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)
