Ángel
Manuel Rodríguez
Can you
explain what is meant by the phrase "God made him [Jesus]
. . . to be sin for us" (2 Cor. 5:21)?*
We'll
have to wait for the Lord's return to explain fully the meaning
of this verse. But that does not mean this passage is totally beyond
our comprehension. We can say some things about it, even if much
of it remains unexplainable.
1. "Him who
had no sin": The sinlessness of Jesus is indicated in several places
in the New Testament (1 John 3:5; 1 Peter 2:22; Heb. 4:15). It was not simply
the absence of an act of disobedience on His part but also the absence of the
taint of sin from His person. His absolute distance from sin in any form and
expression lies at the very foundation of the saving power of His death. Apart
from Christ no one else has broken away from the enslaving power of sin (Rom.
3:9, 10). He permanently broke the universal power of sin. This is the good
news: The One over whom sin was unable to rule at all has placed His victory
at the service of the human race as a means of atonement.
2. "God made
him . . . to be sin for us": This phrase reveals several important
ideas. First, it rejects the view that the Father was against us while the
Son had to persuade the Father to love us. It was God who took the initiative
and provided what we needed. He loved us in our rebellion and sin.
Second, we're confronted with the unfathomable mystery of
the atonement. Atonement mysteriously occurred in the encounter
between holiness and sin, death and life, purity and impurity.
One could argue that Christ became sin by bearing our sin, assuming
full responsibility for it, and experiencing its penalty. But we
should not separate that legal image from the fact that on the
cross Christ in fact experienced God's absolute abandonment.
Third, Christ became
sin "for us," for our benefit, as our substitute. We know about
the burden of our own sin without experiencing God's total abandonment.
Yet our guilt, inadequacy, and shame weigh as a heavy burden on our souls.
As our substitute Christ experienced the guilt, shame, and humiliation of the
whole human race entirely abandoned by God. The guilt and shame of sin was
heaped upon Him until it crushed Him while He groaned under its weight (Heb.
5:7).
Notice that He did not become a sinner, but sin. The sin of the
human race was credited to Him not in an impersonal way, but in
actuality. He who had no sin was treated as if He had committed
the sin of every human being who ever lived or will live in this
world of sin and death. He "redeemed us from the curse of
the law by becoming a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13). The curse
that was ours was carried in His person, and through His death
He exhausted its condemning power for those who believe. He "was
rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his
poverty might become rich" (2 Cor. 8:9). The words "his
poverty" refer to the fact that He became a curse for us,
and that our sin and its penalty were transferred from us to Him
as our substitute. Jesus took our poverty upon Him in order to
enrich us.
3. "That in
him we might become the righteousness of God": Here is revealed
the purpose of the astonishing sacrificial death of Christ. He took what was
ours--our sin--and gave us what we did not have--the righteousness of God.
This gift is only available to those who are in Christ; those who exist in
a faith-relationship with Him as the Son of God.
The phrase "the righteousness of God" could designate
the righteousness that God imparts to us through sanctification.
Or, it could mean the righteousness that we have before God, the
imputed righteousness that God credits to us by faith in Christ.
This last interpretation appears to be the most appropriate in
the context. Christ took what was not His, our sin. Now in Him
we participate in that which is not ours, the gift of justification
by faith. God did in Christ and through Christ the unimaginable:
He made Him sin. Because of that we are accepted in the Beloved.
*Bible texts in this article are from the Holy Bible, New
International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984,
International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan
Bible Publishers.
5/06
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