1 John II. 1-3.
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. And hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.
This new chapter in the Epistle is in fact a new chapter in Christian ethics. It is closely connected with the one we were considering before Easter; still it is a step forward in our study, that is to say, a step forward in human experience, and in God’s revelations.
You will remember where we stopped. The Apostle had spoken to us of sin. He had told us that ‘If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins;’ that ‘if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’ Now he begins, ‘My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.’
You will be struck with the fatherly tone in which St. John speaks. It belonged to himself—the old man, who had watched over the flock in Ephesus, to whom all the members of it looked up as one to whom they owed more than any child owes to its parent. It belonged to his character as an Apostle. All the Apostles felt themselves to be fathers. Christ had told them that they were not to call any one man their father on earth: that would interfere with their faith, that they had one Father in heaven. They gave heed to this precept. St. John did not call himself the father of the Church generally, though he was the last Apostle left. He did not even call himself the father of the different churches in Asia Minor, though they all knew him and reverenced him. He taught them, as you will find in the Apocalypse, that each had a pastor or angel of their own, and that that pastor derived his authority not from him but from Christ. But though no one might usurp this universal fatherhood—though it would have destroyed the very constitution of the Church to do so—each circle or society was to be an image of the great family, each was to have its own father. The Apostles loved and cherished that name, and all that it implied, and all that illustrated it. They much preferred it to any title which merely indicated an office. It was more spiritual; it was more personal; it asserted better the divine order; it did more to preserve the dignity and sacredness of all domestic relations. It is a sad day for churches, yes, and for nations, when men begin to regard themselves chiefly as officials sent forth by some central government to do its jobs, and not as men who are bound by sacred affinities and actual relations to those whom they preside over.
But St. John had a special reason for using this tender phrase, ’ My little children,’ in this place. All sin, we have seen, 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 to 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 man, 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.
’If, then, the Apostle wished the Ephesians not to sin; not to yield to selfishness which was in them, and which was separating them from each other and from God, what could he do better than remind them that they all belonged to one family; that this was their great privilege; that the Son of God had come amongst them to redeem them out of their pride and divisions, and to make them the little children of His Father. These Ephesians might say to the Apostle, ’Why, you told us just now not to say that we were without sin; you told us to confess our sins; you told us it was a lie not to confess them. Is not that as good as saying that we cannot help committing sin?
‘No!’ he answers, ‘my little children, it is not so at all. You are under no obligation to sin, because you have each of you this selfish tendency, this selfish nature. God has made you one flock, one family. Keep that truth in remembrance, and you will be able to deny yourselves, and forswear that separate nature of yours; to act as if you were bound to each other; to feel other men’s sins and selfishness as your own; to feel that you carry their wrong in you; to feel that your Deliverer and Brother is also theirs. I tell you these things; I urge you to confess your sins, on purpose that you may not sin; on purpose that you may enter into fellowship with Him in whom is no sin, who is altogether righteous.’
’ And,’ he goes on, ‘If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.’ Supposing these words stood alone—supposing there had been no previous words to explain what St. John thought of sin, and no previous message respecting Jesus Christ the Righteous—we might easily fancy that he meant something of this kind,—‘It is no doubt an unfortunate thing to sin; it should be avoided, if possible. But if any man does fall into it, there is one who has such might and influence with God that he can persuade Him to overlook the offence, and not to punish, hereafter at least, the man who has committed it.’ This, I say, would have been a very plausible interpretation; a heathen of Ephesus would certainly have concluded at once that it must be the right one. He would have said,—‘No doubt we all desire to find advocates who can induce our gods to pardon us or to accept some compensation for the punishment they would inflict. You think you have found the Advocate who has influence enough with your God to secure impunity for your misdoings.’ Many a Jew of Ephesus, perhaps, would have been equally sure that the Apostle must have had this thought, or a thought very like this, in his mind. Such a Jew would have said, ‘Yes! if you could persuade me that Jesus was the Christ, I, too, might be glad of His advocacy to help me in avoiding the punishments which my transgressions of the law have incurred. But as I see no proof that He is the Christ, I would rather trust to the High Priest of Jerusalem, and to the sacrifices which he offers according to the law.’ But though both heathens and Jews might have used this language, I am certain that no heathen and no Jew would have found what in his inmost heart he was longing for if he found an advocate who would obtain for him this sort of forgiveness. No; the best heathens perceived—every Jew who had been taught by the law and the prophets knew—that it is not a blessing but a misery to escape the punishment of sin. The best heathens perceived—every Jew who was taught by the law and prophets knew—that what a man wants is to be set free from his sin, and that no advocate could serve him in the least unless he could be the instrument of winning for him that emancipation.
But if this is true about heathens and Jews, whose education and whose corrupt practices disposed them to accept this notion of an advocate—if they had the sense of needing help of a kind quite different from any which such an one could afford—think how impossible it was for St. John, after the message which he had just announced to the Ephesians, to tolerate for one moment so immoral a doctrine. He had spoken of Jesus Christ as manifesting the life of God, as declaring to men by His words and acts that God was Light with no darkness at all, as enabling men to have fellowship with that Light. Could he all at once contradict these lessons and say, ‘Jesus Christ the Righteous does not show forth the mind and purpose of God, but He is one who intercedes with God to alter His mind, to adopt a new and different purpose?’ Could he say, ‘It is not the great blessing of all that God should detect all the darkness that is in us, and scatter it, and bring us into His clear Light? What we want is, to avoid His Light, to find an advocate who will say, Let these poor creatures alone, they cannot bear thy Light. Let them hide themselves in their own darkness; they are so used to it. Do not be hard upon them if they have a preference for it.’ No; St. John had no such horrible dream as this. He did not so slander the Master upon whose breast he had lain, of whose eternal life he was to testify. He did not so blaspheme the God of Light. He did not so hate the men whom God has made in His Image.
What he does say is in perfect consistency with his previous lessons, only it is a deepening and an expansion of them. ‘My little children,’ he says, ’you are not bound to sin. What I have said to you is to remind you that you are brought into a family in Jesus Christ your elder brother, and that His Father is your Father, and that you may have fellowship with them and with each other, and so may rise above your selfish instincts and tempers. And if any of you do sin, if you do fall into low, loose, selfish acts, or low, base, selfish states of mind—then let me tell you how you may be raised out of them—
how you may recover your right position again. The effect of those bad acts, of that bad state of mind, will be to make you think that there is a hopeless barrier between you and God; that you have made Him your enemy. The effect of it will be to make you think that you have lost the privileges of a member of this family; that you have nothing more to do with your brethren; that you are shut up in your own evil nature. These thoughts will seem to you true and certain. They must seem so; for you cannot help knowing that you are at war with the God who is all goodness and truth, that you are at war with your brethren. It would be mere mockery and self-deception to tell you the contrary. But understand, you cannot set aside God’s order merely because you do not acknowledge it. You cannot change God’s countenance, because your eyes are jaundiced. He has made you members of a family in His Son. ‘“He is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” And He looks upon us as we really are—one body in Jesus Christ the Righteous, though we choose to act as if we were a set of separate creatures. And He wishes us to act upon a true belief, and not upon a lying fancy. Remember, then, that Jesus Christ the Righteous is ever with God, the sharer of His counsels. Remember that He represents us as one family, one race before God. Remember that He is the same, though we change; and then you will feel that there is always a way open for you to return to Him from whom you have wandered, always a passage out of your darkness into His light; one which is for all; one which no evil act, no evil state of mind can close up; for it is the way out of these evil acts, out of that evil state; it is the way which God Himself has prepared for us.’
This, I think you will see, is a different notion of an advocate from the other, and one that is considerably more helpful to struggling and sinful men. The word ‘advocate,’ which our translators have used, is in itself a very good one. The word signifies etymologically, ‘one who may be called to us; a helper and counsellor.’ Here it describes Him whom St. John speaks of as God and with God; one in whom we may read and understand His mind; one in whom God can look upon men, and in whom men may look up to God. The belief that there is such a one is, I think, the most elevating, most comforting that it is possible for human creatures to cherish. We are apt to look out upon the world and count heads, and then say to ourselves, ‘What a hopeless mass of misery and crime is here! Perhaps Paris is better than Constantinople; perhaps London is better than Paris. But if so, how wretched are the prospects of mankind! For what is this London, if one considers it in the aggregate, if one thinks of it in any of its portions?’ So we reason, and then we too often go on—Pharisees as we are—to wrap ourselves in our own righteousness and wisdom, and to thank God that, at all events, we are not as the great majority are. A man is stopped in the midst of that self-congratulation. The question is asked him straightly and roughly, by one who means to have an answer, ‘Is not that very thought of thine a proof that thou art as the great majority are? What else is destroying them but the very selfishness, the very want of understanding that they are members of a kind, which you are now indulging? And do not you see that they are members of a kind in spite of all this selfishness in them and in you? Don’t you see that they have affections one for another, however sunken and fallen they may be? Do not you see that they are related to each other as husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, even when they are quarrelling most and tearing one another in pieces most? Do not you see that there is an order in the world, and that God is upholding it, in spite—yes, in spite of you and your narrowness and pride, and your wish to be a solitary creature?’ Then one begins to say to oneself, ‘An order? Where is it? What is it? Who can tell me anything about it? How is God upholding it? Will it triumph at last over all this disorder? And what have I to do with it? If I have been living as if I did not belong to it, how may I begin to live as if I did belong to it?’ Then it is that these words, ‘We have an Advocate or Representative with the Father,’ acquire such a meaning and power. We need not be separate from our kind. He is not separate from it. He cares for it, watches over it; holds all the different elements of it together. We need not learn what man is in Constantinople, or Paris, or London. He is the Man. It is in Him that we know what we are, and why we were created. In Him each man may draw nigh to the Father of all and say, ‘Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before Thee.’ In Him we may confess other men’s sins and crimes as well as our own, and may learn that their crimes and sins have not destroyed them yet, because Christ is on their side; because Christ is the advocate and supporter of that in them which He has Himself created; because it is not His will or His Father’s will that that shall perish.
Perhaps you will say, ‘It is all very well to use these “fine words” about London, and Paris, and Constantinople, but St. John was acquainted with none of these cities; one of them at least was little more than a collection of mud cabins in his day. And the people he was thinking of were a very small circle indeed, which was surrounding him in the city of Ephesus, or at most a set of men called Christians who were scattered up and down the Roman Empire, separated from the rest of the world, denouncing its customs and its worship.’ Wait a moment till we have read the next verse, and then let us consider whether these were all that St. John was thinking of; whether it was possible for him to think only of them when he spoke of the Advocate with the Father, ‘And he is the Propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but for the whole world.’ Our translators have introduced the word ‘sins’ into the second clause, supposing it ought to be repeated from the first. Perhaps they are right; I am not sure; and I believe, when we have examined the principal word in the passage, we shall find that it makes no great difference whether we say that He was a Propitiation for the whole world, or for the sins of the whole world.
That principal word is ‘Propitiation.’ What does it signify? I must refer you back to what I have been saying about the word ‘Advocate.’ Those heathens and Jews who looked for an Advocate who should induce some Divine Ruler not to punish them, also looked for something which that Advocate should offer to the Divine Ruler, in order that He might be moved to compassion. They expected that He should give the God some adequate or sufficient motive not to execute the vengeance which it seemed to them that He was executing, or was likely to execute, upon them. No more natural notion could come into the minds of people who had done wrong, and who knew they had done it. If some fellow-creature had displeased them, this was the course they were inclined to adopt; the more inclined the harder and crueler their feelings towards him were. ‘Pay me that thou owest,’ as our Lord says in His parable, is the language which one fellow-servant is apt to use to another. He does not care to make his fellow-servant better; he cares only to get an amends for some injury which he thinks he has suffered at his hands. And he supposes that the Lord of all acts upon the same principle; that He, too, wants compensation for some injury He has suffered; that He, too, is spiteful and vengeful; that He, too, cares that His servants should pay Him what they owe, not that they should become right and gracious men. How, indeed, could a being desire them to be that which He is not Himself?
But I must repeat what I said in the other case. Though this was the natural notion of both Jews and heathens, one which they could justify to themselves by arguments, one that they became strengthened in by a series of religious acts which were grounded upon it—no Jew and no heathen was satisfied with it. The conscience in each of them acknowledged a wrong which no such compensation could clear away. The conscience in them confessed that they had grieved some Being who could be content with nothing else but that they should be right and true men. The best heathens said that the Being they worshipped must be right and true Himself, and that it was dangerous and wicked to attribute any acts to Him that would be base and evil in them. The Jew, taught by the law and the prophets, believed that the God and Judge of all the earth was a righteous being, and could only do right; and that the whole scheme and purpose of His government was to make men right. Whatever sacrifices and offerings He appointed, such a Jew was sure, were appointed for this end. They were, as I said in a former lecture, God’s way of bringing back those who had wandered from fellowship with Him and with each other into that fellowship. They brought an animal which God had prescribed to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. They confessed their sins over it; the priest presented it; it was declared to be the sign and pledge of an atonement and reconciliation between God and the worshipper.
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. It was the most conspicuous object in the building; the cherubims covered it with their wings. The High Priest who offered the sacrifices died; this sign of God’s presence with the people lasted on from generation to generation. It said to all Jews, young and old, ‘Though you have erred and ‘strayed, though you are stiff-necked and rebellious, God ‘is still claiming you as His people; God is inviting you ‘to claim Him as your God.’
St. John had been used to gaze on this mercy-seat when he was a boy in the Temple at Jerusalem, when he went yearly to the feasts. He had seen it as a man. He had seen it when he walked with Jesus in the Temple; he had seen it after Jesus had died and had gone away from the world. He was far away from Jerusalem. The Temple was perhaps still in existence; but if it was, it was desecrated; it was surrounded with armies; it was soon to be burnt with fire. 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. In Him God is satisfied with us; in Him we can be satisfied with God. Why did he say so? Because he believed that the only sacrifice with which God can be pleased is the voluntary sacrifice of a self; is the sacrifice of one who delights to do His will, and to suffer it. Because he believed that Christ had offered this sacrifice. Because he believed that God had signified His delight in it, by raising Jesus from the dead. Because he believed that that act declared Him to be the Son of God—the Mediator and High Priest who had always united God to man, from whom all other mediators and priests derived their worth and meaning; without whom they were nothing. Because he believed that, being this, Jesus Christ the Righteous fulfilled the idea of the Mercy Seat, in whom God and His creatures can have fellowship, in whom the children who have wandered from their home may find it again.
But was this all? No; the Jewish sacrifice, high priest, and mercy seat were gone. Was this, then, a Jewish high priest, sacrifice, mercy seat? If He was 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 atoned or 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. Whether we live in London, or ‘Paris, or Constantinople, we are no longer separated. ‘There is a common Lord of us all. There is a common ‘life for 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.’ This, then, is the second part of our Christian ethics. The groundwork is laid in the revelation of God to man, as the Light in whom is no darkness. ‘That revelation was made to creatures who had sinned and walked in darkness. It told them that they were meant to rise out of their sins and to walk in the light. To-day we have heard of the elevation of men into union with God. Jesus Christ the Righteous is the Person through whom the revelation of God is made. Jesus Christ the Righteous is the Person in whom mankind recovers its true position and glory. Therefore our ethics are in the strictest sense Christian; but they are also in the strictest sense human. They adapt themselves to the wants of individual men. ‘They concern societies of men. ‘They prove that there is a fellowship for the whole race of men.
Next Sunday we are to enter, if God permit, upon another subject:—the worth of commandments—the nature of obedience. ‘That subject is wholly unintelligible, so long as we fancy that an advocate or a propitiation is necessary that we may escape from our obligations or from the penalties of neglecting them. But there is another practical topic of which I must say one word before I conclude.
The longing of men for fellowship with God—the sense in men of a separation from God—had both found their expression in prayers or litanies; some of these had been general, offered up by the priest for a whole congregation or society; some had been special, the utterance of an individual’s cry for help under his own misery, the acknowledgment of his own evil. These prayers were, I may say, the very signs of humanity, the proof that man does not and cannot reckon himself among the beasts that perish. They point to the past: they look on to the future; they are connected with all the needs of the present. And yet these prayers might become most inhuman. They might be struggles in one man to get something which his neighbour had; they might be cries to a divine power to aid a strong man in crushing a weak one; they might be coverings for deceit and violence, and encouragements to persevere in them. Prayers and sacrifices have served these vile ends. As long as men think meanly of God—as long as they forget their relation to each other—they must serve such ends.
Christian ethics rescue prayers from these vile applications, and vindicate the strong conviction of human beings that without prayers they cannot live. When we believe that there is an Advocate or Representative of mankind, who ever lives to make intercession, that we may not sink but rise, that we may be delivered from our own darkness, that we may know the God who is Light—our prayers become cries against a common enemy—the pursuit of a common blessing. When we believe that Jesus Christ the Righteous is the Propitiation or Mercy Seat for us and for the whole world, that He has made the sacrifice of Himself which is well pleasing to God, our confession of our individual sins increases our confidence in the purposes of God for the universe; our most earnest petition being that He will make us true and loving sacrifices to accomplish His good will to us and to mankind.