Sin and the Advocate
Rev. Res Spears
Walking in Truth and Love • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Transcript
One of the great joys of being married is to have a teammate in life.
Life’s hard, right? And we were never meant to do it alone. In fact, that’s why God made Eve. He had made Adam and saw that it wasn’t good for man to be alone, and so He made Adam a helper who was suitable for him.
Adam and Eve were now a team. They were supposed to be helping EACH OTHER.
After nearly 23 years of marriage, Annette and I seem to be getting this teammate thing down. We make a great team in so many ways, because we both understand our roles.
She cooks dinner, and I eat it. I leave little messes around the house so she can clean them up. Whenever we’re going somewhere together, I’ll drive so she can tell me what I’m doing wrong.
I really don’t know what I’d do without her, but I suspect she’d thrive without me. At the very least, she’d be a lot less anxious in the car.
For some reason, Annette has got it into her mind that I’m not a great driver. Now, I’m not going to go into all the reasons she’s wrong. But I WILL admit that there was a time in my life when I became very familiar with the operations of traffic court.
And so, when I received my last speeding ticket 15 years or so ago, I went in with a plan that I was pretty sure would convince the judge to let me off with a warning.
I’d been married long enough by then that I was well familiar with Annette’s talent for on-the-go driving instruction. And she’d been with me, in the passenger seat, when I’d been pulled over. And she’d never said a word that night about my speed.
So, when it came time for my case to be heard before the court, the officer said he’d clocked me going 12 miles above the speed limit, or whatever. And the judge turned to me and asked if there was anything I wanted to say.
It was only in that moment that I realized how dumb I was about to sound. But by then I was committed, and I couldn’t think of any other defense.
And so, I said, “Your honor, I don’t know about the officer’s radar, but what I DO know is that my wife was with me, and she NEVER lets me get away with speeding. If I’d been speeding, she surely would have said something.”
By the time I was finished, I wasn’t really expecting to get out of the ticket. I was simply hoping the judge would laugh. Even if that meant laughing AT this idiot standing before him.
What I got was “Guilty. Go see the clerk of the court to pay your fine.”
I’ve thought about that day many times since then. As with so many other things I’ve done in my life, the IDEA I had wasn’t terrible, but the execution was.
The idea was to have a character witness to introduce a reasonable doubt that I could have committed the crime of speeding.
But the execution messed everything up. First, my character witness wasn’t in the room, so what I was presenting to the court was hearsay.
And second, by my own implicit admission, my character witness would tell the court that I had a habit of speeding that only her persistent admonitions brought under control.
I had hoped Annette would serve, even in her absence, as an advocate on my behalf. But I’d botched the whole thing, and all that was left for me was to pay the fine.
Now, courtroom dramas have taught us to think of the lawyer as a defendant’s advocate in court.
But back in the first century, A.D., this legal term meant someone who would stand before the court and testify about the good character of the accused. Usually, it was a friend or family member. They served as what we now think of as a character witness.
And this is important, because, in the next couple of verses we’ll look at today from the Book of 1 John, we’re going to see that the Apostle John describes JESUS as the advocate for His followers before God.
You’ll recall that John presents in this letter to the churches of Asia Minor a recipe for fellowship with God.
He said that God is light and that in Him there is no darkness at all. And so, if we, as followers of Christ, are going to be in fellowship with God — if we’re going to have the present experience of abundant life that Jesus promised — we must be walking in light, rather than in darkness.
Even though sin doesn’t break the relationship followers of Jesus have with God, it DOES cause damage to the fellowship we should desire with Him.
And, as we saw last week, John doesn’t really pull punches about sin. He says it keeps us out of true fellowship with God. He says we all HAVE sinned. And he says we all continue to sin, even if we have been saved from the penalty of sin through faith in Jesus.
We sin because we are sinners. And yet, John calls us to strive for something better.
He calls us to strive to be ever in fellowship with God — to be sharing with Him the abundant life for which we were created. That was the purpose of this letter or message from him to the churches. And he makes the point in verse 1 of chapter 2.
1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;
2 and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.
Notice how tenderly John speaks to the churches here: “My little children.”
Remember, this letter was written to believers, and as we’ll see later in this series, John considered many of them to be mature believers. But here, he calls them “my little children.”
I can only imagine that his great affection for them made him think of theirs as almost a parent-child relationship. And what parent doesn’t want the best for his or her children?
When we talk about speaking the truth in love, this is the kind of thing that we should have in mind. The kind of love that is willing to say, “I know this thing looks enticing, but it will hurt you.”
And one of the hardest things for a parent must be knowing that the very things you have warned your children about are going to be the things they turn to when they are able to make their own decisions.
Whether John was an actual father or not, it looks like he understood this hard part of parenting, because — look at the next part of verse 1: “And if anyone sins....”
The word “if” there introduces what’s called a third-class condition in Greek. It’s “if” in the sense of “when.” In other words, John assumes that the condition will be met, that someone WILL sin.
John is writing so that he might encourage us NOT to sin, but he knows that we will.
And here’s the thing: If that were the end of the story, then we might conclude the whole matter of striving against sin is pointless and that there’s no reason to be assured of our salvation.
If sinning equals walking in darkness, and if there is no darkness in the God of Light, then what hope do any of us have, since even we who have followed Jesus in faith continue to sin?
John answers that question in the second part of this verse, and, in my opinion, it’s one of the most encouraging lines in Scripture.
“If anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.”
J. Vernon McGee had a wonderful observation about this statement: “Notice that John does not say that if anyone repents, he has an Advocate nor if anyone confesses his sins, he has an Advocate. Neither does he say that if anyone goes through a ceremony to get rid of his sins, he has an Advocate. What he does say is that if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father. Before we even repent of that cruel or brutal word we said, the very moment we had that evil thought, and the moment we did that wrong act, Jesus Christ was there at the throne of God to represent us....” [J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible Commentary: The Epistles (1 John), electronic ed., vol. 56 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1991), 39–40.]
WHEN we sin as followers of Jesus, He stands in the court of heaven as our advocate, as a sort of character witness for us. We’ll get back to that last part in a minute.
But first, note that John says calls Him Jesus Christ, the righteous. Actually, it’s closer to Jesus, THE Christ, the righteous one.
He is the unique and eternally beloved Son of God, equal to the Father in His God-ness. He is THE Christ, the promised Messiah, the King of kings and Lord of lords, sent to us as the one God promised from ancient times to save us from our sins.
He is the righteous one, the one in whom all righteousness dwells; the one who lived as a man, yet without sin; the one whose perfect righteousness makes Him the perfect Advocate before a perfectly holy and righteous God.
But why would we, as believers, need an advocate at all? What kind of judicial proceeding is taking place in heaven that would require Jesus to advocate on our behalf?
Well, it’s hard to understand, but we see in both the Old and New Testaments that Satan continues to have access to heaven.
He is pictured as reporting to God, along with other angels at the beginning of the Book of Job, where He then accuses Job of remaining faithful to God only because God continues to bless him.
Before His crucifixion, Jesus tells Peter that Satan has demanded to “sift him like wheat.” And then, He warns the disciple that he’ll deny Jesus three times before the rooster crows the following morning.
And in his apocalyptic revelation, John describes Satan — whom a loud voice describes as “the accuser of our brethren” — being cast out of heaven, along with the angels that have followed him.
So what’s going on with all that?
It seems that, in His sovereignty, God has allowed Satan to come and go into heaven. We can only guess why, but perhaps it is for God to remind Satan that GOD is sovereign and that Satan can never do anything that God doesn’t allow.
Whatever his reason for being there, it seems from Scripture that one of the things Satan does while standing before God is to bring accusations against God’s people.
He stands before God as a prosecuting attorney, telling God, “Hey, look at the way Pastor Res sinned today! Aren’t you going to execute your justice against him?”
But our Advocate is more powerful than our accuser. And His standing before the court of heaven is ever so much higher than that of Satan, the great deceiver.
And John says Jesus advocates for us with the FATHER. He doesn’t say Jesus advocates for us with HIS Father.
I think the point John is making here is that the familial relationship believers have with God as adopted sons and daughters through faith in Jesus isn’t destroyed, even when we commit sin as followers of Jesus.
God is still the Father to us, even if we’ve fallen out of fellowship with Him because of our sins.
Even if we have damaged the fellowship, we can be assured that the relationship remains.
And John gives us the reason for this assurance in the next verse.
We who have placed our faith in Jesus can be assured of our salvation — certain that we have a familial relationship with our Heavenly Father — because Jesus Himself is the propitiation for our sins.
Now, there’s a word you don’t see every day! In fact, we only see it a couple of times in the New Testament, both in this very letter.
To understand it, we need to look back at how this word appears in the Greek version of the Old Testament, where it normally means “atonement.”
The noun form of this word refers to the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant, within the Holy of Holies in the temple.
This is where the presence of God was located. And it was the place where the high priest would sprinkle the blood of the sacrifice on the annual Day of Atonement. This was the place where mercy met justice.
Now, back in 1 John, the Apostle describes JESUS as the propitiation for our sins. HE is both the priest offering the sacrifice AND the sacrifice itself.
He is the one who brings both cleansing and forgiveness of sins. And He is the one whose sacrifice turns God’s righteous anger for our rebellion against Him away from us.
And it is because JESUS is the propitiation for our sins that we who have placed our faith in Him can have assurance in our salvation, even when we sin as believers.
We have BEEN saved by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus, because of Jesus’ completed work at the cross. We are BEING saved by the Holy Spirit’s work within us to conform us to the image of Jesus.
And we will BE saved by God’s giving us glorified bodies no longer subject to the enticement of sin when we are resurrected as Jesus was.
And ALL of this is the work of the triune God, the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If any of it depended upon US, we would all be without hope.
For we who have placed our faith in Jesus, He now stands at His Father’s right hand as the one who made atonement for our sins, and He pleads our case before God.
I said earlier that He stands as a character witness on our behalf. But He’s not there attesting to OUR character.
That’s what Satan is doing, and he’s a pretty good judge of our character. His accusations are actually just. He’s not wrong about us. We ARE sinners, even if we’ve placed our faith in Jesus.
But what Jesus is doing is something magnificent.
He stands at the Father’s right hand as a character witness to HIMSELF! And before that heavenly court, He declares, “I am Jesus Christ, the righteous One. And I have atoned for their sins as only I could have done.”
When Satan says, “Look what Pastor Res did now,” Jesus says, “But look what I did. I shed my blood for THAT sin. I took the just punishment for THAT sin. I have redeemed him from THAT sin. That sin is covered by the blood of my sacrifice.”
And not just THAT sin. And not just MY sins. And not just the sins of those who already have followed Jesus in faith. Look what John says here: “Not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.”
Now, this isn’t some claim to universal salvation. In fact, John will deny that as a possibility later in this very letter.
No, what John is saying here is that, in His death, burial, and resurrection, Jesus made salvation available for all.
His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection were sufficient to satisfy the just wrath of God over all sin. But that sacrifice is only effective or efficacious for those who turn to Him in faith.
As John puts it in his Gospel, “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.”
Jesus came, and He gave Himself as a sacrifice at the cross, taking upon Himself the sins of all mankind — as well as the just punishment for them — so that all who BELIEVE in Him may have eternal life.
This doesn’t simply mean agreeing that He was a figure in history. This doesn’t even mean simply agreeing that He died and lived again.
Believing in Jesus means allowing the knowledge of Him to change you. It means trusting that He was telling the truth when He said “no one comes to the Father but by Me.” It means setting aside trust in your own righteousness — in your own goodness.
It means putting your trust in Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the only one who can stand before God and advocate for you in response to the one whose accusations about you are true, because Jesus bears witness not to your character but to His own.
It means trusting that His righteousness alone can bring you into the family of God. It means confessing before God that you are a sinner and that only Jesus can save you from the just penalty you deserve for your sins.
It is true that Jesus died for all. But He advocates only for those who are His.
Will you allow Him to become your advocate today? Will you turn to Him in faith today? Will you accept His gift of salvation today? Will you enter into fellowship — into eternal life — with Him today?