The World’s Greatest Attorney is Unlicensed
As a lawyer on the receiving end of a cultural avalanche of lawyer jokes, I take particular pride in the scriptural description of Jesus, the Christ, as our advocate before God.
1 John 2:1 - My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;
OK, I may have over-claimed the parallel, but too many lawyer jokes can do that to you. What is this reference to Jesus as Advocate? The basic idea is that God the Father is a completely just God, who can, because of his Complete Holiness, have no part in sin. The dilemma of mercy for sinners is that if God simply allowed sin in a world He intended for perfection and “goodness”, then He would be acting contrary to his character as Holy.
How could justice be accomplished without the destruction of a rebellious human race? No imperfect human could “make the case” or “pay the penalty” sufficiently to satisfy a completely just God. The remarkable love of God is this: that He Himself paid the penalty that humans could not pay. The crux of Christianity is that the Christ is the fulfillment of a New Testament (covenant) with people living by faith in God’s redeeming love. The New Covenant is this: that God has reconciled Himself to us, and restored us to our original intended goodness through the life, death, and victorious resurrection of the God-man, Jesus. Therefore, Jesus in effect stands before the Father as our advocate to “maker our case” that we are “justified” before God. The case we could not make, Jesus, the Son of God, makes for us.
Well, then why do we continue sinning, and why is the world by all appearances turning darker in sin rather than renewed in the Light? Are we really in a state of “restored goodness”? The answer is that God works by a process of change, rather by immediate transformations. God works. Yes, God does labor through His Spirit working in us to continue a process of change initiated by our acceptance of eternal life though our faith in the “New Convenant”, that is, faith in the work of Jesus completed by his suffering and death.
Now, read 1 John again:
1 John 2:1 - My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;
John is basically acknowledging that we are a work in progress, and that sin is inevitable as the process continues, but that we surely will be sinning less as the process continues. Because the process is the work of the Holy Spirit living in us, Jesus, the Son of God, bascially makes the case that even in our sinning we are not condemned, and we do not have to live a life of guilt or self condemnation. This, even Freud would agree, is good news.
So, a jaded and “sophisticated” world would declare Christians to be “crazy” for these beliefs. In truth, Christians are the most mentally healthy persons on earth because free of neurotic guilt and self-condemnation, even as they daily “fall short” of their ultimate perfection in eternity.
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