Love Taking Care of Our Sins
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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. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
1 John 2:1-2 ESV
The whole first letter of John is about loving one another because God loves us. In that context of love, he writes that all of this love talk is so that we won’t sin. It’s not a letter of fear or destruction or judgment because of our sin, it’s a letter calling us to look, see, and believe how much God loves us. Sin and death are both the consequences of judgment, and they are the the tools that the devil used to keep us enslaved to fear.
But now, sin and death are done for once and for all because of Jesus, and the love of God has been shown fully. When you are looking and observing and receiving that love, the desire to sin will be weaker and weaker. I say weaker instead of gone because God is so very kind to us. He will let us sit at the same table with Him and eat and then sin against Him. The fact is that if God did force us out of our sin we couldn’t handle it. Peter said that God is a “consuming fire” and all of Israel begged to not speak with the Lord, but for Moses to do the talking for them.
We cannot advocate or defend ourselves against God. If you have little kids, you might hear the excuse “Well I just…” every day. That’s a statement of someone trying to justify themselves. We can’t justify ourselves before God. Jesus Himself, the righteous, justifies us and is our advocate. By already being in place, our sin is already advocated for, there is no down time between doing the wrong thing and then, 14-28 days later we have an advocate. No, He is already there, watching, advocating, and helping.
He is the propitiation for our sins. That word doesn’t just mean that He took them away. It has a connotation that it makes person that is getting paid off happy too. Like when you get in a fender bender with your neighbor’s 1996 Camry, and to make it up to him, you buy him a Mercedes with 8 miles on it (a boy can dream can’t he?!). THAT is propitiation. So Jesus was the payer and payment for our sins, and it didn’t put us on ok terms with God, it made God happy with us.
Not only that, but it made God happy with every other person that will call on His name. And some of those people might be jerks today, but if they call on Jesus tomorrow, they’ll be in your family.