A Sermon by J W Alexander
1 John 2:1. 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.
The word Paracletos, here translated advocate, has no exact equivalent in English. This Greek word often occurs and is very precious; it sometimes means someone who takes up his client’s cause to carry it through by pleading and by acts, an advocate; it sometimes means someone who goes forth to make peace between two parties, pleading for an offender, an intercessor; it sometimes means someone who stands by the sinking sufferer, uttering words of consolation and strength, a comforter. All these offices come together in Christ Jesus, who is an Advocate to urge His people’s cause, an Intercessor to make peace for them, a Comforter to fill them with joy. Hence one might almost wish the text had said, “If any man sin, we have a Paracletos with the Father”.
Now, though this name of love is also given to the Holy Spirit, there is something delightful in regarding both the Son and the Spirit as standing towards believers in this same relationship. In thinking of divine consolation, there is no need for fine discrimination between the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit, for when the Lord Jesus comforts, it is through the Comforter. Very different, however, is the work here ascribed to Christ as the Paraclete. Here He acts, not in sinners, but for them; not on earth, but in heaven; not with creatures, but with God. The topic presented to us is: The Lord Jesus Christ as Mediator and Head, acting above on behalf of His people, in virtue of His perfect righteousness.
You will at once be struck with the strong contrast in the text between sin and righteousness. It is I the sinful one; it is Jesus Christ the righteous. And this has a bearing which cursory readers and superficial theologians are apt to overlook, but it is the solution of the main difficulty for mankind. This is clearly and fully before the mind of the Apostle John, who characteristically, as a thinker and writer under divine guidance, unites depth of meaning with childlike plainness of words. His truths are as solid and precious as a diamond, while they are no less simple and clear.
- 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
1Taken, with editing, from Faith, a posthumous volume of Alexander’s sermons. Born in 1804, he was a son of Archibald Alexander. His ministry began in Virginia and ended in New York; he also served briefly as a professor in Princeton Seminary. He died in 1859.
down or decay. It is a sense of sin that troubles mankind. It is conscience that anoints priests, declares fasts, keeps Lent, rears altars and even offers human sacrifices. It is the self-accused sinner who cries, “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? (Mic 6:6,7). Yes, many have replied, and vainly endeavoured to offer the richest and bloodiest sacrifices, to escape the intolerable sting of sin in the conscience.
So much worse is pain of mind than pain of body, that pagans and Roman Catholics most willingly endure, and even inflict on themselves, any degree of suffering from hunger, whips, hot iron, knives and continued tortures, in order to get rid of the more appalling inward fury of an evil conscience. Under Christianity release is afforded, but only through Christian means. Christ cures this inward fever, but only in those who drink from His fountain. The consciousness of sin, with its accompanying pain, exists in everyone; it is sometimes dull and subdued but always ready, on provocation, or at the hour of death, or in eternity, to become agonising. And whenever the thought becomes explicit, whenever the soul understands itself, it leads 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 stings and wounds and curses sinful man as sinful man. And when a religious transformation takes place, even though there is then a new nature, conscience remains.
This 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: “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” (1 Jn 1:8,9). Consciousness of impurity begets repentance, and so confession, and so cleansing. “If we say”, John adds, “that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us” (1 Jn 1:10) – words which strikingly convey the truth we have been asserting and which deserve our careful consideration.
Any proposition introduced by the holy writer with such unwonted and startling language must be highly important. Any error that would make the Lord a liar is not only to be forsaken, but guarded against and abhorred. This error alleges 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 – indeed, the entire Christian system – proceeds upon this fact. There is no such thing as becoming a true Christian by a process of making that which is not quite good grow gradually better. It is day out of night. There must be a thorough clearing away of every self-righteous figment before the first stone of the gracious building 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 out of sight every pretence of Gentile and of Jewish righteousness. And we seem to behold him, after completing this herculean task, proclaiming, “But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe” (Gal 3:22). Corresponding to this 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 discontented with a worldly life, and however much he may desire religion as a new and better means of comforting himself, he has yet done nothing, unless he now knows that he is a sinner. In truth, this is the very thing by which the Lord Jesus Christ first reveals Himself. All other and lesser benefits are only so many results of this. What the sinner needs is to be freed from his sin. This was the single matter which made the gospel welcome to thousands, both Jews and Gentiles, when it was first proclaimed.
A great eclipse had come over the nations because of sin. Athens and Alexandria had reared thoughtful minds, opened their vision to the likeness of virtue, lifted them up to behold the goodly but unattainable prospect, and then dropped them down into the depths of the ocean. When a conscience-smitten philosopher had come, pale and panting, out of the rounds of rites, penances, mysteries, sorceries, schools and systems to the Church – which filled him with rapture – it was the rising of a bright new light on his midnight of sin. And the operations of God’s Spirit are no less constant in the world of grace than the shining of the sun and moon in the natural world, for the soul which God has purposed to save is invariably brought first to mourn over his sinfulness and then to hunger and thirst for the removal of sin.
In this desire, the subject does not always – perhaps does not often – distinguish the longing for pardon from the longing for purity, or justification from sanctification. The poor sick child that tosses in a hot fever on your
bosom yearns for health, for rest, for ease and for water; it does not pose academic questions to the doctor. The poor sin-sick soul is dying for the one gift which the New Testament calls righteousness. Everyone who has ever come to the good Physician knows the burning wish. There runs through the whole gospel, as the bass notes of a harmony, this consciousness of sin, which we discovered in our 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 when giving 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 sin.” And when the soul has proceeded thus far in experience, and breaks for the longing which it has 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 the gospel.
- In the four or five verses before the text you may have observed the point that even true disciples sin. And the lesson before us is introduced with particular reference to sinning believers, who commit the evil that they hate. The sequence of thoughts is this: (1) All commit sin. (2) It is dreadful to commit sin. (3) If, nevertheless, we sin, there is One who is sinless: “If any man sin“, there is, in the court above, Jesus Christ, who never sinned.
Here again is a contrast! It is good to transfer our observation from sin to righteousness, from earth to heaven, from self to Jesus. Notice, while the principal figure offered to our gaze is Christ, it is Christ in a particular position. Our help and relief, when our consciences are disturbed by sin, are to be sought in contemplating the Saviour, not in the glory that was His before the world began, when incarnation existed only in the decree; not in the foreshadowing of the times of the patriarchs or of Moses; not in His humiliation on earth; not even dying on the cross or sleeping in the tomb of rock; but as entered “into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Heb 9:24) – a wonderful commentary on the words, “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”.
This heavenly work of the Redeemer belongs, not to the humiliation, but to the exaltation. Both are priestly parts of the work of our great and only Priest, but one was below and the other is above; one was transient, the other is perpetual; one was payment of debt, the other is demand of release; one was at the altar in the outer court, the other is in the most holy place, within
the veil, before the resplendent glory of the ark. Both concern sin; both concern Christ’s righteousness – but in differing respects. Sin is expiated by Christ’s sufferings and death; it is removed by the Surety making intercession. Christ’s righteousness was, in one of its principal parts, secured by the offering up 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, everlasting merit and ground of the acceptance of believers and their continuance in favour.
The ancient priesthood, a succession of men transacting with Jehovah on behalf of sinners, was constantly interrupted by death. But Jesus, as Paul declares, “is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Heb 7:25). The chain of dying 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, the antitype of the tent in the desert. We have a veil, dividing the court on earth from the holy of holies in heaven. We have a High Priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building. “an High Priest who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man” (Heb 8:1,2).
The eye of the sinner in Israel, as he stood at the altar, was wistfully fixed on the high priest as he passed out of sight on the great day of atonement, within 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, the Paraclete who pleads for all His people by all the beseeching and constraining merits of His life and death, before the throne of 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 ourselves, 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”.
We must settle firmly the doctrinal basis of our confidence in order to escape the weakness of some people whose religion is all sentiment and emotion, without any substricture of truth. Let us then consider for a few moments how the consciousness of sin is relieved by a view of our heavenly Advocate and Sponor, who 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 a sovereign to intercede for rebels must be free
from any accusation of being a rebel himself. He who comes into court to answer for offenders must himself be free from any accusation. He who undertakes for sinners must be without sin – for who could answer for him? Looking more closely at the matter, we perceive the special nature of this mediation: that it was intended to relieve this great difficulty of the universe – how a just God can pronounce the ungodly to be heirs of heaven. What the world of sinners had lost and could never produce by itself is conformity to God’s will and the power to satisfy God’s law. What 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 sinners exclusively to the death of Christ. It is true that the 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 the Saviour can be said to constitute the whole of that righteousness through which sinners are made righteous. For when we come to examine that 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.” To endure the penalty was high obedience. The essence of all obedience is the loving offering up of the subject’s will to the supreme Will. This offering up in love, this subjugation of will, was indeed remarkably 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. All His acts, words and thoughts, His habits and disposition, were 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 presents 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. Adam, the original Surety, who failed in the probation was one. “Therefore as by the offence of one judgement 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” (Rom 5:18,19). Enhanced as is the intrinsic merit by the infinite nature and divinity of person, it outshines what
would be the joint splendour 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 righteousness, and the sinner’s heart is satisfied that God can now be just and yet the justifier of the ungodly that believe in Jesus.
Hear the precept: “My little children, these things write I unto you that ye sin not”. Hear the relief: “And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ,” who never sinned. “Such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens” (Heb 7:26). Behold Him as He stands for believers, within yonder veil! The shadowing forth of this was truly impressive to ancient Israel. Among all the sacred orders of the Gentiles, there was no person so majestic as Aaron and his successors. On his brow was the plate of pure gold, engraved with 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. On Aaron’s breast was the twelvefold breastplate, with rows of gems bearing the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. Thus the forerunner is entered, even Jesus, made a High Priest for ever; thus He bears the names of His people next to His heart.
For their sakes He became man; for their sakes He obeyed and died; for their sakes He intercedes and reigns. His acts as Elder Brother are vicarious, and His very sanctity flows from them. Mark this in His prayer when near Gethsemane: “For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth” (Jn 17:19). This is good news for sinners. If we sin, the Paraclete is sinless. It is in “Jesus Christ the righteous” that God looks on those who believe. Justification by faith is by the righteousness which faith appropriates. You are never further from being accepted, sinner, than when you struggle most vehemently to fabricate a righteousness of your own.
Desist, for the achievement is impossible. You have groaned under the load of sin and have worked hard to make yourself better, but without success. The stone which you roll to the steep mountain top continually rebounds upon you. The outward reforms which you sometimes attempt only serve to show you how unreformed your inward principle is. There is nothing within you which can appease your conscience. No amount of zeal for outward service and legal obedience can atone for past sin or purchase future happiness. These fruitless attempts are like those of the Jews, whose condition was such a grief to Paul: “They being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted them-
selves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Rom 10:3,4).
Attempts, by mere natural strength, to cope with sin inflaming the conscience is like fighting against the rage of fire with one’s bare hands. Attempts to cover up the wounds in the heart and smother the pang of remorse are always futile. “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer” (Ps 32:3,4). Bring out then the long-concealed distress. Give up the effort to live without pardon and peace. Disclose the heavy secret and unbosom yourself to God. Confess that you deserve His judgement, and own that the case is blacker than your worst enemy ever charged. Go down on your knees; lie prostrate in the dust as the leper, the publican, the chief of sinners, but do not pervert those sorrows; do not turn those tears into poison by weighing them as if a certain amount of humbling would purchase a certain amount of peace.
No, this would only change the kind of payment you offer. Receive the great truth: no payment remains to be made. The Surety has paid all. The salvation is without money and without price – that is, we are saved by grace. Do not ask whether you have been convinced enough, whether you have mourned enough, whether you have repented enough – as if you had to be convinced, to mourn, to repent to some particular extent before you could have a right to believe. Your right to believe is the infinite truthfulness of God in offering Christ and His salvation to the chief of sinners.
Do you believe this? Look upwards and see heaven open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. Forget yourself, forsake yourself, with all your merits, all your strivings, all your tears, all you repentings. Indeed – even more and harder – forget your shortcomings, your iniquities, your hardness of heart, your unbelief. Flee from it all and leave all far behind you while you fix your eyes on the Advocate with the Father. Look to Him and be saved. This is the beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased.
Yes, you have sinned to the extent of utter condemnation, so as to be lost in unrighteousness, but 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 that travail of His soul. Do you believe this? Believe in Jesus Christ the righteous, and you shall 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? No, 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 your lingering, doubting, self-righteous, self-destroying soul.