Every person needs an advocate in order that he may stand successfully before God’s judgment bar when he calls each one of us into his presence. God has appointed a great Advocate for each one of us, Jesus Christ, the Righteous. We should always remember that this is just one of the ways God has expressed his love for each one of us. None of us is able to provide an advocate for himself who can help us when each of us must stand before God to defend our behavior. (See Matthew 16:27)
As we have just said, God has made the great Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous, available to every person. But we must accept him and must also know that he has accepted us. Only then will he be willing to represent us and plead our cause on the day of judgment. The assurance of our acceptance of him and of his acceptance of us comes through a change in our behavior which is brought about when we accept the Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and when he accepts us. The basic change in our behavior through which we are assured that we know the Advocate and the Advocate knows us is obedience. Before we accepted Jesus to be our personal Advocate we “turned every one to his own way.” (Isaiah 53:6) But when we accept the Advocate and he accepts us, then he helps us bring about a fundamental change in our life style so that now we become obedient to God through the Advocate whom he has appointed to help us.
Christ’s Apostle John tells us that, “hereby we know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.” (1 John 2:3) This is the test by which we can know the condition of our relationship to the Advocate. Perhaps we know many sacred truths. Also, we may be able to cite some lengthy religious creed. However, these achievements are not proofs that we know Jesus as our Advocate. Real fellowship with The Advocate is proved by doing his will.
Since we are assured that, “we know him, if we keep his commandments,” each of us wants to know if this keeping of his commandments requires sinless obedience. Everyone who accepts the Advocate whom God has appointed should certainly have the desire for sinless obedience. This is obvious from the fact that the Advocate whom God has appointed for us is Jesus Christ the sinless one. There should never be a time when we desire to fall below the perfection which Jesus himself demonstrated in his life. Anything less than this desire would be evil desire (Colossians 3:5).
But though our goal is to “keep his commandments,” we must also realize that we constantly do fall below our desire for complete obedience to Christ. In view of 1 John 1:8-2:2, it is impossible to understand that John intended to say that we must reach sinless perfection before we could, “know him.”
If we had always lived our lives with sinless perfection we would then have no need for an advocate to plead our cause before God. Also, in that case we would be liars if we acknowledged our sins, but John tells us we are liars if we fail to acknowledge them. The meaning of ‘keep’ is clarified in the next verse, that is 1 John 2:4. It says, “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him;”
‘Keep’ is translated from the present tense of a Greek verb (taireo) which expresses the concept of, “Continued action. The action of the verb is shown in progress, as going on.” (W.H. Davis, Beginner’s Grammar of the Greek New Testament, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1923), p. 25.) Thus the test is based on a person’s continued practice or action. Disobedience is the continual or habitual action of the godless while among them obedience is rare and coincidental. With those who have accepted the Advocate, on the other hand, obedience is the general practice while disobedience is the exception and is comparatively rare.
Now, through John, God allows us to look deeper into our own hearts. The obedience which we must demonstrate in order to have the help of the Advocate can only grow out of a change in our affections. “…but whoso keepeth his word, in him verily hath the love of God been perfected. Hereby we know that are in him:” (1 John 2:5) Here “his word” is used interchangeably with “his commandments” in the previous verse.
In 1 John 2:6 we learn more about a proper relationship to our Advocate. It says, “he that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk even as he walked.”
In the Greek language, in which this was first written, the expression “abideth in him” means one remains in him. The expression “abideth in him”, communicates the two important points: first, that the relationship to God which the followers of the Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous, have is not just a series of encounters but a stable way of life; second, that the stability does not imply inertia, that is a static life style, but a vitality visible in the way one walks.
The expression, “walk even as he walked.” shows that Jesus, the Advocate, sets the standard. for our moral conduct. When we accept him as our Advocate, God performs a moral miracle in our lives so subsequently we may live as he did. We will not be perfectly sinless as he was but there will be a radical transformation in our manner of life so our life style regularly and consistently resembles his.
In our next program we will see from the immediately following text, that the most critical aspect of the change in our life style refers to the standard by which we express brotherly love. Jesus taught us that we are to love, not as we love ourselves, but as he loved. He said, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (John 13:34 ASV) Thus, Jesus set a new standard for brotherly love. When we follow that standard we are walking “even as he walked.”