COMFORTABLE WORDS
‘If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous: and He is the propitiation for our sins.’
‘Hear also what St. John saith.’ So our text is introduced to us as one of the Comfortable Words of our Communion service. It brings to our minds the sinner, the Father, and the Saviour.
I. The sinner.—‘If any man sin.’ This, then, is clearly a message for you and for me. St. John, the Apostle of Love, is not one whit behind the other Apostles in bringing before us the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and also its universality. ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.’
II. The Father.—It is the presence of sin in our hearts which has come between us and God.
(a) We know that God is love; but that is only one attribute of the Divine character.
(b) God is holy, and His holiness is such that He cannot bear to behold iniquity.
(c) Moreover, God is just, and His justice demanded that sin must be punished.
III. The Saviour.—But St. John tells us in this beautiful text how God’s love, and holiness, and justice all meet in Jesus Christ.
(a) He is our Advocate (all our prayers are offered through Him).
(b) His very name, Jesus, means that He is our Saviour.
(c) He is also Christ (the Anointed of God).
(d) The Righteous (for He knew no sin).
And all these characteristics fit Him to be the propitiation for our sins.
Illustration
‘We need to remember, as Bishop Moule of Durham writes, that “the first and direct regard of the Atoning Sacrifice is not towards man, but towards God. It aims, indeed, with Divine precision, by a short, sublime circuit of love and blessing, at man’s heart; showing man not by word only, but by unspeakably moving deed, what God would do, I dare to say what God would suffer, for his salvation. But the direct aspect of the sacrifice is towards God, as violated Holiness. It is such as to set God’s love free along the line of His law; ‘that He may be just and the Justifier,’ the Accepter, of the sinner who closes with Him. He Who is the propitiation is, as such, our ‘Advocate towards the Father’ (1 John 2:1). The notion of ‘reconciliation,’ in the diction of the Bible, looks probably in this direction. ‘Be ye reconciled to God,’ interpreted by non-theological passages where kindred phraseology is used as between man and man (see 1 Samuel 29:4; and compare Pearson, p. 365), means not, ‘Bring your wills to meet half-way a Father cruelly misunderstood and purely indulgent’; but, ‘Hasten while you may to claim the amnesty of the Atonement at the feet of your holy King.’ Not for one moment does the Bible allow us so to mistake this aspect of the Atonement as to dream of a fierce and hostile Deity wishing to condemn but bought off by the woes of a sinless Victim. It is the Father Himself Who finds the ransom, Who gives His Beloved, Who lays on Him the iniquity of us all. From the infinite recess of paternal love comes forth the Lamb that is to be slain. But then the Lamb bleeds on an altar that looks toward the dread shrine of that awful Holiness which means the eternal moral order personal in God. Jesus Christ crucified is the Gift of God as love, that we may stand scatheless, welcomed, adopted, beloved, before God as fire.’ ”