I did some searching in the Bible to try and find something that would support the idea of confessing directly to God. I found quite a bit about confession and repentance and I did actually find one place that lends support to the idea that we can confess directly to God and receive forgiveness. That passage is found in Psalm 32:
Ps 32:5
I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
So I suppose that there is some support for that idea. But it seems strange to me, and that Psalm is absolutely an outlier in the way that the Bible talks about confession and repentance and forgiveness. Other than that verse, the testimony of scripture is that receiving forgiveness is a costly thing. The Old Testament required a blood sacrifice for sins and that sacrifice was to be something substantial like a Bull or a Goat. In the Bible, sin is always serious business and requires a serious price be paid in order to receive forgiveness.
Part of the reason for that is that God sees sin as serious. It damages the relationship between God and Man and the relationship between Man and Man. Breaking faith, either with God or with another person has serrious consequences; it puts a strain on the relationship even if the other person doesn’t know that they have been hurt. You know, and your actions and your attitude toward that perrson will never be the same again.
In the New Testament it is the unchanging witness of scripture that confession follows repentance and must be made to another person, or a group of persons in order to receive God’s forgiveness. In fact, it is one of the direct promises of Jesus that the Apostles have the power to forgive sins in God’s name. Upon receiving the Holy Spirit, they were told that (John 20:23) “If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.” The Church teaches that this power has been handed down by the laying on of hands to all of the spiritual descendants of the Apostles. It is the authority that Jesus gave to the Church and that the Church has empowered her ministers to administer.
It was the practice of the very early church that people make their confession in the midst of the whole congregation as a form of public apology and a request to be returned to the fellowship of the saints. You can imagine that confession was a very difficult ordeal and was not commonly done. It was the Church in Ireland that began the practice of private confession with the priest as a matter of spiritual growth and learning. The Priest became instrumental in teaching his people the skills reuired to overcome habitual sin. The church saw the wisdom of this style of confession and adopted it world wide.
Frankly, for a very long time, the Church did not do a good job with her responsibilities in regard to administring confessions. For a long time Bishops and Priests were, in general, poorly trained, poorly supervised, and became selfish for ill-gotten gain. That is just one of the things that Martin Luther and the other Reformers rebelled against in the 1500’s. As a result, much of the Protestant Reformation was focused upon stripping the clergy of their powers and their prestige.
It is not commonly known that anyone can hear a confession at any time and in any place. Scripture simply describes that (1 John 1:9-10) If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So, it is perfectly acceptable to confess to another Christian person. The power that is reserved to the priest is not the power of hearing the confession, it is the power to prounce the absolution of Sin in God’s name. So, if you hear someone’s confession, you can assure them that God looks upon the contrition of their hearts and will forgive them.
Making a sacramental confession to a priest offers two advantages: one, we have the promise of Jesus that the Priest speaks with the authority of God when he pronounces forgiveness, and two, the Priest is sworn to secrecy as to the things that are told him in the sanctity of a confession. We can be removed from the Priesthood for revealing the secrets of a confession and that is a promise and a threat that we take very seriously.