Monday, July 4, 2022

Reformed Theology Teaching that Jesus Became "the greatest sinner who ever was by imputation"

  

Christ made sin

 

Jesus the sinless one was also Jesus the offered one. However, we need to prioritize another facet of Christ’s sinlessness: namely, that the spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29) who also cured on a tree (Gal. 3:13). Paul affirms both of these points in that glorious text, 2 Corinthians 5:21: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’

 

At the cross, Jesus became the ‘greatest sinner who ever was’ by imputation. Imputation was an act of God through which he credited out sins to Christ on the cross. In this ‘glorious exchange’ of imputation, God then makes an effectual grant and donation of a real and perfect righteousness to his children. He credits—or accounts—to us the righteousness of Christ. Our sins was therefore imputed to Christ on the cross so that his perfect righteousness could be imputed to us when we receive Christ through faith.

 

This explains Luther’s claim that no man ever feared death as Jesus did. This does not mean that he experienced sinful fear of the lack of courage—he is the most courageous man ever to have lived—but that he understood his death as a curse-bearing death. As the Scottish preacher-theologian James Denny (1856-1917) observed:

 

These experiences of deadly fear and of desertion are of one piece with the fact that in his death and in the agony of the garden through which he accepted death as the cup which his Father gave him to drink, Jesus was taking upon him the burden of the world’s sin, consenting to be and actually being, numbered with the transgressors. (The Death of Christ [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1902], p. 64)

 

Here the mystery of the gospel and God’s wisdom fly right in the face of human understanding. The only one who did not deserve to die ended up dying a death more spiritually brutal than any other conceivable death. God made the sinless one ‘to be sin’. Nothing is more shocking an glorious. Nothing should provide us with more awe and delight. Nothing should provide us with more awe and delight. Nothing should keep our minds busier on earth than this great reality: the Holy One of God was declared unholy, so that unholy sinners might stand unblemished before a holy God.

 

While God imputed our sins to Jesus, his curse-bearing sacrifice did not ultimately defeat him because of the crucifixion, as evidenced by his resurrection from the dead. Death, as the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23), could not hold him, because he never sinned. So the defeat of death was the conquest over sin and the devil; and so his victory is our victory, because the sinless, righteous one could not be held captive in the grave. One day, in our own resurrection to life, [1 Cor 15:54-57] will come to pass. (Mark Jones, Knowing Christ [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2015], 106-7)

 

By laying on him our iniquity (Isa. 53:6), God transferred our sins to Christ. They are no longer ours to pay for. It is finished. As Christians, we are now under no condemnation (Rom. 8:1), because it is finished. The guilt, condemnation, power, and penalty of our sins were dealt with at Calvary, because it is finished. He finished the work that only he could finish. (Ibid., 149)

 

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