FAITH IS THE VICTORY
By Professor E M Blaiklock MA Litt. D
CHRIST THE ADVOCATE. As though anticipating such fearful souls. John turns in
Chapter II in a sudden access of tenderness from "we" to "I" and addresses his readers with an affectionate vocative which he is to use six times. No one had a better right than the last survivor of the Twelve to look upon himself as the father of the family of faith. Those who seek long and intimate study of the mind of John should note and mark in this letter the thronging echoes of the Gospel. It is often possible to seize and enjoy the passing images in that rich store. Here John is remembering the. strange, tense atmosphere in the room which Judas has just left, and hearing again the accents of a Voice which has haunted sixty years. "Little children, yet a little while I am with you. . ..
" The words were very true of the last remaining member of the party. And how gloriously John used those last rich years. The aged should study John. The venerable Bede in the famous story, using his last breath at Jarrow twelve centuries ago to translate the Fourth Gospel, was John's true disciple. He deserves more such. Something of the scorn Tennyson's Ulysses felt for inactivity, his determination "strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," would perhaps bring back vigour and usefulness to many lives which have become too pre-occupied with death:
Tennyson:
“I am become a name
For always roaming with a hungry heart.
.........
Yet all experience is an arch where through Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause and make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
John's Christlikeness, however, precedes a warning. He would have his people know that there must be no surrender, that though Christ forgives, the fact conveys no licence to continue in sin. And yet John knows how hard the way is, how prone the flesh to frailty, and how even the best fighter stumbles in the fight, and he hastens to reaffirm the truth which closed Chapter 1: "If anyone commit a sin, we have an advocate." The tense in the Greek text puts the emphasis on the act of sin, not the state.
The word "advocate" is another strong echo of the Gospel.
It is one of the best known terms in New Testament theology, "parakletos," and occurs five times, once here, and four times in the Gospel. "Advocate" is the only word which renders all contexts. It means "someone called alongside" with the implied meaning of help. In the Gospel it refers to the Holy Spirit, alongside in Christ's place, to woo us to deeper experience. Here it refers to the Intercessor who pleads for His own in Heaven.
We should pause here, for this truth touches all of us. Only those who are free from sin have no need of an advocate. Let that be the first of three propositions. Are there any who are free from sin? Verse 10 of Chapter I answered that question.
So does Paul. "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God." So does Christ, telling the teacher of the Jews that he needed a new heart, touching the living fault of a youth who professed to have kept all the commandments, arresting the careful Pharisee on the Damascus Road. Our own hearts too answer the question. They only imagine perfection who have no contact with Christ, no contact indeed with human goodness, for which honest one of us is not frequently moved to confess with lago: "He hath a daily beauty in his life which makes me ugly"?
If, then, the first of our propositions is that we all need an advocate with God, the second states: "There can be no other advocate but Christ." How simply does experience sustain that truth. We have spoken of the pathetic multitude who sought by toil and agony to win merit with God. Using John's very word a smug rabbinical tract says: "He who fulfils one
commandment has gained himself one advocate. • • • He who commits one transgression has gained one accuser." If such were the grim case, life could be little else than "a certain fearful looking for of judgment." Indeed, as Pearson's hymn puts it: "How helpless and hopeless we sinners had been."
Those who have sought human intervention bear like testimony. "My soul was sick," said Bilney of Cambridge, over four centuries ago, "and I longed for peace but nowhere could I find it. I went to the priests and they appointed me penances and pilgrimages, yet by these things my poor sick soul was nothing profited. But at last I heard of Jesus." He tells how, in Erasmus' Latin Testament, he chanced upon the text: "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." And that sentence, said Bilney, "did so lift up my poor bruised spirit, that the very bones within me leaped for joy. It was as if after a long dark night, the day had suddenly broke." Note John's imagery in the Cambridge scholar's words. "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." This was the truth which Bilney succeeded in imparting to Latimer, and between them they made history.
We add a third to our two propositions. Hear them again:
First, we all need an advocate with God. Second, there can be no other advocate than Christ, and now, third, those who need an advocate need Him always. Let us ever claim His office, and rest in His eloquent all-sufficiency.