We are a country that loves a courtroom. For a while it was Judge Judy playing on the television bolted to the wall of the doctor’s waiting room, and before that it was a murder trial that stopped the whole nation in its tracks, everyone leaning toward the screen to see which way the verdict would fall. There is something in us that cannot look away from a trial. Part of it is the fascination, watching the case turn on a technicality nobody saw coming. Part of it is the frustration, watching an attorney take a set of plain facts and bend them into whatever shape he needs the jury to see.

I have sat in that room more than once. Over my years here I have been called for jury duty six times, and one of those times I served as the foreman, so the picture I am about to draw is not something I read in a book. Imagine a trial where the defendant knows he is guilty. The prosecutor knows he is guilty. The defense attorney knows his own client is guilty. The judge on the bench knows it too. Every person in the room agrees on the facts, and there is no dispute to settle. Then the verdict comes back, and it is not guilty. Something strange is happening in that courtroom. Stay with that scene, because the passage in front of us is going to walk us right into it.

John hands us a couple of verses loaded with legal language, an advocate, a defendant, a charge, a verdict, and one enormous theological word that we cannot afford to skip past. Some of us feel our shoulders tense when the teaching turns to doctrine, as if the deep end of the pool were roped off for stronger swimmers. Consider why God gave us His word in the first place. He gave it to be read, to be understood, to be worked down into the way we actually think. He did not hand us a book and expect us to back away from the hard parts. These verses are basic Christianity, and He means for us to know them.

“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)

The Marks of a True Believer

Before we get to the trial, John wants us to know who is standing in the dock. Through his letter he keeps handing us tests, plain ways to check whether the faith we claim is the faith we have. Three of them gather here. The first is that a true believer is cleansed by the blood. John had already written that if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). The second is that a true believer confesses. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Confession is simply agreeing with God, telling Him plainly that what He calls sin is sin and that we have done it.

The third mark opens our passage: we are conquering our bent toward sin. John writes so that we may not sin, and I want to be careful with what that means. This is not spiritual grit, the white-knuckle project of trying harder until we finally measure up. It is walking in the Spirit, and it still involves a deliberate choice we have to make with our own will. Jesus said that anyone who would come after Him must deny himself, and there are mornings that comes down to telling yourself a flat no. Looking back over the years since God saved you, you ought to be able to say that by His grace some of the old chains have actually loosened, that a few of the sins that once ran your life do not run it anymore.

That matters because sin is never neutral company. It enslaves. We were built to serve something, and Paul makes the options painfully clear:

“Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” (Romans 6:16)

There used to be a story told about an old sea captain who had commanded the same ship and the same crew for years until, somewhere out on the Atlantic, his mind gave way. His breakdown grew so violent that the crew had to lock him in a cabin below deck, and the first mate took the helm as the new captain. The old captain never stopped shouting orders through the door. The difference was that the sailors had learned to say to one another, we do not answer to him anymore, we have a new captain now. That is the Christian life. The old master still shouts his commands up through the floorboards, and grace has freed us from having to obey a single one of them.

None of this means we ever arrive at a place where we stop sinning altogether, where the bad attitudes and the sharp words and the wandering thoughts finally go silent. We will not reach that in this life. It also does not mean we shrug and cannonball into the deep end because everyone sins anyway. Paul answered that dodge before we could finish asking it: are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? By no means, he says, how can we who died to sin still live in it (Romans 6:1-2). The believer standing in this courtroom is a person being cleansed, confessing, and slowly loosened from sin, and who still, on this side of glory, sins.

The One Time the Accuser Tells the Truth

With the defendant known, the charge gets read. In this heavenly courtroom God sits as the judge of all the earth, and He judges by the perfect standard of His own holy law. He wrote the law, He interprets it, He applies it, and there is never so much as a shadow of a mistake or a twist in His ruling. Standing opposite is the accuser. John’s own vision names him:

“…the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.” (Revelation 12:10)

Day and night, without a break, Satan brings his case against the people of God. He points at you and says, look at what she did, look at what he is still doing, that one calls himself Your child and he is a hypocrite, he has no claim on Your forgiveness. Here is the strangest feature of the whole scene. This is the one moment when the father of lies is telling the truth. We are sinners. The accusations are accurate. God hears them, and He does not pretend the facts are other than they are.

That is what makes the next word so astonishing. The court has a real charge, an honest prosecutor for once, and a defendant with nothing to say in his own defense. If the trial ended there, it would end the way justice says it must.

An Advocate With the Father

It does not end there, because the defendant is not standing alone.

The word John uses is an old legal term. An advocate is a defense attorney, the one who stands up and pleads your cause. Let me offer you a piece of pastoral counsel drawn straight from the courthouse: never represent yourself. The law is too intricate, the procedure too specialized, for any of us to walk in off the street and defend ourselves well. You want a real advocate, someone who knows the court and can stand in your place. That is exactly what John says we have. When anyone sins, and notice he says when, not if, because the grammar underneath the word assumes it will happen, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

Look closely and you will see John count himself in. He does not write that you have an advocate; he writes that we have one. The aged apostle who leaned on Jesus at the table, who saw the empty tomb, puts himself in the same dock as the rest of us and says, I need this defense as much as you do. There is a second thing worth noticing. This advocate takes only one kind of client. He never defends a person who will not first admit guilt. We came to Him already confessing, saying Father, I am a sinner, I believe the blood was shed on the cross for me, and I receive the salvation You offer in Your Son. The moment we pleaded guilty, He took the case.

His defense does not run the way the courtroom television trained us to expect. He does not dispute the evidence or argue that His client is innocent. He is called Jesus Christ the righteous, and it is His righteousness, not our record, that He brings to the bench.

The Fine Has Been Paid

Which brings us to the verdict, and to the largest word in the passage. He is the propitiation for our sins.

It is not a word we use over coffee, and I understand the instinct to slide past it. Hold onto it instead, because it is one of the most precious words in all of Scripture. Some months ago a woman in our congregation was failing in her health, and when I visited her she handed me a three by five card she had written out for her own funeral service. On it she had put a single reference and a single word: First John, propitiation. She did not explain it. She did not need to. She wanted the people she loved to walk out of her service knowing one thing, that the payment had been made, that it was finished, that there was nothing left for anyone to add.

That is what the word carries. A propitiation is a payment that is full and complete, one that leaves nothing owing and lacks nothing, a payment that entirely satisfies the demands of justice. Set it back in the courtroom. The defendant is guilty, the prosecutor says so, the defense says so, the judge says so, and then a voice speaks up from the side of the room: guilty, yes, but the fine has already been paid, in full, and nothing is owed.

We have to sit with why a payment was needed at all, because our moment does not like the answer. God is holy and just, and that means there are no backroom deals at His bench and no plea bargains. However much He loves us, He cannot simply wink at sin and wave it through. Every sin that has ever been committed has to be answered, and it does not take a thousand of them to earn the sentence. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), and one is enough to owe it. More than that, His anger at sin is not a mood He needs to get over; it is the right response of a righteous judge to rebellion against Himself. Scripture says plainly that God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day (Psalm 7:11).

I know how that lands on a person raised to prefer a softer picture. Many people would rather worship a God who is only ever warm, who never judges, who accepts the authentic me exactly as I am and asks nothing further. The real God loves you far more fiercely than that sentimental one ever could, and His love moved Him to do something the sentimental version never would. In kindness the Father took our sin and laid it on His Son, and while Jesus hung on the cross at Golgotha, God poured out on Him the wrath our rebellion had earned, though the Son had earned none of it. Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). He was clean and deserving of nothing, and He stood where the guilty stand.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

That is the great exchange. He took our filthy, stained garment of guilt and wore it to the cross, and He hands us His own spotless righteousness to wear, so that when the Father looks at us He sees us clothed in His Son. That is how the verdict can read not guilty over people everyone in the room agrees are guilty. The fine against us was paid by Christ. Notice, too, how wide John throws it at the end of the verse. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. The sacrifice is sufficient for every person alive, offered to all, and it becomes effective in the one who turns and receives it. This is why God now commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30). The door is open, and the invitation is to come.

The Mercy Seat

There is one more room I want to take you into, because it shows you that this courtroom was built long before any of us were born.

A couple of centuries before Christ, seventy-two Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and that Greek Old Testament was the Bible many ordinary people in Jesus’ day read and heard. It matters here for one reason. When John reaches for the word propitiation, he reaches into the same family of words that Greek Old Testament used to name a specific object, the mercy seat.

Go back to the wilderness. God told Moses to build a box, which we call the Ark of the Covenant, and inside it lay the stone tablets of the law. Think about what that means: God’s people had broken every command carved on those stones, and the record of the broken law sat inside the box. Above the box rested the visible glory of God, the Shekinah. Between the broken law below and the holy glory above there was a lid of pure gold, with a carved angel at each end and their wings arching toward the middle, and it was there, over that golden lid, that the presence of God met His people. Once a year the high priest carried in the blood of a slain animal, passed through the veil into the Most Holy Place, and sprinkled that blood across the lid. If he entered with unconfessed sin on his heart, he did not walk out alive.

That golden lid was called the mercy seat, and the word for it is the very word John lays on Jesus. Propitiation is the mercy seat. It is the place where the broken law and the holy glory meet without the sinner being destroyed, and it has always been about the blood. The high priest had to return year after year, sprinkling again and again, because the blood of animals could never actually clear the debt; it only pointed ahead to something it could not accomplish. When Jesus made His sacrifice, He made it once for all, and then He sat down, because there was nothing left to do. The old priests never sat; their work was never finished. He sat because His was. From the cross He said it plainly: it is finished.

Look back over the whole trial. The people in the dock are being cleansed, are confessing, are slowly conquering their sin, and they still sin. The accuser stands and tells the truth about them. Their advocate, Jesus Christ the righteous, stands and pleads, not their innocence but His own finished payment, that one was Mine, it has been paid. The verdict falls: not guilty, because the debt was settled in full at the cross. God is not pretending the sin away. He punished it. The only question left for any of us is where our sin gets answered, on Calvary or on our own account forever, and Scripture leaves no third door.

If your name is written in that pardon, then the accusation will still come. It will come on a Tuesday afternoon when a memory surfaces that you thought was buried, or at two in the morning when you cannot sleep for replaying the thing you did, or in the middle of an ordinary drive home when your own conscience reads the charge against you and every word of it is true. In that moment you do not answer the charge yourself. You have an advocate, and He answers it with a payment already made and a righteousness already given. An old hymn puts the whole courtroom into four lines, telling of a great High Priest whose name is Love, who ever lives to plead our case, so that when the accuser points and names our sin, the just and holy God is satisfied to look on His Son and pardon us. The fine has been paid. Go into the week as someone the court has already acquitted.

2026.07.26 / The Advocate and the Mercy Seat / Pastor Brent Stille