Scripture Daily

Context No. 241 of 4322 · Nehemiah

Context · Reflection

Nehemiah 9:16-20: in context

16“But they and our fathers behaved proudly, hardened their neck, didn’t listen to your commandments, 17and refused to obey. They weren’t mindful of your wonders that you did among them, but hardened their neck, and in their rebellion appointed a captain to return to their bondage. But you are a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and didn’t forsake them. 18Yes, when they had made themselves a molded calf, and said, ‘This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,’ and had committed awful blasphemies, 19yet you in your manifold mercies didn’t forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud didn’t depart from over them by day, to lead them in the way; neither did the pillar of fire by night, to show them light, and the way in which they should go. 20You gave also your good Spirit to instruct them, and didn’t withhold your manna from their mouth, and gave them water for their thirst.

This is part of the long prayer of confession in Nehemiah, prayed by the community back in Jerusalem after the exile. Ezra has read them the law, they have seen how far their ancestors drifted from it, and now the Levites lead the whole assembly back through their own history out loud, holding nothing back.

The retelling is unsparing about their own family line. Our fathers, they say, acted proudly and stiffened their necks and refused to obey. They forgot the wonders God had done, and in their rebellion they even picked a leader to take them back to slavery in Egypt. They made a molded calf and called it the god who had brought them out. Each line is an accusation the people are laying against their own ancestors, not against anyone else. But the prayer is built on a single repeated hinge, and the hinge is the word yet. Yet you, a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love, did not forsake them. The pillar of cloud stayed over them, the good Spirit kept teaching them, the manna kept coming, the water kept flowing.

They are not reciting the failures to wallow in them. They rehearse the whole record of rebellion in order to measure the mercy that never once left, sin by sin. The point of the confession is not how bad they were but how faithful God stayed. When I go back over my own history, am I telling it to condemn myself, or to see the mercy that kept showing up through all of it?

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