Did Jesus Make Confession For Sin?
- Matthew Prydden
- Mar 24, 2022
- 5 min read
“O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your wrath, Nor chasten me in Your hot displeasure! For Your arrows pierce me deeply, And Your hand presses me down.
There is no soundness in my flesh Because of Your anger, Nor any health in my bones Because of my sin. For my iniquities have gone over my head; Like a heavy burden they are too heavy for me.” Psalm 38:1-4
I can still remember the very first time I read George Smeaton’s wonderful book, ‘Christ’s Doctrine of the Atonement’. It didn’t teach me many new things as such, but rather deepened my understanding of so many of the wonderful aspects of soteriology (salvation theology).
One new thing I did learn from it, however, was revelatory and has had a huge impact on the entirety of my theological understanding ever since. When discussing the text John 1:29, “The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’” George Smeaton said this,
“It must be noticed, further, that the verb beareth, which is in the present tense, is not used as a prophecy, neither as an allusion to the constant efficacy of the sacrifice, but as indicating that Jesus was even then the sin-bearer. He never in fact appeared ‘without sin’ during His humiliation (Heb. 9:29).”[1]
What Smeaton is saying here is that Jesus wasn’t just bearing our sin upon His own Person whilst on the cross but was so doing throughout the entirety of His earthly life. That was why, throughout the entirety of His earthly life, Jesus suffered under the curse of that sin. As Horatius Bonar also notes, that, as “there was no room for Him in the inn” (Luke 2:7), “in poverty and banishment His life began. He was not to be allowed either to be born or to die, save as an outcast man.”[2]
Understanding that Jesus Christ was bearing our sin throughout the entirety of His earthly life is a foundational truth that needed to be established before we can come to answer our question proper, which is:
Did Jesus make confession for sin?
This may seem an odd question to ask, but I ask it for this reason:
Within the Psalms, including those considered as being Messianic (prophetically relating to Jesus and His Messianic work), there are examples of confession of sin. Psalm 38 is an example of this. It describes Jesus’ struggles under the curse of sin, and goes on to assert, from the perspective of Jesus still, that there is “no health in my bones, because of my sin. For my iniquities have gone over my head;” (v.3, 4).
Were these words really to be the words of Jesus as well as of the Psalmist himself? Many years ago, I read (somewhere) that the Messianic Psalms apply directly to Christ except for those parts that relate to confession of sin – as Christ was/is incapable of sinning, and so they could not possibly relate to Christ. That seemed fair enough. It was logical, it was sensible, it was simple. Problem solved. Except that it is wrong and misses a key aspect of Jesus Christ as Saviour.
It is, for sure, an explanation commendable in its desire to free up Jesus from any potential accusations of Him ever committing any sin of any kind, but it is, nonetheless, wrong; and not only is it wrong, but it fails miserably to do justice to what Jesus Christ actually did in His atoning work.
Let’s hear, again, from Horatius Bonar and see what he has to say about these confessions of sin within the Messianic Psalms:
“These confessions must be either those of the sinner or the sin-bearer. They suit the former; and they show what views of sin we should entertain, and what our confessions should be. But they suit the latter no less; and as they occur in those Psalms which are quoted in the New Testament as specially referring to Christ, we must take them as the confessions of the sin-bearer, and meant to tell us what He thought of sin when it was laid upon Him simply as a substitute for others.”[3]
Jesus needed to make confession for sin because He took our sin and made it His own. It is worth stating for absolute clarity that Jesus committed no sin of His own – not even the smallest iota of sin. Rather, Jesus Christ took ownership of our sin in such a complete way that He felt the curse of sin, and wrath of God against sin, pierce Him deeply and press Him down into the dust. Jesus felt these effects of sin because, in His atoning work, He had taken the sins of His people and had made them His own, bearing them upon His own body until, finally, He paid their full price on Calvary’s cross.
Can you even manage to conceive of the holy, holy, holy Son of God making confession for sin? It is a thought that is almost blasphemous, isn’t it? But we must always make clear that this confession was for the sins of His people that He had now made as His own. “For God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).
To describe Jesus’ coming into the world and joining Himself to humanity as His humiliation fails to do full justice to the wholeness of what Jesus did, doesn’t it?! Yet, what else can we say? What words would do justice to it?
We must ensure that we see from this the extreme and unfathomable length that Jesus went to obtain a salvation for us while we were yet sinners! And such sinners we were, to have brought the beloved Son of God, perfect in holiness, to such an definite ownership of sin that the very anger of God against sin pierced Him and pressed Him down to the point of confession and pleading for mercy!
Let us listen again to the words of Horatius Bonar to close:
“[These confessions for sin] own the doctrine of Christ ‘suffering for sin, the just for the unjust,’ [and we must] listen to these bitter cries as to the very voice of the Substitute, and learn from them the completeness of that work of satisfaction, for the accomplishment of which He took our flesh, and lived our life, and died our death upon the tree.”[4]
We must not turn away from these confessions, but turn to them, seeking a greater and fuller understanding of the completeness, and more of the width and length and depth and height of the wonder, of the saving work of Christ Jesus our Lord.
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