Your Best Defense for Your Mess

If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

 1 John 2:1b

As a young boy, I hated cleaning my room.  When I was told to clean up my room I tried to get away with only making it look like I had cleaned.  Sometimes I would take the piles of clothing and move them around to new places.  Sometimes I would try to hide things under my bed sheets.  At other times I would shove things under the bed.  Or I would just throw the whole mess in my closet.  None of it worked.  None of it fooled her.  I never got away with it.

We handle the messes we make in life in many similar ways.  We are a lot like our first parents Adam and Eve.  They tried everything to cover up, to hide their sin.  First, they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness.  The problem with that was that fig leaves dry up and crumble in a couple of days.  When they heard God coming, they tried to hide from Him. We are no different.  Every one of us has secret sins we don’t want anyone else to know about.  While we can maybe hide things from each other, God is not fooled.  He knows.  He knew exactly what Adam and Eve had done.  He knows all of our secrets.  Hiding the mess in the closet doesn’t clean it up.   When that didn’t work, they tried blaming each other. Adam blamed Eve who gave him the fruit.  Eve blamed the serpent who tempted her.  When I was young I was playing with my sister’s new camera.  I ended up using up all her film.  I tried to blame it on my mentally challenged oldest sister.  I got caught when they developed the film and found that there were pictures of my oldest sister on the film.  They didn’t take selfies in those days.  Blaming others just makes the mess worse.  Sometimes we deal with our sin by not dealing with it.  If we ignore it.  We pretend it didn’t happen.  Maybe it will fix itself.  That’s didn’t work any better than waiting for my room to clean itself.   Sometimes we try to downplay the seriousness of our sin.”What’s the big deal?  Everyone does it. No one got hurt.”   “It was just a little harmless lie?”  Yet even a small chip out of the corner of a window breaks the whole window.  

None of these clean up your mess.  None of these get you off the hook. As John wrote in His first Epistle, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves… Yet we never deceive God.  The truth is - no excuse, no denial, no fig leaf or lie will get rid of the mess we make of life. 

What you and I need is someone to speak in our defense… to serve as our heavenly lawyer.    I was once asked in Bible Class if there were any lawyers mentioned in the Bible.  I had no answer at that time.  Fortunately, a lawyer in class did. The next week he brought all sorts of bible passages that he said mention lawyers.  One of them was from 1 John 2.  “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.  He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”    Yes we have an advocate – someone who speaks to the Father in our defense – Jesus!  He is our best… no our only defense.  John gives three reasons.

First, there is His name and title.  Jesus, his name tells us why He came.  Jesus means “God saves.” In the same way that Pastor is my title and not my name, Christ is His title, not His name.  Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Word Messiah.  It means “the one chosen or anointed.”  To say that Jesus is the Christ is to say that He is the one chosen by God to be the savior of the world.   In America if you are in trouble with the law and can’t afford a lawyer, the government will provide one for you.  That’s what has happened here.  We cannot afford the cost of our sin.  We have no ability to mount a defense.  So God provides an advocate for us.  He provides the very best, His own son, Jesus the Christ.   He is our advocate.  He speaks to the Father in our defense. 

Secondly, John calls Him the righteous.  We often talk about how Jesus died in our place, for our sins.  What we fail to remember is that Jesus also lived for us.  In the face of the same temptations we face, He lived the perfect life we fail to live.  Then He offered that perfect life on the cross as payment for our sin.  There on that cross God made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.   As the righteous one, Jesus stood in our place both by his life of obedience and His death on the cross.

That’s why John could write of Jesus “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”   Don’t you love that word – propitiation?  That word means that in Jesus the Father’s demands are completely satisfied.  It’s a little like what Linda would do for me after we got engaged.  My room was an even worse mess in College.  When mom came to visit, Linda didn’t want her to see it that.  She stepped in… cleaned my room for me.  She didn’t just hide the mess.  She cleaned my room so that even my picky mother was satisfied.  That’s what Jesus did.  He cleaned up our mess.  He paid our debt.  He satisfied the Father’s demands… so that when we confess our sins, we can be sure that God is faithful and just… and because of Jesus will forgive our sins… There is no other defense for you or me… We need only one – Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Amen.