To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here
Each day this month of August we’ll be looking at one of the extraordinary metaphors that the Bible uses to illustrate the nature of our relationship with God.
“If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (I John 2:1).
Q: What do you call 40 lawyers skydiving at the same time?
A: Skeet.
Q: What’s the difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer?
A: A bad lawyer might let a case drag on for several years. A good lawyer knows how to make it last even longer.
“Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick-skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge” (David Mellor).
A mother and her child walked through a cemetery. They passed by a headstone inscribed with this message: “Here lies a good lawyer and an honest man.” The child read the headstone and looked confused. “What’s wrong?” the mother asked. “Mommy,” the child asked, “why did they bury two people there?”
“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers” (Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI: Part II).
Lawyers, it seems, have inspired jokes and witticisms in every generation. It should be pointed out that pastors, priests, and rabbis aren’t far behind.
In her August 4 article, “The 25 Objects that Explain America,” journalist Emily Keegin describes how incessant advertising for injury lawyers has become a defining part of our culture.
“Every city, town or suburb,” she writes, “has its own deity who looms above the roadways like a god on Mount Olympus, promising to fix your trauma through the dark art of legal retribution. If you’re lucky enough to live near multiple personal injury lawyers, they will fight for your love with font size, puns and catchy TV jingles.”
Now, before we dismiss the legal profession with the latest quip, we should remember this: The Bible presents Jesus as a defense attorney.
It gets even better than that. Jesus is perpetually on call as your defense attorney in the most important case of your life.
We’re talking, of course, about You v. Yahweh – aka You v. the Infinite-Personal Holy God.
What will it be like to give an account of our lives to God as the righteous Judge? Different generations have dared to embrace different levels of confidence concerning that moment. Our own generation, which prefers to picture God as a smiling, heavenly therapist who is “here for us,” is wildly confident that things are going to go swimmingly.
How about you?
Let’s go ahead and state the obvious: You’re guilty as sin (pun intended). It’s not that your spiritual track record is somehow more blemished than your neighbors’. Rather, the pages of Scripture, from start to finish, declare that all of humanity has come up desperately short of the Creator’s intentions for our thoughts, motives, and actions.
A memorable verse in this regard is Romans 3:23: “For all have fallen short of the glory of God.”
Put simply, you and I stand in need of the best possible legal representation. In the person of Jesus, that’s exactly what we’ve got.
I John 2:1 says, “If anyone does sin [an exceedingly polite way of saying, ‘When in fact you do sin, quite likely before you reach the end of this reflection’], we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ.” The word translated “advocate” is the Greek word parakletos, which literally means, “the one who is called alongside.” Jesus the Paraclete stands alongside us as our legal defender.
We learn more in Romans 8:34, where Paul asserts that “Christ Jesus…is at the right hand of God and is interceding for us.”
At the trial of our life in the courtroom of heaven, Christ not only rises on our behalf, pleading our case, but prays for us.
According to classic Christian theology, the need of every human defendant is a clean moral slate. None of us can dream of presenting such a thing. But Jesus of Nazareth can – which is exactly what he did by dying sacrificially for our sins on the cross.
That’s why every follower of Jesus is destined to experience a miracle – the reality of being declared “not guilty” in the presence of a holy God.
We must not be confused on this point. God the Judge is not saying, “Sin doesn’t really matter,” or “Let’s just pretend you never had a moral debt to pay.” Instead, God is saying that our very real debts have been paid in full – the essence of Jesus’ dying message: “It is finished.”
Have you fallen short of the glory of God this summer?
You’d better have a great lawyer.
If you know Jesus, you’ve got one.