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Chapter 9: To Whom Should We Confess? You will remember that when the disciples asked Jesus Christ to teach them to pray, He started His explanation, This is how you are to pray: "Our Father in heaven…" (Matthew. 6:9-14). Jesus was teaching them and through them teaching us, that our prayers should be directed to God the Father. Farther along in this prayer to our Father, Jesus continued, …and forgive us the wrong we have done as we forgive those who wrong us (Matthew 6:12). Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in this most famous of all prayers taught us to pray to God the Father, and to ask forgiveness of Him. Luke puts it this way, Forgive us our sins for we too forgive all who do us wrong (Luke 11:4). We confess our sins directly to God the Father, not because as Protestants we want to be different, but because that is the way Jesus taught His disciples to pray. This was the normal way in which Christians confessed their sins in the first centuries of the church. Confession to the priest became official Catholic doctrine in 1225 A.D. Priests had started hearing confessions some time before this, but they prayed to God for the person rather than claiming to remit the sins themselves, as they do now. In order to uphold the practice of confession being made to them, some priests refer to the passage in John; As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Then He breathed on them and said: "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive men's sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound" (John 20:21-23). The first thing we must notice is that these words were not spoken only to the apostles or to any other special class, but to all Christ's followers who were together at that time. Remitting sins is therefore not a privilege of the clergy, but extended to all believers. In addition, we must ask, how did those who were present and heard Christ's words interpret them? What did they do to obey? They evidently understood that sins are forgiven when people trust in Christ as savior, because they went out and preached the good news that by trusting in Christ Jesus we have the forgiveness of sin (Acts 2:37-38, 10:43). They did not go out and listen to confessions, nor tell anyone that they themselves were remitting sins. The book of Acts is the history of what the early Christians did, and how God worked through them to spread the Gospel in that time. If you are still in doubt, a careful study of this book will convince you. The episode in John 20, from which we have examined verses 21-23 is also found in Luke 24:36-48 with the addition of a very important detail: He said to them: Thus it is written that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead on the third day. In His name, penance and the remission of sins is to be preached to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of this (24:26-48). Christ was speaking about preaching repentance ("penance" is a poor translation) and the remission of sins and not of confessing our sins to man. By asking, "What did those who heard him do?" and studying out the answer in the Bible, we can easily see what our Lord meant: Witnessing to Christ, and proclaiming his salvation is what they understood that Christ was telling them to do, and that is what they did. The confessionals came hundreds of years later. You may ask, "Do we need to confess our sins, or not?" Yes! Every Christian should confess his sins, but our confessions should not be made to man because only God has the power to forgive. The apostle John wrote, But if we acknowledge our sins, he who is just can be trusted to forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrong (1 John 1:9). This Biblical exhortation to confess our sins to God is quite clear, but in case there should be any misunderstanding, almost all translations use "confess" where this one uses acknowledge. Also, as you read the preceding verses, you will see that he who is just is clearly referring to God. We should confess our sins to God, trusting Him to forgive us on the basis of Christ's blood which was shed for our sins. As we trust Him, we will find that as His word says, He who is just can be trusted to forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrong. If we have sinned against some person, the Bible teaches us to ask that person's forgiveness also. Therefore if I have sinned against a priest, I should confess that sin to him as well as to God. There are also times that we need to talk to someone else about what we have done. The idea however, of confessing to a priest in place of confessing to God, is never found in the Scriptures. Praying directly to your Father in Heaven, confess to Him all the sins that you can remember having committed, and trust that Christ paid for every one of them. Then in the future, when you fall into some sin, you should immediately confess that sin to God as well. |
