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
[a)dikia] from
the basic root dike [dikh] 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 [a)dikia] 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 [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 [i(na] clause—hina
expresses a purpose—and it is used as an aorist active subjunctive of the Greek
verb hamartano [a(martanw]. 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 [kai] plus ean
[e)an], 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 [e)gw],
translated “we,” plus the verb echo
[e)xw], meaning possession. We possess “an Advocate with
the Father.” The word “Advocate” is parakletos
[paraklhtoj], 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—
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 who 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