More on Sin…
“But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.” (1 John 1:7-2:2).
“Propitiation” is one of those big words we tend not to use in everyday Christian parlance. We approach the term from a “theological” sense in that we understand better how it is that we are “saved” or in Paul’s terms “justified.” But the Apostle John challenges our understanding of the term (I believe). John is not talking about justification or regeneration. Those that John is writing have already experienced regeneration. He calls them “little children.” Furthermore, John has a term he uses for regeneration in 1 John, which is to be “born of God.” No, John is not using the term “propitiation” is some highly technical theological sense, but in a very practical sense. John is not talking about what happened when we became children of God but what happens to us as children of God. This is all about how we live out the Christian walk. John appears to make (among others) these four points.
First, we are all going to sin. John says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Sin is a part of our daily Christian existence — there is no way around it. We will sin until God resurrects us into the image of Christ. We are stuck with sin as a reality in our lives.
Second, we must always “confess our sins….” That is, we can never get to the point where we do not agree with God that sin is sin. And, even for Bible-thumping Christians, this is a great temptation. No, we will acknowledge the big ones — yeah, those are sin. But we tend to gloss over what we perceive to be the little sins. The wrong glance here or there; the time we did not quite love that brother the way we should have; maybe the time we sowed seeds of discord and we now want to look back and revise the event to make it actually a highly spiritual event. But we cannot do this — we must always accept the fact that our sin is sin.
Third, we need to try to cut it out. John says, “My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin.” There is this odd tension in the book of 1 John between the reality that sin is a part of our lives and the mandate that it not be. We are in a struggle, indeed. But we must continue that struggle. We need to be (with the power of the Holy Spirit) rooting sin out of our lives on a daily basis.
Four, propitiation is how John resolves this horrible tension. We should not sin but we do. How do we ever maintain fellowship with God in this life? John’s answer: the blood of Christ. The blood of Christ covers us as much as Christians as when we became Christians. We need to start considering the term “propitiation” not as some technical term that explains the mechanics of when we became justified and regenerated and start considering it a daily necessity. Without it, there is no on-going fellowship with God. That is, propitiation is as much about sanctification as it is about justification.