1 John 2:1-2

THE ATONEMENT

‘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: and He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.’

1 John 2:1

We are not, according to the Scriptures, to regard God as having simply established a moral world as a kind of moral machine, in which laws operate as they do in physical nature.

I. He is Himself continually in personal relation with us, just as He was with the Jews of our Lord’s day. What we see, therefore, in the life of our Lord is but a visible manifestation of what is proceeding in the daily life of every soul among us. Under the Christian dispensation we are brought within the circle of the Divine life in a more intimate degree than was the case before. The Divine Spirit has been sent into the world to convince men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment; and the human conscience is the result of that continual communion between the soul of man and its Father in heaven. God’s relation to our daily life and daily conduct is, accordingly, one of continuous personal knowledge and personal judgment. The Spirit, Whom our Lord said He would send into the world, was to be a personal agent like Himself, forming personal judgments of our conduct, just as our Lord formed them of the disciples who were with Him, or of the Jews to whom He bore His testimony. In a word, we are in daily and hourly relation with a personal and righteous Lord, Whose relations to us, of approbation or disapprobation, of pleasure or displeasure, of love and of wrath, are substantially similar to those which prevail between ourselves. A living God is perpetually forming a moral judgment of our actions, bearing witness to our inmost hearts of what is right and wrong in us, and regarding us in accordance with our moral and religious conduct. We have to do not simply with an established order, but with a living personality—with a living God.

II. If this be so, what is it which restrains the Divine will from punishing the daily and hourly offences which we commit?—What is it which prevents the assertion of His righteous judgment against the terrible sins by which life is marred all around us? Where is the influence which enables Him, consistently with justice to His own righteousness, with justice to those claims of right and wrong which even men desire to see asserted, to abstain from such a severe enforcement of His laws as would, we must be well aware, bring misery and disaster upon us? The answer is to be found in that aspect of the Atonement which the text brings before us. Just as we are perpetually in personal relation with God, so is our Lord Jesus Christ in perpetual personal communion with His Father and with us; and He is perpetually interposing on our behalf, with the same love as that with which He suffered on behalf of His people on earth, and by virtue of that suffering. ‘If any man sin,’ says the Apostle, ‘we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins.’ The Apostle does not say merely that, if any man sin, Jesus Christ has made a propitiation for our sins. That He made that propitiation, that He offered a sacrifice, once for all, sufficient for the vindication of the Divine justice, is, indeed, elsewhere asserted, and is the necessary foundation for His action.

III. The essential point of the consolation, which the Apostle mentions, is that by virtue of this propitiation, once offered, our Lord is the perpetual Advocate of each individual soul with His Father.—He pleads for each one of us, in our worst sins as well as in our weaknesses—pleads for us with that sympathy with the weakness of our flesh which is rendered possible by His participation of our nature, and with that claim upon His Father’s mercy which He established by bearing the consequences of our sins when He was upon earth. His living presence with His Father and with us renders His sacrifice an ever-present, an ever-subsisting ground of appeal. It is not merely that a great satisfaction was offered to God’s justice in the past, but that the Lord, Who offered that satisfaction, now lives in the heavens, at His Father’s right hand, and intercedes for us with all the influence which His suffering for us confers upon Him. As the personal action of God involves His personal judgment upon our evil, so, on the other hand, does His personal character involve His listening to the perpetual supplications of the Saviour, pleading for mercy, for long-suffering, for a further time of grace, for further aids of God’s Spirit, to the souls with whose weaknesses He sympathises, with whose temptations He is acquainted. The virtue of the Atonement thus consists, not merely in the greatness of the sacrifice once offered, but in its continual and living application, by the Saviour’s own intercession, before His Father’s throne. ‘He is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.’ The virtue of His sacrifice is potent in proportion to the personal character of the God and Father to Whom it is offered, and before Whom it is constantly presented by Him, as our High Priest. There is nothing past, and nothing formal, in the operation of that sacrifice. It is a living Saviour, Whose sufferings are still remembered by Himself and by His Father, Who pleads for us as our Advocate, because He is the propitiation for our sins.

IV. This personal aspect of the action of the Atonement enforces upon us, in the most solemn way, the fact of our abiding personal obligation to the Saviour.—As God’s eye ever sees us and judges us, and as the Saviour is ever pleading for us, so should we be ever looking up to Him in humble gratitude and obedience, thankful for the grace which gives us the opportunity and the power to grow into harmony with His will. For the sake of keeping alive in us this perpetual remembrance of His suffering and of His abiding intercession, has He appointed the holy mysteries of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, ‘to the end that we should always remember the exceeding great love of our Master and only Saviour, Jesus Christ, thus dying for us, and the innumerable benefits which by His precious blood-shedding He has obtained to us, He hath instituted and ordained holy mysteries, as pledges of His love, and for a continual remembrance of His death, to our great and endless comfort. To Him, therefore, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, let us give (as we are most bounden) continual thanks, submitting ourselves wholly to His holy will and pleasure, and studying to serve Him in true holiness and righteousness all the days of our life.

—Dean Wace.