Audio
Studiocam
Introduction
We are about to enter Agriculture Mental Health Week … you may see ads in the media about the ‘Yellow Wellies’ week and if you do see them, this is what it’s about.
Now, I’m sure that the bulk of what we hear is going to be great and it can only help to shine the light on keeping yourself as far as you can in a state of good emotional and psychological well-being.
Of course, that’s true.
We all have that responsibility for our own state of good health.
I do want to suggest though that you analyse the messages that are sent out, particularly their underlying assumptions about what we should be aiming at.
You see, what most of the mental health organisations are saying is that in order to preserve our mental well-being we should aim to be happy, but the message of 1 John and of Scripture in general is that you get to be happy by being holy.
This makes logical sense if you recognise that most of the sorrow in this sad world has sin at its source, but if you don’t recognise that foundational fact in the Christian analysis of the world, you will want to short cut the avoidance of the thing that make you miserable and spend a lot of time trying to get to the destination by effort rather than by receiving God’s gift of mercy and of grace.
To do that you will have to filter out of your world-view and ignore a lot of observable phenomena that are real and ‘out there’ and that actually exist.
So 1 John 2 comes at things a different way altogether.
Let’s look at John’s take on things and then you can take his model away and test it for logical consistency and workability in your own personal life in this world.
1) John’s purpose, v. 1a
Let’s hear John as he comes to his point:
“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin.”
(1 John 2:1)
I think that is a VERY striking way to address his hearers, don’t you?!
Fancy saying a thing like that!
Well, WE might be shy about saying that to anyone, but John inspired by the Holy Spirit clearly is not.
And yet, this bald statement is at once touching and compassionate as well as cutting.
a) Plainly expressed love
So, the Greek word used here for the people John addresses is τεκνίον (teknion) 'children’.
As in many languages, you use metaphorically the word ‘children’ to address people caringly, evoking all the tenderness, care and goodwill of an ideal parent-child relationship.
It’s a non-literal but illustrative relationship-defining term, and John is calling these readers of his: ‘dear children, little children’.
It is used in the Bible about 9 times Jn. 13:33; 1Jn. 2:1, 12, 28; 3:7, 18; 4:4; 5:21
Now, this direct talking to his readers at the beginning of 2:1 marks a break in the pattern we’ve been observing so far in John’s book, owhere you get:
i) the opponents’ claims (indicated by the phrase if we say followed by a negative statement in the apodosis, the “then” clause)
and then
ii) John’s counterclaims (represented by if with a positive statement in the apodosis) made so far in 1:6-10.
The seriousness of this last claim (in 1:10) about making God out to be a liar makes the author, as it were, interrupt himself to address the readers as his faithful children and to explain to them that while he wants them not to sin, they may be assured that if they do, they can look to Jesus Christ, as their advocate with the Father, to intercede for them.
After this, the last of the author’s three counter-claims in 1:5-2:2 is found in the if clause in 2:1b.
But we have to realise that this is John demonstrating that all that he is saying here comes out of his sincere, gentle, loving and succouring relationship with them.
But his love far from deflecting his purpose is what leads to John’s pursuing this purpose.
b) Plainly expressed purpose
John’s purpose is not concealed, he has no hidden agenda.
He declares his purpose and his heart’s desire for them.
It is ‘so that you may not sin’.
Now … that sounds quite a tall order if you just put it like that.
John isn’t simply teaching the readers not to be habitual or repetitive sinners, as if to imply that occasional acts of sin would be acceptable.
He isn’t saying that.
He’s much more on the lines of what we read in Romans 6 where Paul is defending the Gospel truth in these terms:
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?
By no means!
We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that,
just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father,
we too may live a new life.”
Romans 6:1-4
The faith and repentance that were symbolised in our baptism … the gateway ordinance into the faith … speak entirely of ending one way of life and setting out on another.
John is calling here, then, as Paul does consistently across his letters to churches all over the Roman world for the initial call to repentance to be worked out across the face of the Christian’s new life in Christ.
But what that means is that in practice neither faith nor repentance are to be seen as MERELY the gateway to this new life in Christ,
but as its fundamental and abiding principles
… to be embraced and continually guided by.
And the clearly expressed purpose of the author here is that the readers should not sin at all, just as Jesus told the man he healed in John 5:14 “Don’t sin any more.”
Now ... I hope you are still with me because John is about to transition from the fundamental and abiding principles of this new life in Christ to the practicalities of human failure and how to deal with their troubling reality.
2) John’s proviso, v. 1b
“But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.”
Firstly then, says John …
a) In the event of sin
After dropping the bombshell in v. 1 about not sinning any more, John just blithely carries on in v. 2“But if anybody does sin …”
Well, that’s much more realistic John, we can identify with that, but … how does that fit in with what you just said?!
Well, it is exactly the same word for ‘sin’ as in the end of v. 1
I write to you so you won’t sin, but if you DO sin …
The Greek verb is ἁμαρτάνω
It can mean to be without a share in, to miss the mark and be found lacking in some way.
It can therefore also mean to err, to be mistaken.
Its use developed further to cover the idea of missing or wandering from the path of uprightness and honour, to do or go wrong
And so it came to mean: to wander from the law of God, to violate God's law and in that sort of way to fall into sin.
And although there has been a lot of discussion of different Greek tenses of this verb at the end of v. 1 - trying to make a case for translating there ‘I write to you … so that you will not CONTINUE in sin’ - it’s quite hard to make that out definitely from the words and tenses themselves alone.
The CONTEXT, though, is a much greater help with this, because straight after saying ‘I’m writing to you so you don’t sin’ … or aim, our serious objective, the thing that we do GENUINELY strive for (simply because that is what repentance aims to DO about sin), nonetheless we know NONE of us is strong enough and we DO make the mistake of committing sins.
Now, let’s be clear that this is not all about being in a state of sin, it IS about committing acts of sin … what we call ‘sins’.
He’s written to us so that we don’t sin and then he uses two very small words that are very significant for us.
He writes:
καί
1) and, also, even, indeed, but
then:
ἐάν
1) if, in case
So John is saying: but, if in case you DO sin, then you need to know this …
Now look, there is something absolutely amazing here about the character of the God of ‘if, in case’.
i) We have no excuse for our sin as human beings, full stop.
None.
Then,
ii) we have doubly no excuse for our sins as those who have seen how bad a thing sin is as we have come to recognise the horror of what happened on the Cross to meet the awfulness of sin, and as a result of seeing the Cross and the Christ himself with new eyes we have turned FROM sin to trust in Him and follow Him
… putting out trust in Him and walking in His ways.
So we have doubly no excuse as humans and as believers who’ve further committed ourselves to TURN from sin and trust Christ.
And yet the holy judge of all the earth is still the God of the ‘but if you do sin, then …’, and points us to the One Who pays the price of our sin with His very own blood.
We give people a chance.
We might give people a second chance.
His ‘but if we do sin, then …’ covers it ALL.
And He ’s the ONLY One Who (being without sin) could actually fairly reasonably do otherwise!
So what is it He provides for our predicament?
b) We have an advocate
The Judge Himself provides for an Advocate.
παράκλητος (paraklētos) 'counsellor'
(Noun Accusative Singular Masculine )
counselor, counsellor.
This isn’t a force or a principle or an encouraging nonsense to life our spirits.
This is a HIM, and when we mess things up and do that for which there is DOUBLY no excuse, HE (the offended party) comes straight in and stands up for US!
Now, we’re no doubt used to the idea that this word means ‘one called, or sent for to assist another; an advocate, intercessor, helper, one who encourages and comforts’
In the New Testament that word refers exclusively to
i) the Holy Spirit and
ii) to the Lord Jesus Christ.
In 1John 2:1 … possibly because we’ve heard more sermons on John 14 than on 1 John it does seem to speak generically of one present to help us and to compensate for the departure of Christ himself, John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7 … that’d be the Holy Spirit.
And yet … not so fast … Christ is Himself our advocate in Heaven!
The word occurs in the Bible around five times but what might help us here is that the description of the Holy Spirit as the “Paraclete” is unique to the Gospel of John (14:16, 26; 15:26; and 16:7).
Here, in the only other use of the word in the NT, it is much more obviously Jesus, not the Spirit, who is described as παράκλητος (paraklētos).
Now, we should have been ready for this interchangeable use of the word because we know about John 14:16, where Jesus told the disciples that he would ask the Father to send them ‘another’paraclete (ἄλλος, allos, “another of the same kind”).
This does kinda create the idea that Jesus himself had been a paraclete in his earthly ministry to the disciples because it was ANOTHER Paraclete Who Jesus said would be sent.
Another implies two!
And, of course, the thought of Jesus’ intercession on behalf of believers following His return to Heaven again … as our advocate … does occur elsewhere in the New Testament, in Romans 8:34 and Hebrews 7:25, for example.
The best explanation of 1 John 2:1 seems to be along those lines.
So John is saying, ‘I’m writing to you so you don’t sin, but if you do … don’t throw up despairing hands and go away … because we have an Advocate with the Father’
It is, if you like, the pastoral response to the sort of testimony about the believer’s ongoing struggle against unwelcome sin that Paul testifies about in Romans 7:
“I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature[d] a slave to the law of sin.
Romans 7:18-25
And now John is about to tell us exactly why having such an Advocate means we should NOT despair in that sort of experience, but rather go forward in hope.
3) John’s ‘Amplification’ - the qualifications of our Advocate, v. 2
How can we even TLK about going forward in hope when we’ve sinned against the light we have in Christ?
The reason we can go forward in hope from that point at which we’ve messed up again lies HERE … in the qualifications of the Advocate.
See it this way: if you’ve made the error or had the innocent ill-fortune to get hauled up before the beak, and you’ve gone looking for a solicitor to sort things out for you, you kind of expect that person to have an appropriate CV for the job.
You wouldn’t want to be in a place where he starts doing or saying things that make you suspicious, so you say ‘hang on, you ARE a properly qualified advocate, aren’t you?’
Only to have him say, ‘oh no but don’t worry I’ve seen the job done really well in a video on YouTube’!
The QUALIFICATIONS of an Advocate are crucial!
And now John dips back into attesting this Advocate we have with the Father when we sin in view of what he has personally seen, heard and touched … from the Lord Jesus.
i) Jesus
‘Jesus’.
It’s not just a Christian name, you know?
Of course it does come to signify Jesus of Nazareth when we use the name like that, but this name is a name with a very clear history and clear point and it’s not just a label but a message with a meaning.
From the very start when the angel met with Joseph the message that angel brought from Heaven made the meaning of Christ’s naming quite clear:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Matthew 1:21
Now, in terms of the problem that John’s been tackling here, that there message from the angel at the start of the incarnation seems to me pretty bang on the money!
But there’s more to our Advocate’s qualification for what we need Him for than even that because this Saviour Jesus is also the Christ.
a) The Christ
This Saviour Jesus is the Christ.
This is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah Who fulfils all the Old Testament promises of bringing redemption and salvation, blessing and peace.
He is the One.
The One on Whom the Spirit descended like a dove at His baptism in the Jordan.
The One on Whom the Spirit of God rested as He did wondrous signs to attest His forgiveness of individual people’s sins, and taught as One Who had authority … NOT like their teachers of the Law.
THAT One is our Advocate when we sin.
Crucially, CRUCIALLY that One is the Righteous One.
b) The Righteous One
The One Who is δίκαιος
In the New Testament this word means righteous in the sense of observing God’s laws, generally in a wide sense, upright, righteous, virtuous in the sense: keeping the commands of God.
It is used of him whose way of thinking, feeling, and acting is wholly conformed to the will of God, and who therefore needs no rectification in the heart or life.
There is a clear understanding in the New Testament, though, that this word only applies truly to Christ Himself.
It means ‘approved of’ or ‘acceptable’ to God.
Now, this is important.
Paul, again, writes of the Lord as being the One Who is just, AND the justifier of the UNgodly.
So, Romans 3:25-26 says:
“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.
He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—
he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time,
so as to be just
and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”
Now, that’s a bit odd really.
You’d think that the One Who is perfectly just would JUDGE sin, wouldn’t you, not justify the ungodly?
And, of course, He DOES judge sin.
But it all happens through the process of atonement … and any Jewish readers or hearers of this impassioned rhetoric of John’s would recognise of course straight away that the sacrifcial victim had to be ritually ‘undefiled’ in the OT sacrificial system.
They would understand from the ritual of the scape goat and from the laying of the hand onto a sacrifice to ‘transfer’ guilt to it that the beast the guilt was transferred to had to be ritually clean
… now hold that thought for where John is taking us next, because this
Saviour (Jesus),
the Christ (the long-prophesied redeeming Messiah)
Who is the Righteous One (therefore capable of taking the transferred sin of the guilty)
… is the only perfectly righteous human being who has ever lived and is therefore SUPREMELY qualified to be what sinners need: our atoning sacrifice.
ii) Our atoning sacrifice
Oh GET THIS!
The Greek word (ἱλασμός, hilasmos) behind the phrase ‘atoning sacrifice’ conveys both the idea of
a) “turning aside divine wrath” and
b) the idea of “cleansing from sin.”
So, you remember this is all about the provision God makes for those John is reminding that we really must not sin, but if we do sin, then all this means of reconciliation is so graciously provided for?
Reconciliation and peace is found in our world by means of reconciliation and peace with:
• Jesus.
• The Christ.
• The Righteous One.
• Our atoning sacrifice
And it is all brought about by the
i) turning away of the righteous anger of God that is His consistent righteous response to our falling short of the mark, and
ii) cleansing us from that sin’s penalty while providing strength against its power.
A suitable English translation for this word ‘atoning sacrifice’ (ἱλασμός, hilasmos) is a difficult and even controversial problem.
“Expiation,” “propitiation,” and “atonement” have all been suggested.
Leon Morris, in his ‘The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross’ sees as an integral part of the meaning of the word (as in the other words in the ἱλάσκομαι [hilaskomai] word-group) the idea of turning away the divine wrath, suggesting that “propitiation” is the closest English equivalent … and that’s absolutely fine so long as you speak seventeenth century English reasonably fluently … or if you have someone who does on hand to explain what it means to you!
It is certainly right to see an averting of a real and actual divine wrath in this context, where the sins of believers are in view and Jesus is said to be acting as Advocate on behalf of believers.
If you haven’t got a God Who is justly and in a measured way ANGRY at sin, there is no room in your theology for atonement.
He is our atoning sacrifice … but that’s not quite got us to the point of our need even yet, so John continues …
iii) The atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world
“He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
There is a tendency in secular culture to say that your faith-answers to your life-problems are only relevant and applicable to people who have a prior settled faith in Christ.
That is not true.
We don’t have sin simply because we are Christian.
We have sin (though possibly not a crystal clear awareness of it) simply because we are human.
And the solution for it remains the situation for humans, whether we as humans have availed ourselves of that solution yet or not!
John therefore makes THIS crystal clear …
Christ is the answer to our psychological dysfunctionalism, whether we are appraised of that fact yet or not.
His analysis is that our dysfunction is attributable to our rebellion against God and the place in the world that He made for us as individual human beings, long before sin came and wrecked things at the Fall.
His provision for the foul up we’ve made by this lies in restoring our lives to that pattern He planned, once the foul up has been righted by Christ’s life, death, resurrection and atonement is what makes winning back the damage to our situation and our psyche from this carnage.
And that is not just the universal problem but the universal solution if we’ll turn from sin and walk faithfully along with Christ.
Conclusion
So then my contention at the start of Mental Health Week is this: humanity’s problem is not the inability to feel happy but the inability to be holy.
The solution to humanity’s mental malaise is not to pretend things are better than they are, smother our feelings of inadequacy or insecurity in paeans of unjustifed and untrue praise nor even to teach people to go around BEING happy when indeed they are not!
The solution to humanity’s longed-for wellbeing is to tackle the unease and the guilt at its source.
Its source lay way back in a beautiful Garden, when mankind took way too seriously the word of a tempting, talking snake.
Its solution is expanded on here by John in his book.
Sin is the great misery-maker.
Salvation and the Saviour’s atoning sacrifice is the solution that the Just God still graciously offers.
And we have an Advocate with God for when we sin when we shouldn’t.
He’s the same Advocate Who paid the price of our sin, and He’s SUPREMELY well-qualified for His role in our salvation.
“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.
He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
And THAT’s why we seek to meet the psychological and well-being questions and issues of the people in the world around us who don’t know Christ yet … those questions are so pressing, so many and so various … by sharing with them ‘the Way’ of the faithful life in Christ.
He is not the atoning sacrifice only for the sins of our in-crowd, but also for the sins of all the people in the world … if only they’ll turn to Him and trust Him and learn to follow Him along in His way.
No comments:
Post a Comment