Confession Through Praise: God’s Glory (Neh 9:6-11)

And Ezra said: “You are the LORD, you alone; you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. To all of them you give life, and the host of heaven worships you. You are the LORD, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham; and you found his heart faithful before you, and made with him a covenant to give to his descendants the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite; and you have fulfilled your promise, for you are righteous.

“And you saw the distress of our ancestors in Egypt and heard their cry at the Red Sea. You performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of his land, for you knew that they acted insolently against our ancestors. You made a name for yourself, which remains to this day. And you divided the sea before them so that they passed through the sea on dry land, but you threw their pursuers into the depths, like a stone into mighty waters.”

We might often think of a prayer of confession as simple: “I confess my sin of pride, O God.” That is appropriate, of course. But perhaps confession should sometimes help us answer questions such as “Why should we confess our wrongdoing?” “Why should we confess it to God?” This prayer of confession begins with praise to remind us why confession matters, bringing power to our confession that might not exist otherwise.

Background

The last prayer began this lengthy confession with sackcloth and ashes, and a prayer that blessed God, placing the focus on Him first, even though the prayer of confession that follows is about the people. Genuine confession can only come when we know who God is in all his power and glory, and that is where this part of the prayer begins.

The prayer begins like a hymn: a call to praise God. How do they praise God? By describing and glorifying Him as creator and as the giver of life. For the Jews assembled in this story, the history of their people is also a reason to praise God: He is the one who chose their ancestor Abraham and brought him safely to the promised land; He is the one who made a covenant—a promise—that it would be their land for many generations. The praise then turns to how God delivered them from slavery in Egypt.

Note that the last part of the praise does something that might seem unusual to us: it describes how God, by doing all these things, “made a name for himself.”