Christ our Righteousness.
This short, pregnant passage stands in one of the inner sanctuaries of the Bible. This first epistle of St. John is very possibly the latest page of Scripture in date. Assuredly in it the Holy Spirit takes the reader into the last recesses of spiritual life and experience; He leads him into the most penetrating and searching views of holiness, and obedience, and love. A tone and air of serene yet awful purity, at once most spiritual and most importunately practical, characterises the pages. The Christian contemplated in this letter is a man of God indeed; he has fellowship with the Father and the Son.
I. All the more remarkable it is, then, that in such a passage comes the language of the text. For one thing, we are here warned that the heights and depths of grace leave the liability to actual sinning there still. This blessed believer, this privileged and transfigured man, may very conceivably sin, so says St. John. "He is the propitiation for our sins." Here are the basis of the advocacy; the strength of the plea; the reason of the sinning believer's non-exclusion. The pacification of offended holiness, the reconcilement of the Father-Judge in His awful consciousness and cognisance of His regenerate child's slightest sin, lies altogether here, not in effusion of love, but in propitiation, not in presence of spiritual life, but in propitiation.
II. From the text we see the union of Christ and His people, the union of Christ and the believing soul. Our Advocate, our propitiation, is also our Elder Brother, our celestial Bridegroom, our vital root, our living and life-giving Head. In Him we "possess His possessions" won for us. Amongst them we possess His dear-bought merit, good for us from first to last of our need. That merit is lodged evermore in Him, and we are one with Him.
H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All,p. 3.
Consider:
I. The nature of the office which Christ as our Advocate sustains. (1) It would seem to be necessary for various reasons that there should be this Mediator between God and man. The pagan people, in the absence of revelation, invested their departed heroes with intermediate powers, and constituted them in some sort intercessors with the offended gods. In the dim twilight of the shepherd-age, Job speaks as the representative of thousands when he breathes out his complaint, "Neither is there any daysman between us, who can lay his hand upon us both." This want was supplied in the case of the Jews by the sumptuous furniture of their economy. It had been strange if in a more glorious economy, the last and the utmost of the dispensations of God, man had been left to his own vague conceptions of the unseen object of his worship; but God has sent His Son into the world, and all men now may see the fellowship of the mystery. God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. (2) This office of advocacy is essential to the completeness of the priestly office. Other priests become infirm with age, sicken in disease, and die; "He ever liveth to make intercession for us."
II. In every point of view or conception, Jesus Christ the righteous is our perfect Advocate, throughly furnished for every good word and work; and it is a matter of difficulty to select those aspects of His qualification which will most warmly commend Him to our regard. We observe (1) He is a sympathising Advocate; (2) He is a prevalent Advocate; (3) He is a continual Advocate; (4) He is the exclusive Advocate. He was the only Redeemer, and by consequence He is the only Intercessor. "He trod the winepress alone, and of the people there was none" to help Him; and only He is authorised to appear for us in the presence of God. To associate others with Him in the work of advocacy is to cast a reflection either upon His ability or willingness to save.
W. M. Punshon, Sermons,p. 236.