The Good Confession

The Good Confession.  Words are funny. They can change over time. They fall out of fashion. They combine with other words to make new compound forms. One of those words that has fallen out of fashion is to fess, as in: “The perpetrator finally fessed up to his involvement with tampering with the evidence, Detective.” Fessing [up] is acknowledging or declaring the truth of a situation, usually in public.

One place that fessing is frequently found is in the Bible. Confessing subjectively and professing objectively (same Greek word, homologeo) hold a central piece of the New Testament. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Rom. 10:9). Confession is not only declared in the once-and-for-all sense of salvation but also acknowledged in the daily grind of sanctification. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Therefore, to confess/profess is to say the same thing about a situation that God has said about it. Concerning salvation, sin, or whatever the issue might be, we agree with God, even when we are on the wrong side of justice and in need of his mercy.

Therefore, the opposite of confessing is denying, also with an emphasis placed on its public application. Peter famously illustrated this in his triple denial (John 18:25, 27), a betrayal over which he repented and was restored to Christ by Christ (John 21:17). Peter eventually said the same thing about Jesus in public that God had said. Peter confessed; he agreed with God to such an extent that he, seven short weeks after running scared from the servant girl in the courtyard of Caiaphas, spoke bold words, unthinkable to him on the night of Jesus’ arrest, to many thousands of people in Jerusalem. “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36).

But it was Jesus who made the true, better, and unflagging confession. He had no sin to confess, but he was the Good Confessor in the sense that he always said the same thing that God the Father said no matter where he stood. “I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession” (1 Tim. 6:13). Ultimately, it is his confession of us to the Father that holds the full weight of our eternal hope. Christ agrees with the Father about our identity; that whatever we were before, he has made us to become his people by grace through faith in his blood. “The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Rev. 3:5).