The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love. He is faithful to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. And this is exactly what we see Him do throughout the passage, and throughout all of history. We see that God’s goodness is not dependent upon His people’s faithfulness. And Nehemiah 9:18-25 certainly does demonstrate the unfaithfulness of the Israelites.

In the fall of 2021, as our church was going through the book of Nehemiah, I was working through the prayer of confession in chapter 9. As I studied the passage, it helped me to recognize something extremely important:

It’s really hard to believe in God’s goodness.

Most Christians will say that we do believe God is good, of course. We can affirm the general truth. But when we start looking at our own lives, we struggle to see how God can be good to us because we’re not terribly faithful people.

But Nehemiah 9 has some very good news for us all, even today, which is that God’s goodness is not limited by our faithfulness, because it’s not based on our faithfulness.

Where We Start in Thinking About God’s Goodness

The prayer that comprises Nehemiah 9 starts where it should—with praise for God’s self-disclosure, His creation of the world, His covenant with Abraham, and His rescuing of the people from bondage in Egypt. But in verse 16, the prayer moves from praise to confession. It is a recognition of the people’s ongoing rebellion against Him. That rather than responding with worship, they countered with rejection.

They refused to listen—they refused to obey God. They did not remember the wonders He performed, even the ones that

And then there’s the last half of verse 17:

But you are a forgiving God,
gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in faithful love,
and you did not abandon them.

Even in the midst of this confession of the people’s sin, the Levites couldn’t not point the people back to God. In fact, the language here is a paraphrase of God’s own self-disclosure from Exodus 34:6-7:

The Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin.

Now, stop and think about those words for a second. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love. He is faithful to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. And this is exactly what we see Him do throughout the passage, and throughout all of history. We see that God’s goodness is not dependent upon His people’s faithfulness. And Nehemiah 9:18-25 certainly does demonstrate the unfaithfulness of the Israelites.

God’s Goodness to the Faithless

In the wilderness, the people denied Him at every opportunity. Before the Red Sea had been parted, they were sure that God had led them into the wilderness to be killed.

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