We Have an Advocate

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. ² He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Passage

1 John 2:1-6 - We Have an Advocate

Conditions

Perfect, which is rare. 

Time

Plenty. 

Teaching

One of the children read the passage and we spent some on our main word for the evening: advocate. I drew up an illustration of the children breaking a window in the laneway and us receiving an angry knock on the door from the neighbour. In such a case I would not send the children to answer the door and deal with the neighbour. Instead I would go before them, between the two parties, and represent the children, advocate for them. We circled this a couple of times, but everyone eventually saw the meaning of the word. 

We then circled the question: “How then is Jesus our advocate with the Father?” Good answers all round, but room to go deeper. We moved to some (actual) drawings. First, a collection of people - sinful humanity. How are these people situated before the Holy God? They are under his wrath and curse, which is what every sin deserves (SC 84).

Now we see the people under fire, actual fire, which represents the wrath (the righteous anger) of God (which is also revealed from heaven, Romans 1:18, in case we’re unsure about this). Our family is accustomed to these realities, but even so I spent a few sentences reminding them that it is good and necessary for God to be this way. If He is not holy, holy, holy, and does not hate sin and oppose it completely He is not worthy of worship, nor can we count on Him to fully rid sin from this world (including from ourselves). 

The next question is: “If this situation is unchanged, what is going to happen?” The righteous judgement of God will fall upon humanity and they will be destroyed, for who can stand? Getting to this we imagined what happens when a fire reaches a forest, or (tragically) a building surrounded by bamboo. 

The next picture illustrates not only that Jesus is our solution, but it positions Him as our advocate. He stands before the Father, speaking a word about His people. One of the children recalled, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they are doing.” What can happen now? The anger of God can be turned away. The death of Jesus on the cross removes God’s anger, propitiates it. 

But this alerted me to one more step that we could take. How exactly does Jesus propitiate the wrath of God? By dying on the cross, yes. What is actually going on there? In the next picture we see Jesus move into the very fires of God’s anger:

⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions;
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
    and with his wounds we are healed.

There was some silence around the table at this point. We had perhaps not walked through the atonement in such an explicit way before, and there was some gravity to it. 

We concluded with a picture of Jesus risen… and still advocating for us. Why? Because we will still sin (as John assures us) and we still need an advocate - someone at the right hand of God to apply the blessing of forgiveness to us when we sin. Someone to represent us before God as righteous. Not with a righteous that is our own, but the righteous that comes through faith in Christ. 

I shared a story about how devastated I was before my conversion when I fully realised that I was a bad person, full of sin. And all this sin had been against Someone. Sharing like this was on my mind after reading a comment in a book about allowing the children to read the book of your life, to see your walk with Christ. What good news for me to know that “we have an advocate.” That was a line for the evening, and it must be one of the lines of our lives. 

Songs

In Christ Alone; When I Survey