Cover Up

My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father -- Jesus Christ, the righteous One. He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world -- 1 John 2:1-2

After a couple of days of really bad stuff, including a bunged-up hand which was very inconvenient and the loss of my voice, which is much less so, we are back to John's First Epistle.

I don't like the word 'sin'. For one thing it has a built-in condemnation factor for a lot of us. I always see a fundamentalist preacher with a big black Bible looking down his nose at me. My language is sometimes less than perfect. I know a whole bunch of bad words, and I can employ them effectively in context. Not long ago I had taken time away from work and driven twenty miles to take my wife to a doctor. It was her first visit, so I filled out the long information form for her. She took it up to the receptionist, and, in a minute or two, called me over. I do not give medical people my SSN, since our insurance company has a subscriber number in addition to the group number we are supposed to use. The office would not accept us unless I gave them my SSN. I didn't tell them to go to hell or to screw themselves. I just shrugged and said we'd take our business to someone who wasn't such a bureaucratic Gestapo idiot. I then began the arduous process of dragging my foaming-at-the-mouth wife out of the reception area to the main door. She’s small but wiry. It’s a lot like giving one of my cats a bath.

As we were exiting the building, I expressed my disgust with the word "dumb-ass". Now I think that's pretty innocuous, especially given that my wife needed treatment, and I had just wasted over an hour on a bunch of medical brownshirts. I said it, though, out loud -- and my "out loud" is first of all loud. A man was coming into the building just at that moment, and I recognized him as a missionary I had met some months before. He did not recognize me, but we talked for a moment. As we parted company, he sort of gently chided me to "be careful about what you say. You never know who is going to be around." I chuckled and refrained from saying, “Ain’t that the eff’in’ truth.”

It really did strike me as more amusing than convicting. First, I'm pretty sure God thinks they are dumb-asses, too. As far as being unkind, I prefer being compared to a quadruped lacking the ability to vocalize rather than, say, an intentionally malicious jackbooted fascist. But even more to the point, I do know God is always around, and I worry a lot more about offending Him than anyone else -- even missionaries, God bless 'em.

Anyway, the work of the Holy Spirit, according to Jesus in John 16 is to "convict the world about sin, righteousness, and judgment". For the world, the sin is a refusal to believe in Christ (see John 16:8-11). But, as Matthew Henry and others would point out, there are "Christianized ... and unchristianized, converted and unconverted sinners" (Matthew Henry's Complete Commentary on 1 John 2:1-2). Even as Christians, we, to use the most common meaning of sin, "miss the mark", fail to effectively do our job and carry out the Lord's will.

That, I suppose, is the bad news. It is inevitable that we will not love one another adequately, that we will be fearful and anxious at times, that we will act in greedy self-interest, avenge our own hurts, and dismiss the still, small voice of the Spirit.

The good news is that Jesus is the propitiation or expiation of all sin. On the Ark of the Covenant there were two cherubim carved on the cover. The cover of the Ark and especially the area between the two figures and under their outstretched wings was the “mercy seat”. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest entered the Holy of Holies and refreshed the covering of blood upon the mercy seat. Beneath, inside the Ark, were the commandments given to Moses by the Lord. The blood on the mercy seat blocked, you might say, God’s view of the law and man’s failure to keep it.

Jesus is the anti-type of the mercy seat sprinkled with blood, the fulfillment of what was depicted by it. By His blood, He turns aside divine wrath. It seems sad to us that the Father, even metaphorically, hides His face from the Son as Jesus bears the sin of man, bleeds, and dies. Yet it is in this turning away that we are spared the righteous wrath that is the just response to our rejection of truth. To believe now that we are “objects of wrath” is to deny the efficacy of the Cross. The only ones upon whom the wrath of God falls are those who cannot believe or refuse to believe that what Jesus did is enough. We may suffer the consequences of bad actions just because decisions and actions have consequences – even the action of no action. But we can be assured this is not God’s wrath upon us, for our Advocate has covered justice with mercy.