Good Like a Medicine

“There is someone to plead for you with the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who pleases God completely” (1 John 2:1). This thought will bring you relief when your faith is discouraged and afraid. Satan can take some of Christ’s other functions and twist them around to frighten us. After all, Christ, as a prophet, sentences sin’s crime, and Christ, as a king, has the power to execute that sentence. Satan, however, as our enemy, has enough cleverness to abuse both these aspects of Christ to overthrow the faith of the children of God.

Christ is our advocate. This realization will help you to pull off the mask that Satan has tried to put over Christ’s face, misrepresenting Him to you so that you will be weakened and frightened. This is one of the most common ruses that Satan uses against God’s saints; he loves to take a spark of truth, bringing fire from Christ’s truth, and use it to burn us. He tries to make Christ look as though His face is so angry and distant, that a person who is tempted and guilty will hardly be able to look up at God.

But when you think, “Christ really is my Advocate,” this heals everything. Children can sometimes be scared if their father puts a masks over his face, but if the father speaks with Daddy’s voice, then the mask is gone, if not from the father’s face, yet from the child’s mind. Despite the mask, the child will crawl into the father’s lap.

This is exactly what happens when Satan deludes the saints by showing them a disfigured image of Christ’s face. Let them just hear their Lord speak in His own voice — and when we hear Him speak as an advocate this is His daddy-voice — and their minds will be calmed, their thoughts settled, their guilt will disappear, and their faith will revive.

Is Christ Jesus the Lord my advocate with the Father? Then wake up, my faith, and shake yourself like a giant, rouse yourself and stop being faint: Christ is the advocate of His people, and as for sin and selfishness, the one thing, my faith, that you most often trip over, well, Christ not only died for that, and not only carried His sacrifices to the Father into the holiest of all, but what is more, He continues to uphold that offering as an advocate, pleading its power and worth before God and against the devil for us.

The modest saint is apt to be embarrassed, thinking how troublesome she is or what a lazy good-for-nothing he has been in God’s house all day. Go ahead and blush, but never forsake your advocate.

– John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 116)