Our Advocate Before God's Throne

From Lesson 202 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charlie Clough

So let’s go to 1 John 1:9, the classic New Testament passage on confession of sin. That verse is structured very carefully so that we can see how this works.

We saw this when we went through David in Psalm 51, David’s confession, but we want to look at this confession and restoration. In 1 john 1:9 it says “If we confess our sins, He is faithful,” and by the way, “we,” if “we” confess our sins, that’s believers, 1 John is not written to a mixed group, it is written to believers, you can see this if you look where he talks in several places, in chapter 2 that follows he talks and he says everybody I’m talking to is a Christian. So verse 9 is addressed to Christians, but Christians still need to confess sin as necessary. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous” notice he doesn’t say faithful and loving, he says “faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

The point here is that this confession acts just the same way like salvation does; it makes use of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, it goes back to the very heart of the gospel. That’s why confession is so important, Biblical confession. It forces us, in our hearts, to go back to the time when we were saved, exactly how we were saved; we came to the cross. How do we get cleansed? We come back to the cross. Notice in 1 John 2:1, a few verses later, what he says, “My little children,” showing these are believers, not a mixed group, “My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; [2] and He himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.”

The point he’s making there is it’s not whether we feel this or feel that, the issue here is that Jesus Christ is an advocate with the Father on the basis of His completed work on the cross. In other words, we have an attorney in the Father’s throne room, and it’s the Lord Jesus Christ. We said in Rom. 8, remember one of the things the Son does, He makes intercession for us. What did we say that intercession was? It was between the Second Person and the First Person of the Trinity, the Son to the Father, He makes intercession for us. It’s not the same intercession that the Holy Spirit makes in Rom. 8 but the intercession the Son makes. The Son makes intercession for us. “We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” So confession is centering on the cross, not the merit of the act of confessing.

It’s interesting that people have no trouble under-standing this when it comes to becoming a Christian. They say well, the act of believing the gospel is not meritorious, it’s a non-meritorious thing, I reach out with the empty hands of faith and receive what God has done for me on the cross. No problem! Yet when it comes to confession we want to import and add on all these little extra things. We want to add on a certain profile of proper penance and if we don’t see that, somehow it’s not genuine confession. Wait a minute; go back to the gospel again. What breeds false conversions? Peer pressures, false things. What is the characteristic of true belief in Jesus Christ? It’s the genuine acknowledgment of the truthfulness of the gospel. Well then what is the heart, the validity of true confession? Acknowledgement of sin, it means that we are convinced that there is sin to start with, you can’t confess something that you’re not convinced of. We confess homologeo, the same idea in a court room, when somebody confesses to a crime they have to be convinced that they have committed a crime. They’re not confessing the consequences, I feel bad because I did something bad. Confession is not confessing I feel bad. Confessing is not confessing gee, I’m sorry I’m reaping all these bad consequences of the stupid thing I did. Often people do that but that’s not confessing.

Confession centers on the fact that I have judicially transgressed the holiness of God. Remember Psalm 51, what did David say? “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned.” Now was David saying that there aren’t bad consequences? David knew there were bad consequences; Psalm 38 and Psalm 32 tells you all about his bad consequences. David was perfectly clear about the bad consequences but he wasn’t confessing the bad consequences. He was confessing transgression. So we don’t confess the consequences, we all know about consequences, the pain, the sorrow, the heartache, that follows. That’s not what we’re confessing. We’re confessing transgression of God’s law, that’s what we’re confessing, just as if we were in a courtroom and we confessed that we violated that ordinance. Or when a policeman stops you for speeding, what do they do? They’re trained to bring conviction of sin aren’t they? They’re trained to have us admit that we were speeding, no excuse. There are all the excuses in the world but were we speeding or weren’t we, period! It’s easy, one or the other.

It’s the same thing here, either we transgressed God’s will or we didn’t transgress God’s will. It doesn’t matter…, you know, the Twinkies defense, some characters in a California law case years ago, I had to shoot somebody because my blood sugar was low in the morning, I didn’t have my Twinkies. The sarcasm referring to that stupid trial and the stupid decision that came out of it, they call it the Twinkies defense. God doesn’t accept Twinkies defenses. It’s always transgression of a law, and it’s either/or. The point here is there’s nothing meritorious in confession. The only thing about confession is that we are convinced of the truthfulness of a transgression.

The problem we all have is we kind of know we transgressed but we really don’t want to admit that we transgressed. So we play a little game for a while until we feel so miserable and God spanks us enough and we get enough pain and sorrow, all right, okay. Then you have to be careful again because we’re not confessing the pain, we’re not confessing the consequences, we’re confessing the transgression. That’s why in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” What does it mean He is faithful? It means every time it operates the same way. God is always faithful to forgive when we meet His condition and the condition is confession. We may be flat on our back, we may be walking abound, we may be driving a car, we may be doing this, we may be doing that. The point is that when we meet the condition He is faithful, because He changes not, He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He is faithful to forgive us. But it also adds another adjective.

Not only is God faithful to forgive, He is righteous to forgive, and that is nothing more than the Rom. 3 truth. The cross is the way that God can be just or righteous and the justifier of him that believes, because you see in 1 John 2:1 we need an advocate. Why do we need an advocate? Because it’s like a trial going on and Satan comes, we covered this when we dealt with the picture of Satan coming before God and accusing the high priest, Joshua’s sin, in Zechariah. And he says you had no right to bless him. The point is, going back to this grace pipeline, here’s God and we have a pipeline with us, and the grace pipeline has been established, rooted on this end, the imputed righteousness of Christ; rooted on this end the righteousness of God. That pipeline is in tact, but Satan’s argument is that God can’t bless that person because the person is dirty, the person has sinned, the person is out of fellowship, the person is disobedient, so the issue then is well then how can God bless that person. God in His grace draws conviction out of the heart and once that conviction is drawn out of the heart that sin has happened, the confession comes to the cross, same place salvation comes to, and says that I have transgressed and I am leaning on the cross for forgiveness.

If you think about it, confession is just enforced review of the gospel. It’s the heart here that makes us go back to the gospel, go back to the gospel, go back to the gospel, go back to the gospel, over and over and over and over until we die and we’re resurrected. Because He wants to keep us going back to the gospel, it’s always the finished work of Christ, the finished work of Christ, the finished work of Christ, the merits of Christ, the merits of Christ, the merits of Christ. There’s nothing meritorious in the act of confession itself. The merit is over here on the cross, and that’s what cleans this thing out and keeps us connected. That’s the idea in John 15 of abiding in Christ, the sap flows through the vine. Well how do you get the circulation, the sap flowing through the vine? You keep it clean. How do you clean out the pipe? God has to clean out the pipe, we can’t do that. We didn’t even put the pipe in place. God put the pipe in place. There’s nothing we can do to clean it, there’s not a bath we can take, He has to do the cleansing.

Notice what it says, He is “righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Notice the word “all” there, it’s not just cleansing for the particular sin that we may remember because for every sin we confess there’s probably 84½ that we’ve committed that we aren’t aware of. What does it say? A-L-L, if we confess our sin, you can’t confess what you don’t know, so you confess what you do know. You confess I transgressed this, this, this, this and this. Sometimes it helps to pray the prayer of David in Psalm 139, “Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me,” etc., bring things to my awareness. That’s a daring prayer because that usually is answered pretty quickly, about bring things to remembrance where we’ve transgressed. So we confess that, we confess that, we confess that, but let’s be real. What we confess is a small amount of the total package of what we are and do. That’s why the promise is so gracious in verse 9, that He goes ahead and cleanses from all unrighteousness, not just the sins we confessed.