It strikes me that this is the exact opposite of what most people do today. When the Jews of Nehemiah’s day confessed the sins of their fathers they acknowledged their guilt for their fathers’ sins. Otherwise there would have been no meaning to confessing those sins. This meant in its fullness that they considered themselves to be guilty for what their fathers did, they being part of the same people. At the very least it meant that they were guilty of the same sins and were therefore no better than their parents. But today, if people refer to the sin of their parents at all, it is to excuse themselves rather than to assume any personal share of the responsibility. They blame their wrong doing on their genes or their upbringing.
“I know I have a bad temper, but I inherited it from my father. There is just nothing I can do about it.”
“If you knew the kind of family I was raised in, you would understand why I break my commitments and think of no one but myself.”
“Where I come from everyone steals to get by.”
Some forms of psychiatry encourage this kind of thinking. Many church pulpits wallow in it. But when revival comes to a place people stop trying to excuse themselves by what others, even their parents, have done and instead confess their sin and wrongdoing openly. Like Isaiah, they cry out, “Woe is me! . . . I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isaiah 6:6).
The main part of Nehemiah 9 consists of a long formal prayer by the Levites (vv. 5-38), who presumably had been leading the people in the personal expression of sorrow given earlier. This too is a prayer of confession; that is why it is included here. But it is also a prayer which directs the people’s thoughts to the goodness and power of God and prepares them for a final appeal to Him for mercy in their distressed condition. The tone of the prayer is set in the opening line in which the Levites challenge the people: “Stand up and praise the LORD your God, who is from everlasting to everlasting” (v. 5). Because the prayer praises God, there is something glorious about it even though it is a prayer of sorrowful confession. The prayer contains the three main parts:
1. The work of God in creation (vv. 5-6). Since the bulk of the prayer deals with the history of God’s dealings with the Jewish people, it is noteworthy that it actually begins by praising God as the Creator of the heavens and earth. This is a good place to begin in and of itself, of course. But the prayer also shows the influence on the people of the Scripture reading of the previous three weeks, since the Old Testament begins with a creation account. In fact, the entire prayer follows an outline based on the content of the early books of the Old Testament.
I sense, as I read the first verses of this prayer, that the Levites of Nehemiah’s day were closer to the Scripture and much wiser than most of our contemporary Bible scholars. Today the opening chapters of Genesis are a battleground for competing theories of origins: evolution, theistic evolution, the gap theory, six-day creationism, and progressive creationism. These theories need to be dealt with in their proper place and at a proper time. In fact, I have done so myself in my studies of the early verses of Genesis.1 But these theories are not what Genesis 1 and 2 are about. They are about the nature of God, His power and goodness, and about the duty man owes God as his Creator. Nehemiah 9:5-6 reflects this perspective. We cannot escape the irony that although God gives “life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship [him],” the masses of mankind do not—not even, it seems, the chosen people.
1James Montgomery Boice, Genesis: An Expositional Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), vol. 1, chs. 5-9.