to 1 John because we’ve looked a little bit, just in a preliminary way, at what he reported about this wonderful occasion in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now he picks up on this and he’s talking about cleansing. In verse 1-3 we already argued that this epistle is not written to a mixed multitude, it’s written to believers, just as Jesus ministered to believers in John 13-15. Therefore what is the cleansing that is going on here? It’s the cleansing of fellowship. And John’s issue as he says in verse 1 and verse 3, he says I’m proclaiming this “that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with” the Lord Jesus Christ. So in order to have fellowship there has to be cleansing and verse 9 gives the condition. The condition is “if we confess our sins,” which gets us back to the model that we saw in the Old Testament, same thing with David.

So when we have this growth thing and we go into a spiral down, what is the recovery point? The recovery point is confession before the Father of our sin. This is repeated in dispensation after dispensation, and I’ll give you the verses because we’re running out of time, but take these verses down. This is a verse chain where this confession issue happens again and again and again. It’s not just in 1 John 1:9.

Nehemiah 1:6 is an occasion. Psalm 32:5, that’s the second one. The third one, Psalm 38:18. Fourth one, Psalm 51:3-4. Fifth one, Proverbs 28:13. Another one, Daniel 9:4; some don’t use the word “confess” but you’ll see in the context that’s what it’s talking about. Now the next one everybody should know because every communion service this one is trotted out, 1 Cor. 11:31, “if we judge ourselves we would not be judged.” What’s that talking about? It’s talking about evaluating ourselves, finding out if we have sinned or not, and if we have we confess it to the Father. 1 Peter 4:17 is another.

So the confession is there, not because there’s something meritorious in the confession. The confession is not meritorious, the confession is just the turning point where the sin is acknowledge and that’s what God the Father wants us to acknowledge is when we sinned. We have to understand what the word “confess” means here. It’s the same word that if you were in a trial, what does it mean in a trial when it says someone confesses to a crime? They may confess with great emotion, terribly sorry that they did it, or they be the kind of personality that isn’t too emotional, just says yeah, I did that. I’m ashamed of myself and I did that, but they’re not crying tears down to their shoes. That’s a person variable and the problem we have is that we take something that’s personal variable and miss out on the guts of the thing.

The whole point of confession, maybe it’s the wrong word, but it has religious connotations that I’m trying to get away from; the word “confession” means that I recognize factually, on the basis of Scripture, in other words I’m not doing this to get merit before God. Confession has acquired a false meaning, particularly in some areas of Christianity, where the confession, we’ll say the confessional intensity, the emotional intensity of the confession somehow is thought to give merit. This generates merit and on the basis of that generated merit, because of the intensity of my emotions, therefore that’s why God forgave me. And that’s wrong! God doesn’t forgive on the basis of your tears or anything else. God doesn’t forgive on the basis of human emotion. God forgives because we acknowledge that we are truly guilty of that infraction, and that’s what He wants us to admit.

I’ve often wondered why does God want us to do that; in one sense it’s so tremendously simple but in another sense it’s not tremendously simple because you know very well that when we get out in the toulies the last thing we want someone to do is point out where we are. We don’t want the Holy Spirit doing it, we don’t somebody else doing it. The problem is the Holy Spirit has to keep pounding us on the head, maybe saying okay, if you want to walk on a toulie trip here, it’s a long walk and a short war and I’ll catch you, so that process happens. But somewhere on down the line, ding-doing, the light goes on, oh yeah, okay, all right, the game’s over, now I’ll confess I’ve done that. I’ll confess that I turned against You there at that point. That’s the confession, but the confession itself doesn’t have any more merit than believing in the Lord Jesus Christ had merit. God didn’t save you because you just believed so hard, and that intensity of belief got points with Him. Rather, faith is what… Frances Schaeffer used to say it’s the empty hand reaching out to receive what God is giving. And in confession it’s the admission, factually and objectively of true guilt before God. That may or may not have emotions with it. That’s not the point.

The point is that the confession meets the condition of 1 John 1:9. And the idea here is that if this is us as believers and this is God, and God is righteous, God is just, what has He given to us in the person of Jesus Christ that maintains the pipeline between Himself and us? Let’s think about that for a moment. Imputed righteousness. God imputed Christ’s righteousness to you and to me at the point of salvation. Because of that God looks down on us and what does He see? All the little gooey things that we do, or does He see that we are credited with Christ’s righteousness? He sees that we are credited with Christ’s righteousness. And the reason for the pipeline and the blessing is not because of something we do, it’s because of something He did for us. And because He gave us Christ’s righteousness, He imputed and credited that to our account, that’s the basis of the relationship. What He wants us to do is to confess our sin so that we acknowledge, it’s a teaching device in one sense. It’s a teaching device because in order to confess our sin what does that remind us of? Guilt! What does guilt remind us of? The finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So confession, although it looks simple is actually a profound thing that drives us right back to the gospel. It forces us to go back again and again and again to the atoning work of Jesus Christ. And there’s no other thing that can do this. He could have said jump through hoops 500 times, or hit yourself, and people do this in religious areas, whip themselves 150 times if you sin this and do it 250 times if you sin that, and 300 times if you do that. That’s bologna. If you did it 1,000 times that doesn’t have enough merit to forgive. What forgives is He wants us to admit and go back to the cross again and again and again and again. It’s that simple. People make a big thing out of confession and all the rest of the stuff. I mean, come on! Let’s look at it in its simplicity here.

The priests went and they washed their hands and their feet and that was it; then they went in and did their thing, and God wouldn’t let them do it, He made an issue out of it. Yes, only washing your hands and your feet but I’m going to make an issue out of it. Well you mean it’s just confess sins? Yes! But I’m going to make an issue out of it.

The greatest example is David and what’s interesting in David’s case, to further substantiate this problem about emotions and getting the standard right, is isn’t it amazing to read in Psalm 51, for a man who committed adultery and murdered, to say “Against Thee and Thee only did I sin.” Isn’t that strange language, “Against Thee and Thee only did I sin.” Now I’m sure David is not being… I mean, he must have been heartbroken when he realized he’d just killed one of his top officers, Uriah. Here’s a guy he sent out into war and deliberately engineered the tactics to kill this guy. He lost a trooper, a real good guy for him, and I’m sure he realized later, I mean the first baby he had by Bathsheba died, and then he had that awful trauma with his sons, one raped a sister and the other one killed a son and then Absalom started the whole nation in a revolt against him, it was just a mess, a continual mess that happened. So David’s not saying that he’s indifferent to the consequences, but what he is saying in Psalm 51 is that the sin ultimately is against God.

It helped me understand this, and I don’t know why I didn’t see this before, but years ago I was on a jury, and the lawyers were picking out the jury, questioning you about this and that, and I forgot what was the problem, the judge had the lawyers explain the nature of an infraction of law. What they pointed out was that so and so had done something to so and so, but the crime was against the State of Texas. And I got to thinking, the crime against the State of Texas, wait a minute, I thought the crime was against the victim. No, the crime is against the lawgiver. So our sins are a crime against the Lawgiver. Yes, they hurt people, but the crime is against God, not against the people. It is a crime socially, I mean, I’m not denying that, but I’m saying to understand what David’s driving at in Psalm 51 when he says “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned,” he’s excluding Uriah, he’s excluding Bathsheba, he’s excluding the families involved. You’re saying is he making light of that? No, he isn’t making light of it but he’s acknowledging the focal point.

So that Psalm 51 verse in that sequence of chain that I gave you, that Psalm 51 verse is very important because it defines the nature of confession. The confession is a confession of guilt against God. That’s not saying not to go and try to make it right with the person you’ve offended, but that act of going to try to make it right with the person you’ve offended is not the confession that’s mentioned here.

Also notice something else, there’s not any intermediary in the confession. You don’t confess to somebody else who represents God. There’s no intervention of a priest. That’s interesting from the New Testament point of view because who are believers said to be in 1 Peter? You’re “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood,” so there’s the priesthood of the believer. And that was one of the doctrines that split Europe in half in the Reformation. You can imagine the power this had, if you think about it. Imagine yourself having been raised all your life to believe that you had to go to confession to the priest or you could have no fellowship with God. Now just imagine you were brought up this way, you did it, you saw your mamma do it, you saw your daddy do it, year after year after year after year, you did it and then all of a sudden one of these Protestants comes up to you and tells you, you don’t have to go to a priest, you can go to God directly. As a Christian who is it that indwells you? The Holy Spirit. Who is praying for you to maintain that grace pipeline? The Lord Jesus Christ. Whose righteousness causes you to have status anyway? It’s His righteousness, it’s not yours. So you exercise your priesthood, your individual personal priesthood by making confession for your own sin. That’s a monumental breakthrough. That’s what was so liberating and freeing. And that’s what so scared Church authorities because religious establishments are sinful like any other kind of establishment and one of the things every establishment does, at least every one I’ve been associated with, always tries to perpetuate itself. Well how do you perpetuate yourself? By getting a lock on the customer, on the market. How do you get a lock on the market religiously? By putting yourself as the in between mediary between God and man.

So the Protestant Reformation was a devastating blow to this, when they dared to say that men and women could come to God privately in their own priesthood and make confession of sin. What a mind-blowing thing this was. That’s what was so scary about the Protestant Reformation. That doctrine alone, the priesthood of the believer at this point of confession, broke the stranglehold of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. And this was the focal point.