2.09 - The Advocate and The Propitiation
Chapter 9 The Advocate and The Propitiation
Aim of the Gospel the Abolition of Sin—Perversion of the Doctrine of gratuitous Pardon—Ground of the Apostle’s Joy in his Children—Case of a Sinning Brother—Implication of the Society—Resort to the Advocate—Discrepancy in St John’s Teaching—The title Paraclete—Advocate and High Priest—Character and Competency of the Advocate —Disposition of the Judge—The Advocate has “somewhat to offer”—The term Propitiation — Heathen and Jewish Propitiations — The Scandal of the Cross to Modern Thought—The Cost of the Propitiation to its Offerer—Law operative in redeeming Grace—The Advocate in the Sinner’s place—Universal Scope of the Propitiation.
―—―♦——— My little children, I write these things to you that you may not sin.
And if anyone should sin,
We have an Advocate with28the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous;
And He is, Himself, the propitiation for our sins,
Not however for ours only, but also for the whole world!
— 1 John 2:1-2.
―—―♦———
WE are brought at the beginning of the second chapter to the position that what the Gospel aims at is the abolition of sin (compare Chapter 16 and Chapter 25). Every word St John writes, all that he has learned from his Master and that he has to teach to others, tends and bends to this one point. Not the “forgiving of sins” alone, but the “cleansing” of man’s life “from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9)—to this the fidelity and the righteousness of God are pledged in the new covenant founded upon the death of Christ. St John, as well as St Paul, had to combat the antinomianism which fastens itself in so many insidious forms upon the doctrine of Justifying Grace, upon the proffer of a gratuitous remission of sins. Hence the fatherly solicitude with which he states the object of his Epistle: “My little children,29 I am writing these things to you, to the end that you may not sin.” The danger, which is explicitly stated in 1 John 1:7 of the next chapter, is already in the Apostle’s mind: “Little children, let no one deceive you. The man that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He [i.e. Christ] is righteous.” Imputed righteousness that does not translate itself into actual righteousness, justification which bears no “fruit unto sanctification,” a forgiveness that fails to make a man thereafter clean from sin, is a wretched delusion; it is pictured in rough fashion by the proverb of 2 Peter 2:22: “the sow” that “washed herself, to roll in the mire!” The message of the Apostle will miss its mark, if it does not make its receivers “light in the Lord” and reproduce in them the image of Jesus Christ amongst men (compare 1 John 2:4, 1 John 2:28, 1 John 2:20, 1 John 3:3, 1 John 3:10, 1 John 3:16, 1 John 3:24, 1 John 4:7, 1 John 4:11-14, 1 John 4:20, 1 John 5:18. In the preface St John stated his purpose in a different way: “These things we write to you, that our joy may be made full.” He was writing, like others, out of an irrepressible delight in the truths he had learned, with the longing that his fellow-men may share them. But this first, instinctive aim implies the second, which is deliberate and reflective. He is not the man to take pen in hand simply to relieve his personal feelings and for the sake of self-expression: the knowledge that fills the world with radiance for himself, shines for all men; so far as may be, it shall radiate through him. But it must shine unto salvation. Where men remain impenitent and unsanctified under the Divine light, when they deny their sins outright or shelter them behind a profession of faith, they are worse men and not better for their knowledge; in such cases the preacher’s delight in his message becomes sorrow and shame. “Greater joy,” he writes elsewhere, “I have not than this, that I hear of my children walking in truth” (3 John 1:4). The joy that rises in St John’s soul as, in putting pen to paper, he calls up the image of his children, will be “made complete” and the old man’s cup of salvation filled to the brim, if the purpose of his letter be answered in those who read, if they realize the Christian character, if sin be wiped out and done with forever in them. The Apostle’s little children cannot say “that they have not sinned,” nor “that they have no sin” (1 John 1:8, 1 John 1:10); but they understand that now, since they are forgiven and cleansed by the blood of God’s Son, they must not and need not sin. “If,” however, this unmeet contingency should occur, “if any should sin”—any of those who have tasted forgiveness and come into God’s life—if such a man after all this should commit sin, are we to despair of him and count him as cut off from the brotherhood and forever lost to God? No the Apostle cries: “We have an Advocate before the Father—one whose intercession avails in this emergency (compare 1 John 5:16-17): let us put the case into His hands.”
Since, the hypothesis, “if anyone sin,”30 is contrasted with the purpose of the letter, “that you may not sin,” it is evident that this supposition concerns the readers; the possibility contemplated is that of some sin committed by a Christian man—an act contradictory of his calling—a paradox in point of principle, but such as must practically be reckoned with (compare Chapter 16). When in passing from the consequent of the hypothetical sentence and showing how this sad eventuality must be met, the writer replaces the indefinite “any one” (τις) by the communicative “we” (where we should expect “he has an Advocate”), he does not thereby identify the pronouns, as though hinting that the “any one” might prove to be himself for example, or that any reader might be found in the offender’s plight; he is thinking of the community as concerned in the personal lapse from grace and as seeking a remedy. “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26); “if any man” amongst us “sins,” all are distressed; the comfort is that the Head of the Church feels our trouble—that “we have an Advocate with the Father,” who will intervene in the case. It is not, abstractly, “There is an advocate”; with a thankful sense of our common possession in the Paraclete, the Apostle writes, “We have an advocate,” as when the writer to the Hebrews (Hebrews 8:1) concludes, in his climactic style, “Such a High Priest we have.”
This turn of expression illustrates the oneness of believers in Christ, and implies that sympathetic involvement of the society in the moral failure of the individual which St Paul enforced in writing to the Galatians: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in any trespass, you that are spiritual restore such an one in a spirit of meekness, looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). Remembering St Peter’s fall and recovery, and the anticipatory prayer of Jesus for the offender’s restoration, St John might well express his hope in these terms. The consolation was needed. Amongst the infant Churches gathered out of heathenism and surrounded by it, while the passions and habits of Gentile life ran strongly in the blood of the first converts, relapses were to be expected; the utmost tenderness and firmness were necessary in dealing with them. The Apostle John admits that a truly cleansed and saved man may lapse into sin; and yet he writes later on, in 1 John 3:6, 1 John 3:9 “Everyone who abides in Him [in Christ] does not sin; every one that sinneth hath not seen Him, neither knoweth . . . Everyone who is begotten of God, doth not commit sin, because His seed is in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been begotten of God.” These contrary implications cannot be quite logically adjusted to each other. Sin in Christian believers has something monstrous about it. The contradiction is relieved, however, by observing that the verbs of 1 John 3:6-9 relating to sin run in the present tense of the Greek, which denotes a continued or even habitual action (ὁἁμαρτάνωνκ.τ.λ.), whereas we have in our text (ἐάντιςἁμάρτῃ) a subjunctive aorist, which imports a single occurrence and may include no more than the barest act of sin, once committed and repented of, such as was the memorable fall of Peter. Indeed, when Jesus Christ appears in the next clause as advocate, this presupposes the culprit’s confession and petition for mercy; the Paraclete is invoked for one in admitted need and peril. Christ is no Advocate for the persistent wrong-doer, but for the sinner who renounces his offence and bemoans his fall. On the penitent’s behalf He is ready to interpose; He makes haste to send the message, “Go, tell His disciples—and Peter—He goeth before you into Galilee” (Mark 16:7). The condition of 1 John 1:9, “If we confess,” is indispensable for the advocacy of the righteous Intercessor, as it is for the forgiveness of the righteous Judge.
1. In this connection our Lord Jesus Christ comes to receive a great title, which is given to Him ipso nomine only in this single passage of the New Testament. Virtually He assumed it when at the Last Supper He introduced the Holy Spirit to the disciples as “another Paraclete” (John 14:6). The Spirit of truth was sent “from the Father” to be the pleader of Christ’s cause against the world and amongst men, and to be in this capacity the inspirer of His witnesses, not dwelling visibly with them as Jesus did, but veritably in them. The term παράκλητος—With its equivalent in the Latin advocatus—belonged to the sphere of civil life, and was familiar in the usage of ancient courts. It gassed early as a loan-word into Jewish (Aramaic) use, and is found repeatedly in the Targums and the Talmud; it was probably current in Palestinian dialect. So in the Targum upon Job 33:23, פְּרַקְלׅיטָא [Aramaic: peraq’litah, defender]; is antithetical to קַטֵּיגוֹרָא [Aramaic: qattenotah, accuser] (ὁκατήγορος or ὁκατήγωρ, the accuser; see Acts 23:30, etc., Revelation 12:10): “there appeareth one angel as defender amidst a thousand accusers.” Philo employs the word as in common vogue in the Hellenistic Jewish vocabulary; he describes the Levitical high priest in language strikingly parallel to this verse of St John: “It was necessary for him who is dedicated to the Father of the world to employ as advocate one who is altogether perfect in virtue, to wit, a son of God, in order to secure both amnesty of sins and a supply of most abundant blessings.”31 The “Paraclete was a figure recognized by our Lord’s disciples, when He assigned this role to the Holy Spirit as His representative and the Church’s defender in face of the accusing world; its fitness is manifest when the like part is ascribed to the Lord Himself, intervening in the Father’s presence as spokesman for His offending brethren. Our Lord’s disciples had known Him in the days of His flesh as their “Advocate before the Father”: the prayer reported in the 17th chapter of John’s Gospel was one of many such pleadings; when on the cross Jesus prayed for His executioners, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!” His intercession was virtually extended to “ the whole world.”
What He had been upon earth, they knew Him still to be—Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and to-day, “who maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8:34). St John’s “Paraclete” is synonymous, therefore, with the “High Priest after the order of Melchizedek,” who forms the chief subject of the Epistle to the Hebrews.32 All that is set forth in that lofty argument respecting the character and functions of “the great Priest who hath passed through the heavens,” who hath “entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained an eternal redemption,” may be carried over to the account of the Advocate here in view. This rarer title, however, brings the Mediator nearer to us. The High Priest is an exalted person, clothed with solitary and solemn dignity, “holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the (heavens,”—and all this is true of our Paraclete; but under the latter designation He is pictured as approachable, intimate, entering into and associating Himself with the case of the accused. While the High Priest in his public duty, and acting upon his own initiative, offers sacrifice and makes intercession for the people’s sins, the Advocate listens to each sinner’s confession and meets the specific accusations under which he labours. The relationship of advocate and client constituted a settled personal tie involving acquaintanceship, and often kinship, between the parties. The παράκλητος of the old jurisprudence, in the best times of antiquity, was no hired pleader connected with his client for the occasion by his brief and his fee; he was his patron and standing counsel, the head of the order or the clan to which both belonged, bound by the claims of honour and family association to stand by his humble dependent and to see him through when his legal standing was imperilled; he was his client’s natural protector and the appointed captain of his salvation. Such a Paraclete “we have”—“a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God”; but more than this, an interested, brotherly Pleader, who makes our suit personally His own. There is this difference further, that while the Priest is concerned only to interpose with his offering for sin, the Advocate takes into his account the entire situation and needs of his clansman. Any grave necessity or liability to which the client is exposed, constitutes a claim upon him for counsel and aid.
There are two personal conditions determining the success of the Advocate in the pleading supposed. (1) There must be character and competency in the Paraclete. He is described as “Jesus Christ the righteous.” His name, with the record lying behind it, guarantees the worth of the person and His standing with the Father; it is a pledge of kindness, skill, authority, of human affinity and Divine prerogative, of power and merit and suitability. If Jesus Christ speaks for us—being all that the Gospel reports of Him, all that St John and his readers knew Him to be—we may trust and not be afraid. A gracious hand is stretched out, a mighty voice uplifted on behalf of sinning, suffering men. He is wise no less than pitiful; He has not embarked on a lost cause, nor undertaken an impracticable task. But the peculiar ground of confidence present to the Apostle’s mind lies in the epithet δίκαιος: our Advocate for the brother whose sin we deplore, is “Jesus Christ the righteous!” This assures us not merely of the rectitude of our Mediator, but of His status and effective right as the sinless to plead for the sinful. We may rely upon the righteousness of His action in the matter in hand, and the soundness of the plea He advances. He is master of the law, knowing and fulfilling all its conditions; His character and antecedents warrant us in assuming that He will urge no argument, He will take up no position in representing our case, which justice does not approve while compassion prompts it. What the Apostle Paul said of God, that in the forgiveness of the Gospel He is “just Himself and the justifier of him that is of faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26), is true mutatis mutandis of the sinner’s Advocate: He is righteous Himself, and righteously pleads the cause of transgressors.
This quality in the Paraclete makes safe and sure the remission of sins. Pardon is not extracted by some overpowering appeal to pity, nor enforced by regard for the person of the Pleader; it is grounded upon strict right. The case is won by a Paraclete who could not lower Himself to advocate an unjust suit; while the Judge, though Father, is of such integrity that He will only forgive when and so far as He can be “faithful and righteous” (1 John 1:9) in doing so. This is a vital point in St John’s doctrine of Redemption. The realization of it gives a security, and a moral grandeur and power, to the salvation of the Gospel, which are wanting when this is presented in a one-sided, sentimental way—as though redeeming love acted in disregard of God’s declared law and of the order of the universe.
(2) The other encouraging condition of Jesus Christ’s advocacy is afforded by the name of Him to whom it is addressed. The Paraclete appeals on our behalf to “the Father.” The Father cannot be implacable, hard to persuade, or ready to raise occasions against us and to press the law to our disfavour. Where the judge is absolutely just and can come only to one conclusion, much still depends for the form of his decision, and the mode of execution that may be prescribed, on the kindliness or otherwise of his disposition. When St John declares that “we have a righteous Advocate before the Father,” the case is not that of love pleading with justice —so the Gospel has often been distorted; justice pleads with love for our release!
“Here lies a key to the Apostle Paul’s rich doctrine of Justification by grace through faith,—in the fact that God is one, is Himself, and His whole self, in each act of His administration towards mankind. He is not divided into Judge and Father—righteousness and mercy, law and love–acting now in one quality or office and now in another. He would not be just in His attitude and dealings with guilty men, not just either to them or to Himself, if He did not remember His paternal character, if the considerations attaching to fatherhood and filiation did not enter into His estimate and supply the factors upon which His judgements of condemnation or acquittal, favour or penalty, are based. The two “forensic” Epistles of Paul, those in which he argues out his doctrine of Justification in legal and dialectical terms, are prefaced by the wish of “Grace and peace from God our Father” (Romans 1:7, and by the assurance of deliverance from an evil world “according to the will of God our Father” (Galatians 1:4). St Paul had surely not forgotten these ascriptions nor divested God of His essential Fatherhood, when he laid down his great thesis that “the righteousness of God is revealed” in the Gospel, “of faith, for faith” (Romans 1:17). That is an artificial theology which divorces the juridical and paternal relationships in the Godhead, which makes the Divine Fatherhood less fundamental to the doctrine of the Epistles than it is to the message of Jesus in the Gospels. For St John at any rate, this text is sufficient to forbid the assumption of any such schism in the Godhead or discrepancy in Apostolic teaching. The advocacy that Christ exercises, the “propitiation” He presents, are offered to “the Father.” The nature of the expiation, and the matter of the Advocate’s defence, are such as the Father justly requires, such as will satisfy Him when He meets His guilty and sin-confessing children, such that on the ground thus afforded, and in answer to the pleas advanced and reasons given, He may righteously forgive.
2. The competence of the Advocate being established, and the favourable conditions evident under which He appears, it is necessary to examine the ground on which He presents Himself before the Father-judge.
Pardon is not to be obtained for the guilty on the before asking, nor because of the interest and personal merit of the suitor. Otherwise it had been enough to say, “We have an Advocate, Jesus Christ the righteous; let Him only speak, and our suit is won!” The complementary sentence, “He is the propitiation for our sins,” would then have been surplusage. Men who hold light and easy notions about sin may be ready to suppose this, but neither Christ nor His Apostles so imagined. The general institutions of religion and the deeper instincts of conscience have dictated the axiom that the priest approaching God on behalf of the guilty must have somewhat to offer (Hebrews 8:3); the analogies of human justice, at its best, vindicate this principle. The Pleader is simply “out of court,” unless there is forthcoming a propitiation,—some satisfaction to the outraged character of God or (to put the same thing in another way) to the violated law of the universe, and some guarantee thereby afforded on the sinner’s part that the offence shall cease. The Paraclete must bring the propitiation with Him, or His pleading is null and void. God the Father is “faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, if we confess”—there is the only condition required upon our part; but this suffices in virtue of the covenant sealed by the sacrifice of Calvary and on the ground of the expiation made by “the blood of Jesus” (1 John 1:7, 1 John 1:9). The pre-condition of Jesus Christ’s successful advocacy it depended altogether on Himself to supply. There was no ground in humanity, outside of Him, upon which the Advocate could base a sufficient plea. The old ritual propitiations were unavailing, as the writer to the Hebrews pathetically shows; these offerings did but express the need for some real sin-offering; they appealed for and foreshadowed its accomplishment. “He is the propitiation”—He and none else, none less. The word ἱλασμός [Hebrew כַּפּוּרִים) (כַּפָּרָא), cover] is one about the meaning of which there should not be much dispute.33 This precise term is employed but twice in the New Testament, here and in 1 John 4:10, where it has the same application to the person of the Redeemer: God “loved us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins.” It is a term purely religious (as the verb ἱλάσκομαι, on which it rests, is principally), used in classical Greek of the sacrifices or prayers which are the means of appeasing, or making propitious [ἵλεως, ἱλάσκομαι, the offended gods. In the Greek Old Testament ἱλάσκομαι or ἐξιλάσκομαι, and their derivatives, come into play, chiefly and distinctively, as the equivalents of the verb with its group of dependent nouns. It is fairly certain that this Hebrew word has not departed far from its radical meaning, to cover. The root-idea of propitiation as expressed in the Jewish ritual was That of covering sin from the eyes of God, of interposing between His wrath and the offensive object, so that His punitive anger should be averted and turned to favour. But there is this far-reaching difference between the conception of Atonement presented in revelation and that prevailing in Gentile religions, that while men elsewhere are driven under the pressure of their guilt to invent appeasements for their gods, Jehovah Himself prescribes to Israel the propitiations which He deems fitting and just. Mercy was no less patent than justice in the forms of sacrifice instituted by the Mosaic covenant; if the God of Israel required to be placated, He was eminently placable, making overtures to transgressors and paving the way for their access to His sanctuary. While “propitiation” connotes anger in God, a just displeasure against sin carrying with it penal consequences—and this implication cannot be eliminated by any fair dealing with the word —Biblical Greek carefully avoids making God the object of ἱλάσκεσθαι, ἱλασμός, or the like, the obvious construction in the terminology of natural religion. The Holy One of Israel is not made gracious by the satisfaction offered Him: in His very anger He is gracious; the appeasement He gives order for and invites from His sinning people, proves His pity for them. The appointment of the Son of God under the new covenant as Priest and Mediator for the race, and the provision which constitutes Him the sacrificial lamb of God, develop this unique element of Old Testament expiation in the most astonishing way. The idea of propitiation, which assumed gloomy and revolting forms in the ethnic cults, is touched with a glorious light of Divine grace and condescension. It is amply expounded in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “At the consummation of the ages “ One “hath, been manifested,” who comes “to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” —a Being far above the angels and whose throne is for ever, yet “in all things made like to His brethren, that He might prove Himself a merciful and faithful High Priest in the things pertaining to God.” Thus the Son of God qualifies “to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:17); and the sacrifice of the Cross is seen to be the goal of earlier revelation.
St Paul coincided with St John and the writer to the Hebrews in this interpretation of the death of Jesus. He uses in his classical passage on the Atonement (Romans 3:18-26) the term ἱλαστήριον, where St John has ἱλασμός: “Whom God set forth, in His blood, a propitiatory (victim) through faith.”34 The heathen notion, natural to man’s guilty conscience, of the hostility of the gods who seek to avenge themselves on evil men and plan their ruin, is dispelled by this disclosure. Wrath against sin there is in the Godhead—the antipathy of the absolute Holiness to the false and impure, which burns everlastingly to consume its opposite. Propitiation cannot be forgone; God cannot deny Himself, nor the Fountain of law make terms with “lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). But in wrath He remembers mercy toward His offspring. Beneath the fire of God’s anger glows the fire of His love. If He requires a moral expiation, He shall provide it. If sin must be branded with a condemnation that otherwise would crush the sinner, there is the Son of His love who will submit Himself to that sentence as man amongst men, and bear its weight, who will die the death which transgression entails; and the Father “did not spare His own Son,” when He confronted this liability and humbled Himself unto the death of the cross, but “gave Him up for us all” (Romans 8:32).
There is a paradox for human language, a depth of the Godhead beyond our sounding, in the double aspect of the ἱλασμός, in the unity of the Divine wrath and love, the concidence of mercy and penalty, judicial infliction and fatherly restoration, that meet in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Modern thought stumbles and struggles hard against this offence—its peculiar σκάνδαλοντοῦστραροῦ and cross in the Cross; but no stumbling at it will displace it. With whatever subtlety such words as “propitiation” and “reconciliation” are explained away, they remain in the lexicon of the New Testament, to assert the stern element of sin-avenging justice in the character of God. The death of Jesus Christ attests forever the fearful consequences which the sin of our race, under the operation of Divine law, has brought upon those involved in it. The Apostle’s language recalls the scene of the Israelite “day of Atonement” (הַכִּפִּוּרִיםיוֹם; ἡμέραἐξιλασμοῦ), the “day of affliction” for the sins of Israel. We see the high priest, after he has first filled the shrine with the smoke of incense, bearing the blood of the bullock slain for himself and his family to present it in the Most Holy Place (such sacrifice for Himself, the writer to the Hebrews explains in Hebrews 7:26-28, our High Priest had no need to make), then killing the goat which represented the guilty people in the sight of Jehovah, and carrying its blood in turn before the Presence. This blood of the sin-offering he sprinkled once on the golden lid of the ark which held the law (designated for this reason the “mercy-seat,” כַּפֹרֶת, ἱλαστήριον; see Hebrews 9:5), and seven times in the vacant space before it (Leviticus 16:1-34, Leviticus 23:28-32), which “blood of sprinkling” was called emble-matically the כַּפּוּרִים, the covering of the people’s sins from before the face of God. This was the culminating office of the high-priestly service; its occasion was the one day of the year in which Aaron entered the Holy of holies—alone, and “not without blood”—to “make reconciliation for the sins of the people.” The renewal of the favour of God toward Israel, the maintenance of His covenant of grace with His people and of its status of adoption and privilege, were made conditional upon this yearly propitiation. The lesser, current sin-offerings and sacrifices, negotiated through other priests, were auxiliary and supplementary thereto; they realized for individuals and for minor occasions what was wrought in the solemn and collective expiation offered by the High Priest once in each year. “The blood of Jesus, God’s Son,” of which the Apostle spoke in such arresting words in 1 John 1:7, is the substance, “for the whole world,” of the true ἱλασμός, which the blood of the animal victim slain by Aaron on the day of Atonement represented typically for the nation of Israel. This blood “cleanseth from all sin,” while that served as “a remembrance made of sins year by year” (Hebrews 10:1-3).
St John’s “propitiation” is synonymous with St Paul’s “atonement” or “reconciliation” (καταλλαγή, Romans 5:1-11, etc.); both terms are associated with the Hebrew כִּפֵּר and its congeners and equivalents. But while the Pauline expression signifies the restoring of peace between estranged and contending parties, the Johannine imports the restoring of favour toward the condemned and banished; with St Paul rebels, with St John culprits are forgiven. The one Apostle sees those who were in the enemy’s camp brought over and received on amnesty into the service against which formerly they had borne arms—“translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love” (Colossians 1:13), like himself who was “before a blasphemer and persecutor” of his Lord, but “had obtained mercy”; the other Apostle looks on a company of the once sin-stained and leprous, who were driven from the sanctuary with the “dogs” that “are without,” but “have washed their robes and made them white in the Lamb’s blood,” and now “have the right to come to the tree of life, and enter in by the gates into the city” (Revelation 22:14-15).
But how great the cost at which this right was won by the Advocate! Here was the task and labour of His mission—to “take away the sin of the world.” Other aid our heavenly Friend could render to men with comparative ease. Hunger and disease, madness, even death, as the record tells, Jesus had power to remedy by a stroke of His authority. But a lifting of the eyes to heaven, a sentence of blessing,—and five loaves become food for five thousand men; a mere rebuke,—and wind and waves lie down hushed at His feet and the storm is gone; a command from the holy lips of Jesus,—and the demons quit their tormented prey, the convulsed frame and frenzied brain are restored to sanity; a single word, “Lazarus, come forth!”—and the sheeted dead issues from the tomb, and gropes his way back a living, breathing man. These things were no such great achievement for our Paraclete, seeing He was the Lord of nature from eternity, one with the world’s Creator. But when it came to the putting away of sin, this was a different matter. Power is of no avail in moral affairs, in what touches conscience and character; nor is goodwill of any efficacy, without a fast and wise direction of its impulses. Here lay the redeemer’s problem, the quaestio vexata of the ages—how to set guilty and evil men right with God! Let those who make light of sin, who deem human transgression a venial thing and suppose that our heavenly Father, being gracious and sovereign, might well condone, out of mere prerogative and by way of compassion and magnanimity, the offences of His creatures, —let those who so regard the Divine government and turn the grace of God into a soft indulgence, consider what befell our Advocate in dealing for sinners with the eternal Righteousness. The laws of physical nature, which express one side of the Divine character and embody great principles of its working, are not gentle in their treatment of mis-doers, nor in their, treatment of those affected by the misdoing of others. Mechanics, chemistry, physiology, biology proclaim the fact that “the way of transgressors is hard”—hard for themselves, and for all connected with them. Throughout the regions of natural law, sloping upward toward the moral, “every transgression and disobedience receiveth a just recompense of reward,” and “the mills of God” grind, swiftly or slowly, retribution with the most exact and infallible certainty of sequence. No defiance, no negligence, is overlooked or fails of its amercement. In these vast provinces of God’s kingdom, lawlessness is searched out and visited with a sleepless and exemplary chastisement. When one enters into the spiritual sphere of existence, the forces of love and remedial grace come into play; but they do not neutralize nor supersede the principle of retribution pervading the government of God; lower laws may be subordinated, they are not over-ridden or set at nought when we pass into the higher and more complex conditions of life. From the fall of a stone, flung heedlessly, which maims a child, or the flight of an arrow pointed by hatred at an enemy’s breast, up to the sufferings of the Redeemer under the load of a world’s sin, there is one God, one law, one element of righteousness and truth, that “worketh all things in all.” When our Advocate stepped forth to shield transgressors, when Jesus Christ “came into the world to save sinners,” He engaged Himself to a work of inconceivable pain and difficulty. There was a “chastisement of our peace” to be laid upon Him, without which God could not be truly reconciled to the world, nor the world to God. Neither the Divine nature nor the human conscience would allow this obligation to be evaded. The Paraclete, if He is really to stand by us and go through with our case, though He be the eternal Son of God, cannot get away from this necessity; no favour, no prerogative exempts Him from the consequences, when He has once become the surety for sinners. He must pay the price of our redemption. God the Father will not spare the Son of His love the shame and suffering thus incurred—cannot spare Him, in His utter love and pity, since the law that yokes these consequences to transgression and determines such effects from such causes, is integral with His own being. In the consent of the Son to endure the cross to which men’s sin brought Him, the Father sees the image of His own righteousness and mercy; He recognizes there the oneness of love and justice inherent in His holiness, which constitutes the offering of Calvary the “perfect sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” In virtue of the complete accord between the act of Jesus in yielding Himself to the cross and the laws of moral being that proceed from the nature of God, this sacrifice became (to use St Paul’s strong expression) “an odour of sweet smell” (Ephesians 5:2), a veritable propitiation in the estimate of God.
Having espoused our cause, the righteous Advocate goes to all lengths with it. He holds back from no exertion, no cost that the case demands. His honour, His blood are at His brethren’s service; “the Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10:11). He “emptied Himself” in descending to a bondman’s place; lower still, “He humbled Himself even to the death of the cross,”—to the nethermost of ignominy and anguish (Php 2:7-8). What the sacrifice cost Him, what it cost to God who “spared not His own Son,” is a reckoning infinitely beyond our moral calculus. The scene of Gethsemane allows a moment’s glance into the mystery of Divine grief over human sin. There the Redeemer wrestles with His task, now pressing in its appalling weight on His human consciousness. He shrank back in such horror that, if we read the story aright, the blood forced itself from His tortured veins. “Father,” He cries, “if it be possible, let this cup pass!” Thrice the petition is addressed to the All-righteous and All-merciful, by the Son of His good pleasure. Was the Father deaf to the cry of those quivering lips? Had there been any other way, had it been possible upon less exacting terms to undo man’s transgression, would not that way have been discovered? No; it was not possible with God to pass over sin without atonement, to accept the plea of our Advocate without propitiation rendered. The Priest must become Himself the victim, for His intercession to prevail. No goats or calves of the stall shall He lay upon the altar. He must “by the sacrifice of Himself put away sin” and “enter in the right of His own blood once for all into the Holy Place, obtaining eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12, Hebrews 9:26): “HIMSELF is the propitiation for our sins”—αὐτὸςἱλασμόςἐστιν (1 John 2:2). The Advocate throws His life into the plea; He speaks by His blood. He steps, as one should say, from the pleaders’ bench into the dock to cover the prisoner’s person with His own. He puts His unspotted holiness and the wealth of His being at the service and in the place of the criminal, meeting in his stead the brunt of condemnation, so that by sharing his penalty, in such form as is possible and fitting to innocence, He may save him from its fatal issue and recover him for goodness and for God.
Such a propitiation can be of no mere local validity, of no limited interest and operation. The grandeur of the person rendering it, the moral glory and essential humanity of the sacrifice, bespeak for it a universal scope. A “propitiation,” St John writes, “not for our sins only, but indeed touching the whole world.” The Church’s Paraclete is the world’s Redeemer. Jesus Christ the righteous is the champion and vindicator of our race. His sin-offering, presented by the Son of man for man, avails without limit; it covers in its merits and significance all the families of mankind and the ages of time; He has “obtained an eternal” and a world-embracing “redemption”; even as “there is one God”—so, St Paul argues (1 Timothy 2:5-7)—“there is one Mediator between God and men, Himself man, viz. Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all.” The universal expiation of sin has been made, one that countervails and counteracts sin in its deepest and broadest working—not as a specific Jewish liability, but as the a tribute of the race. So this Paraclete stands forth a the friend and healer of His kind everywhere, the Sin -bearer of humanity. He wears on his official breastplate not the names of the twelve tribes of Israel any longer, but of every tribe and kindred. In His perpetual intercession Jesus Christ bears the weight of the world’s cares and sins before the Father of men. His earthly experience, in life and death, has made Him competent to be “a priest for ever” and “for the whole world.”
The words that first directed the Apostle John to his Master were those spoken in his hearing by the Baptist on the Jordan banks—startling words, which looked beyond the Jewish horizon and showed a faith out-leaping the bounds of the speaker’s ancestry and rearing and a knowledge of things revealed otherwise than by flesh and blood: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). That patient Lamb of God, who submitted Himself for the Baptist’s ordination, had filled the Apostle’s life with His presence. He had displayed many an unlooked—for attribute of power, and received many a name of honour from His disciples’ lips since that day. But this is still His distinctive glory; the act on which the kingship of Jesus Christ forever rests, is that by His righteous sacrifice of love He has “taken away the sin of the world.” The eternal song of angels and of men is that to which St John listened in the isle of Patmos: “Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain, to receive the power and riches and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!”