The Righteous Advocate for Sinners

1 John ii. 1. — And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

Our translators have left some words in their original Greek and Hebrew form. Sach are Amen Selah, Hallelujah, Baptize, Baptist

In some instances this was done on account of the want of an exact equivalent. One of these words, which has no answerable term in English, is the very term here rendered Advocate. This Greek word, of frequent occurrence, and great preciousness, sometimes means one who takes up his client’s cause, to carry it through by pleadings and acts, an Advocate; sometimes one who goes forth to make peace

y between two parties, beseeching for an offender, an Intercessor; sometimes one who stands by the sinking sufferer, uttering words of consolation and strength, a Comforter, All these offices concur in Jesus Christ, who is our Advocate to urge our cause — an Intercessor to make our peace — our Comforter to fill us with joy; and hence one might almost wish the text had said, “If any man sin, we have a Paradetos with the Father.”

Kow, though this name of love is also given to the Holy Spirit, there is something delightful in regarding both the adorable Son and the Spirit as standing towards us in this same benignant relation of manifold good. In our mind’s apprehension of Divine consolation, there need be no nice discriminating between the Yfork of the Son and the work of the Spirit, for when the Lord Jesus comforts, it is by the hand of the Comforter. Far different, however, is the work here ascribed to Christ as our Paraclete. Here he transacts, not in us, but for us; not on earth, but in heaven; not with creatures, but with God. The topic presented to us is the Lord Jesus Christ as

OUR Mediator and Head, acting on our

BEHALF ABOVE, IN VIRTUE OF HiS PEtlFECT RIGHTEOUSNESS.

You will at once be struck, on examination, with the strong contrast in the text between sin and rio-liteousness. It is I the sinful one: it is Jesus Christ the righteous. And this has a bearing which cuisoiy readers and superficial theologians are apt to overlook, being indeed the solution of the main difficulty to mankind. This is clearly and fully before the mind of the apostle John, whose characteristic it is, as a thinker and writer under Divine guidance, to unite depth of meaning with childlike plainness of words. His truths are solid and precious as the diamond, while they are no less simple and pellucid.

I. Consider the case thus: If there were no such thing in the world as consciousness of sin the vast structures of all religions for procuring pardon and peace would tumble down or moulder away. It is sense of sin that troubles mankind. It is a pronouncing and punishing Conscience that anoints priests, declares fasts.

keeps lents, rears altars, and sacrifices hecatombs. It is the self-accused sinner who cries, “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and how shall I bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with yearlings? will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? “Mic. vi. 6. Yes, many have replied, and vainly endeavored to offer the richest and bloodiest oblations to escape the intolerable sting of sin in the conscience. So much worse is pain of mind than pain of body, that pagans and papists do most willingly endure and even will inflict on themselves any degree of suffering, from hunger, whips, hot iron, knives, ingenious and continued tortures, in order to get rid of the more direful inward furies of an eldl Conscience. Under Christianity relief is afforded, but (mark it) only through Christian means. Christ cures this inward fever and frenzy; but only in those who drink of his fountain. The consciousness of sin, with its accompanying pain, sometimes dull and subdued, but always ready on provocation, or at the dying hour, or in eternity, to become poignant and agonizing, exists in all men; and whenever the thought has become explicit, whenever the soul has come to comprehend itself, it leads up to the idea of God as holy and as offended. ‘Nor is this internal principle ever eradicated. It belongs to man as man; and it stino-s and wounds and curses sinful man as sinful man. And when religious transfoiTQation takes place, though there be a new nature, there is no new faculty; and Conscience abides on the vicarious throne as truly in heaven as in hell. The intermediate realm of the present life affords abundant scope for the work of Conscience, both in the righteous and the wicked. None are wholly pure: all are either wholly or partially unclean. As early as the first century this holy Apostle found reason to guard against the shallow conceit of sinless perfection, i. 8:” If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins (a prompting of Conscience when led up to the Lawgiver and Judge) he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse

US from all unrighteousness.” Consciousness of impurity begets repentance, and so confession, and so cleansing. “If we say (he adds) that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and his truth is not in us.” Words which strikingly convey that truth we have been asserting, and which deserve our careful consideration.

Any proposition introduced by the holy writer mth such unwonted and startling language must be of singular moment. Any error that would make the Lord a liar is an error not only to be forsaken, but guarded against and abhorred. This error is the alleging that we have not sinned. The doctrine of sin is fundamental. This dark side of the contrast is always present, like the background of the painting, or, still more exactly, the chaos out of which order and light emerge. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The preaching of every apostle, nay, the entire Christian system, proceeds upon this. There is no such thing as becoming a true Christian by a process of making that which is not quite good, to grow gradually better. It is day out of night. There must be a tliorougli clearing away of every self-righteous figment, before the first stone of the gracious edifice can be laid In this we discern the reason why Paul, as a master workman, in his great epistle to the Romans, begins his sweeping process by utterly demolishing every ground of merit, and clearing away out of sight every pretence of Gentile and of Jewish righteousness. And we seem to behold him, after the completion of this herculean task, and cleaning of this Augean stable, proclaiming, “But the Scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith might be given to them that believe.” Gal. iii. 22. Corresponding to which is the secret operation of God in the heart, by which he turns doctrines into experience, the doctrine of sin into the experience of conviction; and thus he leads the soul to feel its utter condemnation and absolute need of help from without. However deeply a man may feel the discontent of a worldly life, and how much soever he may desire religion, as a new and better means of comforting himself, he has as yet done nothing, unless he has known himself to be a sinner. In truth, this is the very thing and only thing, for which the Lord Jesus Christ first reveals himself. All other and lesser benefits are but so many results. That which the sinner wants, is to be freed from his sin. This was the single charm which made the Gospel welcome to thousands, both Jews and Gentiles, at its first publication. The beautiful picture given by Neander in his Memorabilia is not overdrawn. Dire eclipse was over the nations by reason of sin. Athens and Alexandria had reared thoughtful minds, opened their vision to the likeness of virtue, lifted them up to behold the goodly and unattainable prospect, and then dropped them far down into the depth of the ocean. When a conscience-smitten and heart-sick philosopher, like him of the Clementina,^^ had come wan and panting, out of the round of rites, penances, mysteries, necromancies, schools, and systems, to the Church; which he delighted in, which filled him with rapture, and which was sweetly symbolized by his baptism, it was the rising of a new luminary on his midnight of Sin. And the operations of light in the natural world are not more constant than the operations of God’s Spirit in

* Denkwtirdigkeiteu.

the world of grace; for the soul destined to be saved is invariably brought first to pain for’liis sinfulness, and then to hungerings and thii’stings for the removal of sin. And in this longing the subject does not always, perhaj)s does not often, distinguish the longing for pardon from the longing for purity, justification, and sanctification. The poor sick child that tosses in hot fever on your bosom, yearns for health, for rest, for ease, for water, for the heaven-provided fount; it makes no nice inquii’ies of the pathologist. The poor sin-sick soul is dying for the one gift which the New Testament calls Righteousness. Every one who has ever come to the good Physician knows the burning wish. Every heathen sage, like Cyprian and Justin, went through what had previously been the experience, of every Hebrew apostle, such as John or Saul. There runs through all the Gospel as the deep base of a harmony this consciousness of sin, which we discovered at the first view of the text as the gloomy part of its important contrast. And the aged and beloved disciple, always a minister of love, and always sorrowing to give even necessary pain, approaches the bedside of his patients with looks and words of unusual pity, as fearing to uncover the wound which he must probe. His desire is for their holiness: “My little children, these things write I unto you that ye sin not.” This is the great and blessed end, sinlessness, like that of the sinless One. “This,” says Calvin,” is not only a summing-up of what goes before, but, so to speak, a recapitulation of the whole Gospel, that we should cease from sinP And when the soul has proceeded thus far in experience, and breaketh for the longing which it hath to be loosed from the loathsome and gigantic foe, which wrestles with it only to defile and poison, the news it hails on bended knees is Glad News, for it is Gospel.

11. In those four or five verses which precede the text, you have observed the concession, that even true disciples sin, a most mortifying yet familiar fact. And the lesson before us is introduced with particular reference to the case of sinning believers, who do the evil that they hate. The sequence of thoughts is this: 1. All commit sin, i. 10. 2. It is dreadful to commit sin. 3. If nevertheless, we sin, there is one who is sinless:” If KWi man sin, there,

IN THE COURT ABOVE, IS JeSUS ChRIST, WHO NEVER

SINNED.” All! here again is a contrast; but metMnks we have called one out of the hemispliere of night into the hemisphere of day. It is good to transfer our observation from sin to righteousness, from earth to heaven, ft’om self to Jesus. Observe, while the principal figure offered to our gaze is Christ, it is Christ in a particular position. Our help and relief under conscience of sin is to be sought in contemplating the Lord our Saviour, not in the antemundane gloiy when incarnation was only in decree; not in the foreshadowings of patriarchal or Mosaic times; not in humility on earth; not even dying on the cross or sleeping in the tomb of rock; but as entered “into heaven himself, now to appear in the presence of God for us,” Heb. ix. 24; a wonderful commentary on the words, “We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” This heavenly work of our Kedeemer belongs not to the humiliation, but the exaltation. Both are priestly acts of our gi’eat and only Priest; but one was below and the other is above; one was transient, the other is jDerpetual; one was payment of debt, the other is demand of release; one was at the bloody altar in the outer court, the other is in the most holy place, within the vail, before the resplendent glory of the ark. Both concern our sin; both concern Christs righteousness: but in divers respects. Our sin was expiated by the passion and death: it is removed by the appearance of our Surety for us in intercession. Chiist’s righteousness was in one of the principal parts procured by the oblation of his own holy will in acts of obedience and suffering on earth; it is gloriously set forth, in the sight of God and the universe in heaven, as an abiding and everlasting merit and ground of our acceptance to and continuance in favour. The ancient priesthood, by a succession of men transacting with Jehovah in behalf of sinners, was constantly interrupted by death, but Jesus, as Paul declares, “is able to save unto the uttermost all who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for us,” vii. 26. The chain of unstable priests is summed up in one who is immutable. “We have an altar whereof they have no right to eat who serve the sanctuary. We have a sacrifice, not of beasts, but of the Lamb of God. We have a tabernacle, model pattern, and antitype of that tent in the desert. We have a vail, embroidered over its dark blue web with constellations, and dividing the court of earth from the Holy of holies in heaven. We have a High Priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perpetual tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not in this building. “A High Priest” (adds Paul) “who is set on the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens, a minister of the sanctuary and the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man.” Heb. 4ii. 2. The eye of the ancient sinner in the camp of Israel, as he stood at the altar, was wistfully fixed on the High Priest as he was lost from sight on the great day of atonement, mthin the holiest of all. The eye of the modern sinner, under grace, is equally fixed on the apostle and High Priest of our profession, whom the heavens have received, &c., the Paraclete, who pleads for us by all the beseeching and constraining merits of his life and death, before the throne of the heavenly grace. And blessed is the moment, when, after long and fixed looking at itself and its sins, the soul is drawn to look at the sinless One above! Here within, there is no righteousness; there above, is all righteousness. I am all sin; He is without sin. If I sin, my advocate never sinned, and he is there with the Father. Thus the faith of the sinner lays its emphasis on the phrase, Jesus Christ the righteous.

Now, in order that the doctrinal basis of our confidence may be firmly settled, and that we may escape the weakness of some, whose religion is all sentiment, gust, and emotion, without any substruction of truth, let us consider for a few moments, how it is that the consciousness of sin is relieved by the vieio of a Jieavenly Advocate and 8ponso7 ivJio is sinless Jesus Christ the righteous.

Even in the most vague and general view of the subject, one must perceive that he who comes before the Sovereign, to intercede for rebels must be purged from rebellion himself. He who comes into court to answer for offenders, must be free from offence himself. He who undertakes for sinners, must be without sin:

for who could answer for him? Looking more nearly, we perceive the peculiar nature of this mediatory transaction; that it was intended to relieve this grand difficulty of the universe; i. e.y how a just God can pronounce the ungodly heirs of heaven. That which the world of sinners had lost and could never produce by itself, is conformity to God’s will, and satisfaction of God’s law. That which the inspired apostles represent our Redeemer as procuring and offering is this very conformity and satisfaction; in other words, righteousness. It is common for those who have not gone deeply into the theology of salvation, to ascribe the justification of the sinner exclusively to the death of Chiist. And it is true that the innocent bloodsheddino: and cruel death of our holy Lord was the chief proof of his love, and the culminating point of the redemptive process. Yet neither this nor all the other unutterable sufferings of our Saviour can be said to constitute the whole of that righteousness through which we are made righteous. For when we come to examine the aspect under which this suffering is exhibited in Him, we find it to be a mode of obedience. “He was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” The enduring of penalty was high obedience. The essence of all obedience is the loving oblation of the subject will to the Supreme Will. This oblation of love, this subjugation of will, was indeed signally manifested in the garden and on the cross. But it was manifested elsewhere. It was manifested always. The whole life of the sinless One, from Bethlehem to Golgotha, was one offering-up of. himself in voluntary self-renunciation unto God as the surety of sinners. The entire circle of acts, words, and thoughts, of sentiment, habit, and disposition, was pure and perfect. The obedience included conformity to precept and endurance of penalty. In both, the Lord Jesus Christ offered, in the sight of all holy beings, and of God, an example of immaculate and infinitely illustrious holiness. And such is the righteousness which he ever jDresents before the throne of the majesty on high. It is because he is thus pure and glorious, that he can be a prevalent advocate. His plea is unanswerable. That the excellencies of Christ are the excellencies of one person, while the host of sinners is beyond numbering, need cause US no scruple. The original Surety, who failed in the probation was one. “Therefore, as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so, by the righteousness of One, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life: for as by one man s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous.” Komans v. 18, 19. Enhanced as is the intrinsic merit by the infinitude of nature and the divinity of person, it outshines what would be the joint splendor of all creature-righteousness; even though all creatures had been holy, and men and angels had never fallen. The eye of Him who is so holy that the heavens are unclean in his sight, dwells with acquiescence, approval, and divine delight, on such a spectacle of impersonated righteousness; and the sinner’s heart is satisfied that God can now be just and yet the justifier of the ungodly that believeth in Jesus. Hear the precept “My little children, these things write I unto you that ye sin not.” Hear the reliefs” and if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father,

Jesus Christ “who never sinned!” Such a

High Priest “became us, who is holy, harmless, unclefiled, separate from sinners, and made hio-her than the heavens.” Heb. vii. 26. Behold him, as he stands for us, within yonder vail! The adumbration of this in the type was truly affecting and impressive to ancient Israel. Among all the sacred orders of the most tasteful Gentiles, there was no personage so majestic as Aaron and his successors. Upon his brow was the plate of pure gold, lettered with the engravings of a signet: Holiness unto the Lord. Fit emblem of Jesus Christ the righteous. None but the possessor of this “holy crown of pure gold” can fitly approach the King in his glory. Upon Aaron’s breast was the twelvefold pectoral, with rows of sculptured gems, bearing the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. Thus our “forerunner” is for us entered, even Jesus, made a High Priest forever, thus he bears the names of his people next his heart. For their sakes he became man; for their sakes he obeyed and died; for their sakes he intercedes and reigns. All his acts as Elder Brother are sponsorial and vicarious; and his very sanctity flows down from them. Mark this in his prayer when near Gethsemane, John xvii. 19, “And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.” This is good news for sinners. If we sin, our Paraclete is sinless; if we are guilty, God looks on us in “Jesus Christ the righteous.” Justification by faith is justification by the righteousness which faith appropriates. You are never further from being accepted, O beloved sinner, than when you are most vehemently stirring and struggling to fabricate a righteousness of your own. Desist, for the achievement is impossible. You have groaned under the load of sin, and have wrought hard to make youiself better, but without success. The stone which you roll to the steep mountain top, continually rebounds upon you. The outward reforms which you sometimes effect only serve to show you how unreformed is the inward principle. Within you is nothing which can appease that wrathful conscience. ‘No amount of zeal for external service and legal obedience can atone for past sin, or purchase future happiness. These fruitless endeavors are like those of the Jews, whose condition was such a grief to Paul. “For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the ricrhteousness of God: for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness unto every one that believeth.” Komans x. 3, 4. Endeavors to cope with sin in inflaming conscience, on any principles of mere natural strength, is like fighting against the rage of fire with one’s naked hands. Attempts to cover up the lacerations of the heart and smother the remorseful pang, are always futile. “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my moaning all the day long.” “I said I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord, and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.” Ps. xxxii. 3, 4. Bring out, then, the long-concealed distress. Give over the effort to live without pardon and without peace. Disclose the heavy secret and unbosom thyself to God. Confess judgment, and own the case to be blacker than thy worst enemy ever charged. Go down on thy knees, yea, lie prostrate in the dust, as the leper, the publican, the chief of sinners. But O, do not vitiate those sorrows, nor turn those tears into poison, by gauging, weighing, and testing them, as if a certain amount of humbling would jDurcliase a certain amount of peace. No! This were only to change the denomination of your tendered payment. Oj)en the soul at once to the great truth. There remains no payment to be made. The Surety hath paid all and cancelled all. The salvation is without money and

without price; that is to say, we are saved by grace. Ask not whether you have been convinced enough, whether you have mourned enough, whether you have repented enough; as if you were bound to be convinced, to mourn, repent so much, before you could have a title to believe. Your title to believe is the infinite veracity of God in offering Christ and his salvation to the chief of sinners. Believest thou this? Look upwards and see heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. Forget thyself, forsake thyself, with all thy merits, all thy strivings, all thy tears, all thy repentings; yea, even more and harder, forget thy short-comings, thy iniquities, thy hardness of heart, thy unbelief; flee away from it all, and leave all far behind thee while thou dost x thine eyes upon the Advocate with the Father. Look unto him and be saved! This is the beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased. Grant that you have sinned to the extent of utter condemnation, so as to be lost in unrighteousness; he who pleads is Jesus Christ the righteous. The argument which he wields is his obedience unto death. As it pleased the Lord to bruise him, so it pleases the Lord to grant him the travail of his souL Believest thou this? Believe on Jesus Christ the righteous, and thou shalt be righteous. Dare you close with the offer? Dare you make a venture, on God’s word in promise, and Christ’s heart in pledge? Nay, it is no venture, but the infallible certainty of God. The Judge is ready, the Surety is ready, the righteousness, the pardon, the adoption, the kiss of peace, all are ready, except thy lingering, doubting, self righteous, self-destroying soul!