Post-Salvation
Sin; Christ’s Advocacy; 1 John 2:1
The
purpose of this epistle is to instruct the recipients in how they can enjoy and
maintain fellowship with God. What was happening among these churches was that
they were being impacted and affected by certain false doctrines that were
coming in from the surrounding pagan culture. John is talking to a group of
believers to warn them against the influence of pagan thought and to teach them
how to maintain truth and their walk of fellowship without losing it because
they have been taken in and sought false doctrine. So fellowship with John is
not merely a matter of relationship, or losing fellowship being the idea of committing
sin, but it is breaking fellowship again with learning and applying false
doctrine. It starts with doctrine, not with an overt act or mental attitude act
of sin. Fellowship is grounded upon sound doctrine. By that we should
understand that he is talking about basic doctrine, not every little fine-tuned
point of doctrine in the Scriptures.
For
John fellowship is not the term we tend to use, “in fellowship,” which implies
almost a passive idea that we are just in fellowship, in a position, in Christ;
but he uses the word “having fellowship,” that we are to have fellowship. It is
a much more active concept, something we are enjoying and participating in. The
concept of fellowship has to do with a partnership. Sometimes it emphasises the
receiving into that partnership and sometimes it emphasises the giving side of
that partnership. The giving side of the partnership is how Paul uses the word
when he talks about the various congregations who gave freely and liberally of
their financial resources to help other congregations who were going through
times of trouble. In that sense it was sharing, a participation, a giving, and
that emphasises the active side of the partnership. But the passive side of the
partnership is our fellowship with God where we are enjoying the benefit of
that relationship with God which is primarily activated through the ministry of
God the Holy Spirit, and it is through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit that
we are matured and spiritual growth in us is activated. So fellowship is more
than just being in a position, it is an active process and what Paul calls in
Galatians 5:16 walking by means of the Holy Spirit. There is something active
about it; there is forward momentum in it.
The
word “unrighteousness” in 1 John 1:9 is the Greek word adikia from the basic root dike
which means righteousness. What exactly does this unrighteousness mean? If we
look at the context of 1st John we discover what John means; he
defines the term for us. In 1 John 5:17 he says NASB “All
unrighteousness [ADIKIA] is sin …” The point is that the word
“unrighteousness” is defined by John himself in the context of the epistle as
meaning sin. So when we have the statement in 1 John 1:9 that God is faithful
and righteous to forgive us our sins, that relates to those we confess. It is
an important principle for believers to understand that when we confess our
sins as far as God is concerned it is over and done with. We may still have
discipline to go through because of the sin but now we are back in fellowship and
we are going to have the divine resources of all the stress-busters, the ten
spiritual skills, the problem-solving devices, to handle whatever the
discipline is, whatever the suffering is.
In
the first two verses of chapter two we see the heavenly dynamics of
forgiveness. 1 John 2:1 NASB “My little children, I am writing these
things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate
with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” The “these things” refer to what
he has said starting in 1:5 down to this section. [2] “and He Himself is the
propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for {those of} the
whole world.” In those two verses John hits on at least four crucial doctrines:
the doctrine of the advocacy of Jesus Christ in His present position and
session in heaven, the doctrine related to the righteousness of Jesus Christ,
the doctrine of propitiation, and the doctrine of unlimited atonement.
“My
little children” is teknia mou. By
adding ia to teknon it makes it a neuter plural
vocative and it is a term used for a little child, a term of endearment that a
parent would use for a young child. That tells us that John is addressing them
as believers. This is important because there are those who will say that in
this epistle John is contrasting the life of the genuine believer with the life
of the unbeliever. That is false for a number of reasons, but this indicates
that He is writing to them as believers. The issue isn’t believer versus
unbeliever; it is the believer in fellowship versus the believer who is not in
fellowship. This is crucial to an overall understanding of the epistle. “…I am
writing these things to you [for your advantage].” The “you” is the dative of
the second person plural and it is a dative of advantage. They are written in
order to help the believers with their spiritual life. “…so that you may not
sin.” That always raises a question in the minds of a lot of people because
they think by looking at that in the English
what
John is saying is that as a believer you have to learn these things so that you
won’t ever sin. But that is not what it says in the Greek. The Greek has a hina clause—hina expresses a purpose—and it is
used as an aorist active subjunctive of the Greek verb hamartano. The word means to sin, to miss the mark; it has
the idea of falling short of the glory of God. The subjunctive mood indicates
possibility or potential, but it is also used in Greek, when it is used with a hina, to express purpose or result. When
it is combined with the negative here it is so that you will avoid this
possibility or potential of sinning. The aorist tense is often expressed as
summing up a series of events in terms of a point of action. But it is not
really just one event, it summarises it, so in this sense it is called a
cumulative or constative aorist. He is basically saying, I am writing these
things so that you don’t commit sins. Part of the Christian life is that we
should be doing battle with the sin nature and not sinning. It is the battle in
the soul between the sin nature and the Holy Spirit. When we sin we grieve and
quench the Holy Spirit, we stop the sanctifying growth producing ministry of
God the Holy Spirit, so that means don’t sin.
But
what if I sin? “And if anyone
sins, “And if” is kai plus ean, and it introduces a 3rd
class conditional clause, i.e. it could be one way or the other: maybe you will
and maybe you won’t. They probably will, John is a realist and he knows that we
all sin. Now he is going to give us the other side of the solution that was
expressed in verse 9. Verse 9 tells us what our responsibility is and verse 2
here is going to explain what happens in the heavenly realm. The kai here should be translated in an
ascensive sense, it is not simply connecting. Ascensive means “even if,” it
steps up the intensity, and it introduces the possibility and potentiality of
sin. And he uses the indefinite pronoun tis
[tij] which means “anyone,” it includes all believers. This
introduces John’s realism here, he knows we are going to sin. The solution: “we
have,” and there we have the first person plural pronoun from ego, translated “we,” plus the verb echo, meaning possession. We possess “an
Advocate with the Father.” The word “Advocate” is parakletos, used only once in 1 John and refers to Jesus
Christ, the second person of the Trinity. However, it is not a word that is
strange to John for he uses it four times in the Gospel of John—14:16,
26; 15:26; 16:7—where he uses it to refer to the Holy Spirit. It can have
different nuances and it is necessary to look at the context to see just
exactly the best way to translate it. Here it has a legal connotation because
of the context, the picture of what is going on here. It is a picture of Jesus
Christ as a legal advocate defending a defendant against certain charges that
are brought against him. It is a legal definition of the operation of Christ in
heaven. What is going on in the heavenly realm is modelled on the terminology
of a courtroom. It has to do with legal function.
When
we confess our sins it comes before the bench of the Supreme Court of heaven.
It is a portrayal of the fact that we have been accused by Satan and Jesus
Christ is going to come as our defence attorney, our advocate, before the
Supreme Court of heaven, to defend us. That is based on who Jesus Christ is.
Notice it says: “we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the
righteous.” It emphasises His qualifications; that He is sinless, impeccable,
and therefore qualified to stand before God as our representative. When John
says here “Jesus Christ the righteous” it should immediately bring to our minds
what he has just said two verses earlier that if we admit our sins God is faith
and just [righteous] to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So there is a connection there between Jesus Christ called the righteous
because John wants us to think in terms of whom God is and His characteristics.
Remember, the righteousness of God is His standards; the justice of God is the
application of those standards to man. What the righteousness of God approves
the justice of God blesses; what the righteousness of God rejects the justice
of God condemns.
When
we come before God in confession we are saying that we performed a certain act
that comes under condemnation, but that that was paid for at the cross. Because
at the cross when all of our sins were imputed to Christ on the cross God the
Father in His righteousness could not approve of Jesus Christ at that point and
the justice of God poured out the penalty for sin on Jesus Christ during those
three hours when His suffering was beyond anything that we could ever possibly
imagine. Yet He remained sinless. He did not commit those sins, He just bore
the penalty.
The doctrine of advocacy