(Lincoln’s Inn, 5th Sunday after Trinity, July 16, 1854.)
‘My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.’ 1 John ii. 1, 2.
I do not know whether we ought to complain of our translators for rendering the same word ‘Advocate’ in this passage, which they rendered ‘Comforter’ in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters of St. John’s Gospel. It was not a sufficient reason for introducing a new word, that the subject which is brought before us here is different from the one of which our Lord is speaking to His disciples there. St. John might have thought that it was very desirable and important to denote the Spirit of Truth, who should testify of Christ, who should bring all things to the remembrance of the disciples, who should convince the world of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, by the very same title which he gives here to Jesus Christ the Righteous. Interpreters have no business, in any case, to act as if they were wiser than their author, and to guard against confusion by departing from the course which he has adopted. But, on the other hand, the translators may have felt that the word which they had selected, not without strong warrant of reason, in the Gospel, would not convey the full sense of the Epistle. They must have reflected, that if etymology was the only thing to be considered, no word could be so accurate as Advocate—one who is called to our aid—to represent the force of Παράκλητος. But they may have reflected also that it had acquired, from use, a signification which corresponded far less happily to the description which is given of the work of the Divine Spirit; whereas, every part of that description signifies comfort or strength, which the weak, who are unable to speak for themselves, derive from the presence of a friend and helper. In the passage before us, they may have dreaded less the technical associations with the word Advocate; they may have felt that, in its primary meaning, it was what they required, and that the phrase ‘Comforter’ would have been quite out of place. I own I should have thought them more cautious and more reverent, if they had chosen their equivalent carefully, and then had rigidly adhered to it, at least when they were translating from St. John; but so much is to be learnt from their variations, not only respecting the processes of their own minds and the history of theology, but respecting the truths which the Bible sets forth, that we may have possibly full compensation for their error, if error it is to be called.
I have touched upon this point, because it has an important bearing upon the meaning of the text, and also because it connects the subject upon which I wish to speak to-day with that of which I spoke last Sunday. The Accusing Spirit who is said in the Epistle to the Hebrews to have had the power of death till Christ tasted death for every man, misrepresents the mind and will of God towards us, the acts and dispositions of our fellow-creatures, our own moral condition. He leads us to suspect an enemy in our Father, an enemy in every brother, an enemy in our own heart. The more we know of these inward accusations, of their subtle complications, of the way in which they pervert the most undoubted facts, and the most authentic witnesses of our consciences into falsehoods, and arguments to evil—the more horror we feel of a power near to us, acquainted with our secrets, bent upon our ruin. We may state the conviction to ourselves in the most various forms; but we have it one and all, and we cannot shake it off. No; nor is there any emancipation from it, but in the acknowledgment of that other Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who is also acquainted with all that is passing in us, who knows recesses in our spirits which the other does not know, who reveals to us God as a Father; those whom we had taken to be His enemies and ours, as belonging to a family which He has begotten and redeemed; ourselves as members of that family. To have such a Spirit ever near, ever ready to come when we call upon Him, able to lay bare the sophistries by which the Spirit of distrust and lies is urging us to despair, able to show in every fact which is the excuse for his sophistries, arguments for confidence and hope—this, indeed, is the fulfilment of the promise—‘I will send you an Advocate (or Comforter), who shall abide with you for ever.’
But our Lord says—‘He shall not speak of Himself; He shall testify of me.’ What do these words signify? The accusing Spirit forces us into the understanding of them. He says to us—‘You may have good desires, right impulses, divine resolutions; these may be inspired by some gracious power. But though God vouchsafes all these benignant influences to you, you are not really nearer to Him than you were before. A chasm, which none has traversed, divides you from Him. Who shall ascend up on high into that mysterious world of light where He dwells? Perhaps, the gifts which He bestows on your minds and hearts may have something more wonderful and celestial in them than the gifts of corn and wine which He bestows on your bodies; but they do not constitute any closer bond between you and Him than those do. One man has more of them than another, but how miserably poor is the condition of the best! What a sense he has of insufficiency, of hollowness, of evil! Nay, is not this sense strongest in the best? Do not they accuse themselves most of being sinners? Is not this the only reason why any men in the world have any comfort or repose, that they do not think of God, and of their distance from Him, and of the offences they have committed against Him? The moment these thoughts are awakened, what shame, what misery, what self-loathing, what struggles to attain a good that is never reached, to avoid an evil that is never escaped, follow in every case? Is it less so among Christians than others; less so among those who say they have this Spirit, this Comforter, with them? Are not the testimonies which He hears to their manifold transgressions, to the radical evil from which these transgressions flow, the cause of their unhappiness?’
‘He shall testify of Me.’ This Spirit shall answer these accusations, not by reminding you that you have done one good work or another, or that you had one kindly affection and right desire, or a thousand; that you have different dispositions and affections from your fellow-men, and have had a trust and hope of which they gave no signs; not by such miserable, ragged comfort as this, which fails in every great crisis, which a fit of pain or the recollection of a single evil act or unkind thought, or the discovery of a wrong in yourself which you never knew to be in any one else, or the discovery of something right and good in a man you took to be an outcast from God, which you never knew to be in yourself, or any single revelation of your own character such as God in His mercy will not suffer you to want—may sweep away in a moment. The Spirit of Truth does not sustain His office as an Advocate and Consoler by feeding you with wind; but He says—‘The Accuser speaks to you as men conscious of separation from God. You have that consciousness; you feel that it is an evil thing, a sin, to have it. Why do you feel it? Because there is a bond of union between you and God, because that bond is one which existed before all evil was in the world, and because no evil can destroy it. Therefore your conscience tells you that you are wrong for being separate from God, seeing that your might and proper state is one of union with Him; seeing that you are created for that state in Christ Jesus; seeing that you were redeemed for that state in Christ Jesus.’
This is what St. John had been telling his little children in Ephesus in the commencement of his Epistle. He first told them of the Word of Life which had been manifested, of that Eternal Life which was with the Father; that he had heard this message from Him, that God was Light, and in Him was no darkness at all; that he delivered this message to them that their joy might be full, and that they might have fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ; that if they walked in darkness, they would not have fellowship; but that if they walked in the light, as He was in the light, they would have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus Christ would cleanse them from all sin; that if they said they had no sin, the truth was not in them; that if they confessed their sin, God was faithful and just to forgive them their sin, and to cleanse them from all unrighteousness.
In these words, the Apostle, taught by the divine Spirit—the Comforter—does not give them any joy, or peace, or hope, by telling them of some good thing which they had received in themselves, but of a Life and Righteousness which was in God, and which Christ the Son and Word of God, had shown forth; by telling them how they might be raised out of themselves, and be made partakers of it. To believe in Christ as the Righteousness of God, and as the Mediator between God and man, was, therefore, the true deliverance from sin. The blood of Christ, which declared this righteousness, and the union of man with God, cleansed away the sin of all who really sought God, and wished to be in His Light. It assured them that there was no chasm between them and God; it assured them that nothing but a refusal to believe in the message, ‘God is Light; Christ has been manifested;’ could create the chasm.
And therefore he begins the next passage of his Epistle with the words—‘My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.’ In this way;—by accepting this great news of God and of His Love, and by turning to God in Christ, you arise out of sin, for you rise not of yourselves; you become righteous, for you become one with Him who is righteous. ‘And if any man sin,’—if he loses sight of this truth, and sinks back into himself, and so becomes evil,—‘we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’ The final blow is not given to the Accuser till these great words are uttered. At each act of transgression he renews the argument. You are again evil—consciously, inwardly evil. You cannot deny it. After all that has been done for you, the bond is broken again. And then come the old efforts to restore the union, and bring about the reconciliation. The sin-offering and peace-offering must again be presented; the first-born of the body must once more be given for the sin of the soul. The Father of all must be persuaded to forgive the sin which the child has committed; which means to excuse the penalty which the child has incurred.
St. John cuts short all such schemes, and the argument by which they are justified, with the words, ‘If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’ It is not true that the evil act now, any more than before, has severed the bond between the creature and the Creator, between the child and the Father. The Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, the Lamb slain on the cross at Calvary, is still the Lamb in the midst of the throne; He, in whom God created the worlds; He, in whom God has loved the world; He whom God has given up for the world; He is still, as ever, the Mediator, in whom we are at one with Him, in whom we may draw nigh to Him. No possible act by which man denies and sets at nought the eternal law of the universe, can make it cease to be a law. God’s constitution cannot perish, because men’s consciences tell them that they are violating it, and that by no other law can they live.
He who understands this to be the case, will not endure to remain under the yoke of sin. As long as it is a question, whether he cannot find out some way of adjusting the quarrel, of pacifying the judge, he will tamper with the evil, get as much enjoyment of it as he can, hug it with a mixture of love and loathing. When he knows that there is a way out of it, and that God is leading him along in that way, and that Jesus Christ the righteous is the way, he will desert the false and dark road in which he has been walking, he will begin to think of God as a Refuge and a Father.
Christ speaks of Himself as the Way to the Father. The beloved disciple, who records that expression, speaks of Him as the Advocate, or Paraclete, with the Father. If we apply what was said of the word Paraclete in its other application to this case, we shall not easily suppose that Christ is called an Advocate because He beseeches the Lord of all to do any act which it is not His own perfect Will to do. But He, who knew what was in man, saw how natural such a thought would be to the sensualised and darkened heart. Therefore, He used those remarkable words in His last conversation with His disciples—the one in which He spoke of sending them the Comforter: ‘I say not that I will pray the Father for you; for the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came forth from God.’ This was said an hour or two before all those disciples forsook him and fled. He surely intended them to understand by it that His Father’s love was not the consequence of any act of His, of any petitions of His; but that His acts and petitions were pure, and holy, and divine,—because they were the expressions of the Father’s love, because they were the exact and perfect response to it. The same inference follows still more directly from the passage which introduces the text. The whole of it, as we have seen, turns upon the assertion, that Christ showed forth the Life that was first in God; that He brought the assurance, which was so much at variance with the notions of men, that He was Light, and in Him was no darkness.
I am almost ashamed to argue this point with you. For when did any righteous advocate seek to pervert the course of law, and to bring any partial influence to bear on the mind of the judge? When did he acknowledge to himself any other object than that of aiding the judge’s own desire to ascertain the truth? And if this is so among us, who are so imperfect; if we feel that any other rule than this is immoral, and that all practice ought continually to be rectified by reference to this standard; how can we ever attribute an advocacy to Jesus Christ the righteous, which is of any other character, which would defeat the ends of righteousness? It is most needful that we should clear our minds upon this subject, and should allow no notions which are deduced from the impure habits of earth, to soil our idea of the kingdom and order which is altogether pure and holy. We can cast stones at other people with great readiness; we can complain of the carnal and dark thoughts which prevail in some countries, respecting the intercession and advocacy of saints, and of the way in which those thoughts have darkened the sense of actual right and wrong in the minds of those who cherish them, and have turned them away from the service of God to the service of vanity. We may make the complaint, and in fear and trembling bless God for having freed us from some of the temptations to an error, which is akin to all the worst tendencies of our hearts, as it touches very closely upon some of their higher and better aspirations. But if we suppose we are free from the evil part of this tendency, because it can only take this form of pleading for the prayers of saints; or that it will not take that form, or some more corrupt and idolatrous form in our country, and our own selves, unless we are watching against the root and principle of it; we shall find, too late, how we have been deceived. So long as there is the least lingering thought that Christ is an Advocate for us, to protect us from the wrath or ill-will of the Father; that He has some affection or tenderness for us which the Father has not; so long there lies in us the germ of all the corruptions that we attribute to Popery; yes, and of all that do exist, and ever have existed, in Paganism.
I say the least lingering thought; for we are often very indignant when we find our belief put into words. We may say, honestly, we have not meant that; it is too shocking. And yet we may be cherishing a principle, often acting upon it, suffering it to lie side by side with some better one, which we never try to separate from it,—and this principle, if we dared express it, would take the shape we shrink from. I, therefore, earnestly conjure you all, for the sake of yourselves, and of your children, who will surely carry into its developments any falsehood which you have allowed to remain in the seed, that you bring your feeling about this advocacy of Christ to the light and test of the Scriptures. I have tried to show you, for I consider it important to do so in this congregation, that, even if we give the word its forensic signification, it will not support any such conclusion as the one I have condemned, until we have made that signification dishonest and immoral. But, I must again remind you, that this forensic sense does not properly appertain to the original word. The Paraclete is the Advocate only so far as he is the person who may be always called in as a friend, adviser, helper, counsellor. In this sense, the Spirit is said to be a Paraclete. In this sense, if we follow the analogy of Scripture, Christ the righteous is said to be the Paraclete with the Father. In the language of the Book of Proverbs, ‘He was with Him, as one brought up with Him before the worlds were.’ In the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘He is the brightness of His Father’s glory, the express image of His Person.’ To believe that He who has been manifested to us, who has taken our nature, who has died our death, is indeed with Him, and that not as an accuser but a brother; is the sharer of His counsels; the utterer of His inmost heart; that in Him, and not through any other medium, He sees us, so that we may verily claim to be righteous, because He is righteous; at one with each other, because He is one with all of us; at one with the Father, because He is one with Him; this is, indeed, strength and comfort, and a mighty power, for casting down the accuser; a powerful warrant for repelling and throwing off our sins; for flying from every enemy into God’s holy presence. It would be an ineffectual defence against one who charges us with that essential radical evil, which is contrary to God’s Nature, and makes us incapable of blessedness, to say: ‘But we have an Advocate, who urges His prayer and His Sacrifice, to save us from the consequences or punishment of this evil.’ Such a conception darkens all our apprehensions of the mind of Him with whom we seek to be reconciled, and of Christ who came to reveal His mind. It bewilders, instead of purging, the conscience. But to be able to say: We know that there is at the right hand of God one in our very nature, one who has sounded the depths of death and the grave, and hell; one, in whom He delights; one, in whom He has reconciled the world to Himself; one, in whom He is eternally reconciled ‘to it;’ this is emancipation, not from the darkness of the future only, but from the misery of the present, and of the past. In it lies not that peace which the world gives and takes away, but the peace of God which passes all understanding.
And here, then, lies the connection between this subject of Intercession, and that of Sacrifice. That you may feel how they are related, I have joined the first verse of this chapter with the second, though that is one upon which I have spoken already, when I was trying to ascertain the meaning of the word Propitiation, and the use of it in the Epistle to the Romans. We saw there how altogether foreign that idea of the ἱλασμός or ἱλαστήριον, which identifies it with some attempt to make God propitious, was from the mind of either apostle. The ἱλασμός, or Propitiation—for I did not object to the word when we had found the divine signification of it—was set forth by God; it was declared to be, just as the Mercy-seat in the Old Tabernacle was, just as all the sacrifices in that tabernacle were—His own declaration of His own will and purpose to men; His own way of reducing their will and purposes into submission to His, into harmony with His. Christ, in this mighty and wonderful sense was declared to be the Propitiation, because He was the manifestation of God’s righteousness in the forgiveness of sin; because His sacrifice and offering up of Himself was at once the most perfect exhibition of the will of the Father, and of the voluntary surrender of the Son to this will, of His delight to do it. Such a Mercy-seat, such a Propitiation, such a restoring of the lost, such a reconciliation of God with his rebellious children, the Cross of Calvary was. The Cross gathered up into a single transcendent act the very meaning of all that had been, and all that was to be. God was there seen in the might and power of His Love, in direct conflict with Sin, and Death, and Hell, triumphing over them by sacrifice. But if this was so, that Cross must testify of Him who is with the Father now exhibiting that obedience of which this was the consummate token. It must testify of Him who lives for ever and ever, upholding all things and all men, by that obedience; who will be always the Mercy-seat, the Propitiation, the Living Bond between God and His universe. The reconciliation has been made in Him, by His Sacrifice. It can continue only in Him; there can be no intercourse and fellowship between heaven and earth, except in Him. Whenever any other way than this shall be devised by men; any way to God by their own high imaginations, or by their intercessions and sacrifices; or by the intercession and sacrifice of any intermediate power and helper; then it must be proclaimed more and more loudly: ‘None of these schemes can avail you; they will not deliver you from sin; they will fasten the chains of sin more closely about you; they will bring your consciences into the very bondage from which God is seeking to set them free. One Sacrifice—the Sacrifice of God Himself—has been made once for all. He who has offered it, is the Mediator between you and God. You can only know what God’s mind and will is toward you and to all men, when you behold it in His acts—His sufferings; these tell you that there is an Unchangeable Friend, an Eternal High-priest, in whom the Creator and creature are for ever atoned.’
I have touched here upon the topic which I said last Sunday it was a special object of the Epistle to the Hebrews to expound, the essential connexion between the Sacrifice and the Priest; neither being perfected till they were united in the same Person. I shall not follow out to-day that great subject, which has so many aspects, of the deepest concernment for all times, and for none more than ours. But in preparation for what I may, if God permit, say of it hereafter, I would earnestly remind you, that I have been preaching to-day the doctrine which was proclaimed with such power at the Reformation; the doctrine which made the whole world at that time to shake and upheave. I have been preaching it, not as it was preached then in the terms of St. Paul, but in the terms of St. John. There is the most essential and absolute agreement between them. God the Father has justified us from all things from which we could not be justified by any law. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law, being made a curse for us. Christ has come, made of a woman under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.
The Spirit beareth witness with our spirit that we are sons of God. This is St. Paul’s Gospel. We declare unto you the Eternal Life, which comes from the Father, in whom is light and no darkness. We declare unto you Christ the Paraclete with the Father, the Propitiation for the sins of the whole world. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. This is St. John’s Gospel. Oftentimes we fancy that we accept the one, while we turn away from the other; but there will come a sifting which will show us whether we believe either. It is possible for men to speak much of justification, and to suppose that it is some act of theirs which justifies, not God Himself; it is possible for them to speak of Christ’s redemption, and to suppose that He redeems them out of the hands of God, not brings them to Him; it is possible for them to speak of the Spirit bearing witness that they are sons of God, and to suppose that its witness depends upon some feelings, or tempers, or experiences, which separate them from their fellow-creatures. In that case, the faith which we boast of as having descended to us from the Reformation, is a mere heirloom, not a possession at all; and all the warmth with which we proclaim our determination to keep it, only shows that we feel how insecure our title to it is. And then we must go to St. John’s words. We must affront men—for it is the greatest affront to the proud religionist—with the declaration of God’s absolute and universal truth and love; with the assertion that Christ is the Propitiation for the sins of the whole world; that He is the Intercessor and Priest for man; and with the awful words—awful to every one who hears them, most awful to us who preach them: ‘If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ These words, not by their softness and tenderness, but by their tremendous severity, drive us to some other ground of hope than our own belief or our own feelings. They force us back upon God’s love in Christ as the only refuge from our unbelief, as the only power by which we can be reformed. They force us to say, ‘Father, we have sinned against our brother, and against thee; “oh, deliver us from our sins—from our distrust, our heartlessness, our hopelessness—in Him, and for His sake, whom thou lovest, and who, because thy love was burning Him and consuming Him, gave Himself up for us all, that we might enter into thy presence, and be partakers of thy nature.’