Christ Made Sin for Us (2 Cor. 5:21)

Anonymous

There are many sides to the death of Christ, but 2 Corinthians 5:21 (‘he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin’) brings before us that which exceeds in solemnity and importance all others. Holy and spotless in Himself, He hung upon the cross before God for sin. Not only the iniquities that we had committed, but the sin that is in us from which every sinful act springs was then and there brought before God, and upon Christ, our substitute and representative, there fell all the holy wrath of God against it. He stood there in our place to suffer in our stead that we might be reconciled, and become the righteousness of God in Him, and this meant that the full consequences of sin, with the awful judgment that divine and eternal justice decreed against it, should come upon Him.

We often dwell upon the cross of Christ as the great declaration of God’s love to men, and rightly so, for in that cross the love of God declared its fulness and celebrated its triumph. But there was more than love at the cross. There God showed forth His abhorrence of sin; there He declared His inexorable justice in His judgment of sin in the one who was made sin for us; there His righteousness was manifested, and the integrity of His everlasting throne upheld. This was all done in that hour of hours when the waves and billows rolled over Jesus, and when from the darkness of those depths He cried, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

Upon the cross, Christ suffered greatly at the hands of men. There gathered against Him also the powers of darkness, and no human mind can conceive the fierceness of the fight that they waged against Him, but He defeated them, laid them low; He made a show of them openly, making them His spoil (Luke 22:53; Col. 2:15). But there was more at the cross than these. It pleased the Lord to bruise Him. He suffered for sin at the hands of God. We cannot enter into what that means. The thick darkness that gathered about that cross enshrouds this side of His suffering in holy mystery, but we see that it was necessary. If God is God and sin is sin, nothing less than this would do, not only for our salvation but for God’s glory and for the reconciliation of all things in earth and in heaven, and of us, unto Himself (Col. 1:20).

It was to this end that Jesus came ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). It was to this end that, ‘as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up’ (John 3:14). But though made in our likeness, as the serpent of brass was made like the serpent that had bitten Israel, He knew no sin — He was God’s holy one. The truth as to His spotless humanity is fundamental. And further, there never was a moment in eternity or time when God’s beloved Son yielded more delight to His Father’s heart than when, in obedience to His Father’s will, He took up the sin question on the cross that it might be settled for ever (see e.g. Eph. 5:2; Heb. 10:7–9).

There is nothing like the cross of Christ for moving our souls to devotion to Him. It is there that we see what our sin is. It is there that we learn that the condemnation that our sin called for fell upon the Son of God (Rom. 8:3), who loved us and gave Himself for us (Gal. 2:20). It is there that we learn that He made a complete clearance for us, that He shed the blood that cleanses us, and that now there can be no condemnation for us (Rom. 8:1), for through the redemption that is in Christ, God is just and yet the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus (Rom. 3:24–26).

Author unknown[1]

[1] From Scripture Truth (1916) vol. 8 p. 254. Courtesy of Scripture Truth Publications.

From: Truth and Testimony, 2023