Tag: forgiveness

If We Confess

Being forgiven by God is part and parcel of what it means to be justified (Ac 13:38-39) or saved (Ro 5:9), to be His child. If we die with any sin which isn’t forgiven by God, which is not washed away by the blood of Christ (Re 1:5), the consequence is spiritual death (Ez 18:4), separation from God forever in Hell. (Ro 6:23) So, it’s vital to ensure that all our sins are forgiven, every last one of them. (Co 2:13)

If we make forgiveness of our sin conditional upon our confession, then by definition this behavior becomes a means of earning or maintaining salvation, since it implies we’re lost forever if we don’t faithfully confess all our sins.

This is effectively salvation by works, or legalism, which the Scripture rejects as inconsistent with the Gospel: we’re justified by faith (Ro 3:28), not by works. (Ga 5:4)

God’s salvation doesn’t require that we act a certain way to keep it; rather, it produces behavior within us reflecting the divine nature; we become new creatures (2Co 5:17), moving away from sin to walk with God.

Striving against sin is an ongoing process where we’re growing over time; no believer is perfectly sinless this side of Heaven (Ro 7:21); we continue to sin in ways we hardly even comprehend (1Jn 1:8), but we don’t commit ourselves to a life of willful, presumptuous sin. (1Jn 3:8-10)

As believers, once we realize we’ve sinned we acknowledge this before God; we confess our sin, agreeing with God about it, and look to Him to help us overcome sin, knowing He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1Jn 1:9)

He doesn’t forgive us because we confess our sin, Father God forgives us because Jesus died for us and paid our sin debt once for all. (He 10:14) Confession is how we restore our fellowship with God, how we walk in the light (1Jn 1:7), not how we get Him to forgive us.

Confession does not cause forgiveness; we believers are forgiven of all our sins — past, present and future sins. Confession of sin is simply the natural response for us as we become aware of our sins, and when we do confess we can rest assured we’re forgiven: He never even charges us with sin. (Ro 4:7-8) This is the only way we can be sure of our salvation: God has already accomplished it for us. (Ro 7:16)

We may confirm 1st John 1:9 does not teach this cause-and-effect relationship between confession of sin and forgiveness by carefully noting what it says, and what the text doesn’t say. It says: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The text does not say, “If we don’t confess our sins, God will not forgive us.”

This latter statement, which many infer from this verse, is called the Inverse and it’s not logically equivalent to the original (it means something different). To illustrate, I might say, “If it rains I will go to the store.” If it doesn’t rain and I do go to the store, I’m not being inconsistent; I didn’t say what I would do if it didn’t rain, only what I would do if it did rain. So, 1st John 1:9 says nothing about what God will do if we don’t confess a particular sin; it simply affirms that as we confess our sins we may be confident we’re forgiven.

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Confess Your Faults

A common misconception is that God wants us to be transparent before others, open about our sins and brokenness, perhaps confusing this with humility. The reality is we should be wise, careful who we trust with our inner selves. (Mt7:6) Few are worthy of our trust (Jn 2:24), so we must guide our affairs with discretion. (Ps 112:5) Our motive in speaking truth should seldom be about ourselves; we should be moved in love to edify others. (Ep 4:29)

Even so, when we get ourselves in a spiritual rut, such that we’re consistently off path and unable to recover ourselves, God tells us to confess our faults to those in close spiritual community, praying for each other that we might be healed. (Ja 5:16) God has designed spiritual community around this purpose; God heals some sinful patterns only as dear brothers and sisters pray for us. This endears us to one another in love, and shows us we need Christ in each other to overcome, to live as we should for Him. (He 10:24-25)

Yet, even in such close relationships, God doesn’t encourage us to confess all of our individual sins to each other: He says we’re to confess our faults, which are not entirely the same as sins. The Greek for sins is ἁμαρτίας, hamartias, the idea of missing the mark, relating to discrete acts of Torah violation. (1Jn 3:4) However, the word translated faults is παραπτώματα, paraptomata, to fall beside or near something, connoting a repeating, persistent pattern of iniquity rather than a single act.

Most all of our modern English translations have the Greek hamartias in this text, and thus translate it as sins, trespasses, offenses, etc. This is because three of the four oldest Greek New Testament (GNT) manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, from the 4th and 5th centuries C.E., the Egyptian Text) contain this reading, compared to all other surviving (Majority Text) manuscript witnesses of James. Textual critics typically presume older manuscripts are more accurate, ignoring the fact that the greatest corruptions to the GNT were introduced well before the 4th century. Further, they ignore the fact that no plausible explanation for the existence of the Majority Text has yet been proposed, if it isn’t grounded in the autographs themselves.

The Egyptian hamartias, aside from having an inferior historical claim to legitimacy, is problematic from a practical perspective. The command to confess our sins, applies to every single instance of each and every kind of sin, obligating us all to confess all of our sins to each other, which is not possible: even if this is all we ever do, we’re continuing to commit individual sins faster than we can possibly confess them, so the more earnestly we attempt to obey such a command, the farther behind we will fall in our obedience to it. And there is nothing in such a practice that would be edifying. (Ro 14:19)

A second problem relates to what it means to be healed of a sin which hasn’t been imputed to us. (Ro 4:8) What’s in view here cannot be forgiveness, for this has already been done in full, once for each believer, by Christ Himself. (Col 2:13) Rather, this is the healing of a spiritual wound or malady (Pr 18:14) in an ongoing sinful context. If we need others to pray for our healing from each specific historical act of Torah violation in order to be healed, then we shall never be healed of the vast majority of our sins, so we must remain forever crippled in them. This cannot be our Lord’s intent; it’s the kind of perversion we expect from those corrupting the word.

In comparison, confessing our faults — patterns of sin we observe in ourselves, which remain stubbornly persistent even though we’re struggling to obey – is perfectly reasonable. In resisting sin we become aware of such patterns of iniquity, rooted deeply within, where we’re unable to obey God even as we’re doing our best. It’s perfectly natural then to involve godly brothers and sisters, asking them to pray for us in specific ways so we might overcome and walk in obedience. We’re healed as the lies at the root of our sinful patterns are exposed and replaced with truth. (2Ti 2:25-26)

Confession of specific sins should only be as public as the offence (Mt 18:15a), and pursued, not for personal healing, but as a means of promoting reconciliation and restoration of trust. (b) Confession of faults should only be with trusted allies in the faith for sanctification and growth in personal holiness.

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