The key to recognising sin in our lives (Neh 9:1-5)
Neh 9:1-5
When God called me to Himself, I had little understanding of sin. I was only fifteen at the time, from a Christian home, so I struggled to feel a sense of guilt over wrongs I had done or thought. It was only over time that I came to appreciate in a deeper way how our will, thinking and orientation in life are corrupted by sin. Today, sin is no longer in the vocabulary of our world (except as a reference to guilty pleasures like eating chocolate). At the other end of the spectrum are activities that the law condemns, but in-between these two extremes, what is evil and wrong is largely defined in relation to our personal interests and values (i.e. what hurts me is bad).[1] In the physical sphere, without accurate diagnosis and treatment, illness continues unchecked. In the spiritual realm, understanding sin as God defines it is essential to genuine healing and restoration.
Creating an environment to hear God
The exiles knew that new beginnings can only come when we make sense of the past and repent of wrongdoing. How can we live differently if we never evaluated what has gone before? So, a couple of days after the Feast of Tabernacles finished, the people gather again dressed in traditional mourning clothes to confess their sins (Neh 9:1-2).[2] Today, we tend to focus on the internal workings of our heart but giving external expression to these can help put us in the right frame of mind.
Moreover, the people demonstrate their commitment to God in that they separate themselves from all foreigners (v.2). For us, this seems dangerously like racial discrimination, but what is at stake is the community’s holiness (see my posts on racism and Ezra 9). While finding a balance between being in the world but not of it is not easy, the point to take from this is that pervasive cultural influences can jeopardise commitment to God. Today, we may need to turn off distractions like TV and social media as we seek to pray and minimise long-term impact through limiting our exposure to activities and things that overwhelm our lives with secular patterns of thinking and behaviour.
Deeper engagement with God and His Word
Perhaps surprisingly for us, however, the event does not start with confessions (v.2 is a summary of what unfolds in Neh 9:3). For a quarter of the daylight hours the people stand to hear God’s Word read first. Imagine gathering at church today and listening to the public reading of the Bible for three hours today followed by confession of sin and worship for another three hours! Our passage brings home to us how hurried and busy our lives have become, how we want quick solutions when change that goes deep takes time and patient engagement. To be sure, we can read our Bibles in the privacy of our home, but perhaps we need to recapture the vision of doing these things together as the people of God.
How we come to know our sin
An important principle that arises from this pattern is that to understand our sin, we need to know God and His revealed will better. This is because sin in a true sense (not how the world understands it) is defined in relation to God and His standards. David says of his adultery ‘Against You, You only, I have sinned and done what is evil in Your sight’ (Ps 51:4). This, of course, is poetic exaggeration to make a point. Yes, our sin has implications for other people on a horizontal level, often devastatingly so, and David was aware of this. However, at its root, sin offends against God and His purposes for us and the world.
For the exiles, this process was facilitated communally by the Levites who both cried out to God leading the people in confession (Neh 9:4) and in worship (Neh 9:5). Thus, seeking to engage with God’s Word as the people of God is a way to remind ourselves of what is right and wrong, who God is and who we are. It is only as we do so that we can both confess sin and worship the Lord.
[1] For a penetrating study on how postmodern society has redefined sin/evil, see David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover its Moral Vision (Leicester: IVP, 1998).
[2] Tabernacles is celebrated for 8 days, from the 15th to 22nd of the month, so the people had just a day in-between to take down their booths and put away the signs of celebration.
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