The True Idea of Man.
I. St. John had a special reason for using this tender phrase, "my little children," in this place. All sin is connected by the Apostle with the loss of fellowship. A man shuts himself up in himself. He denies that he has anything to do with God; he denies that he has anything to do with his brother. That is what he calls walking in darkness. The inclination to walk in darkness, to choose darkness rather than light, is sin. We become aware of this inclination; then arises in our minds a terrible sense of shame for having yielded to it, and for having it so near us. But as soon as we believe that God is light, and that in Him is no darkness at all, as soon as we understand that He has manifested His light to us that we may see it and may show it forth with this sense of shame there comes also the pledge of deliverance. We are not bound by that sin to which we have surrendered ourselves in time past, or which is haunting us now; we are not created to be its servants. We may turn to the light; we may claim our portion in it; we may ask that it may penetrate us. And then, the Apostle says, we have fellowship one with another; and the blood of Jesus Christ, of Him in whom is life eternal, of Him who has taken the flesh and blood of men and has poured out His blood for all that cleanses us from sin. We renounce our selfish life; we claim His life, which belongs to our brother just as much as to ourselves.
II. "He is the propitiation for our sins." These Jewish offerings, then, were no compensations to an offended Prince; they were indications and expressions of the will of a gracious Ruler; they were acts of submission on the part of the Israelite to that Ruler; they were witnesses of a union between Him and them which could not be broken. And there was in that tabernacle in which those sacrifices were offered a mercy-seat, where God declared that He would meet the worshippers. What had become of the sacrifices, and the priests, and the mercy-seat? St. John says Jesus Christ the righteous, our Advocate, is the mercy-seat. In Him God meets us; in Him we may meet God. The Jewish sacrifice, high-priest, and mercy-seat were gone. Was this, then, a Jewish High-priest, sacrifice, mercy-seat? If He were that (and He was that), He must be more. The Lord had taken the nature of man; He had died the death of man. Was He not then a High-priest, a sacrifice, a mercy-seat for man? Could St. John dare to say, He is a mercy-seat for our sins only? Must he not say, He also accomplishes what the Gentiles have been dreaming of in their miserable propitiations? He is the mercy-seat for the whole world; the world is reconciled in Him. All have a right to draw nigh to God as their Father in Him; all have a right to cast away the fetters by which they were bound, seeing that He has triumphed over sin, and death, and the grave, seeing that He is at the right hand of God. Therefore we have a right to say our race, our manhood, is glorified in Him; there is a common Lord of us all. Confessing that common Lord, renouncing, by the strength of this common life, our selfish, divided life, we become men indeed; we obtain the rights, the stature, the freedom, the dignity, of men.
F. D. Maurice, The Epistles of St. John,p. 53.