“For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
This is one of the most profound verses in the entire Bible. Charles Spurgeon called it the heart of the Gospel. It is the Gospel in one verse – just 24 words.
It could hardly be simpler than this, yet even eternity itself will not be long enough for us to grasp the wonder of the Gospel.
How important is 2 Corinthians 5:21? Miss it, and you’ve missed the truth of God. In these days of spiritual confusion, when so many people mistakenly think that all religions teach basically the same thing, it is vitally important that the Church of Jesus Christ be firmly settled on the Gospel message. The Gospel is unique, and it stands quite alone.
It is, after all, our only message. God has not committed to us a message about political power or military might. We are not called to right all the wrongs in the world or to pass judgment on every passing trend. The Church has been given one major task: to preach the Gospel. Jesus said to His disciples in Mark 16:15, “Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to the whole creation.”
If taking the Gospel into the world is our God-given task, then it stands to reason that we have to make sure we know what the Gospel is.
There are three main points in our text this morning, each of which we will look at in some detail. 2 Corinthians 5:21 teaches us about Jesus’ character, His sacrifice, and His gift to us.
Firstly, His character.
Paul begins with the fact that Jesus “knew no sin.” Some versions say that He had no sin, stressing the sinless nature of His inner being. There was no sin outwardly because there was no sin inwardly. When Jesus walked on the earth, He was perfectly righteous. He was without fault, without sin, and without evil. He never did anything wrong, never broke any of God’s laws, and He never deviated in the slightest degree from the path of God’s will.
This is crucial for us, because had Jesus sinned, He could not be our Saviour. A sinner cannot pay for the sins of another sinner. The sacrifice must be made by One who is without spot or blemish, like the Passover lambs slain before the Exodus from Egypt. God told Moses that the lambs were to be one-year-old males, in good health, free from disease and physical defect. The lambs that were slaughtered in Egypt were a picture or a shadow of the perfect Lamb of God who by His bloody, sacrificial death would take away the sins of the world.
How do we know that Jesus had no sin? Interestingly enough, we have primarily the testimony of His enemies to prove He had no sin. When the Roman governor Pontius Pilate examined Jesus, John 19:4 tells us what his conclusion was. “Pilate went out again and said to them, ‘See, I am bringing Him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in Him.’”
When Herod and the Jewish leaders put Him on trial, they could find no credible witnesses against Him, so they primed false witnesses who lied under oath. “The chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put Him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward.” (Matthew 26:59-60)
While Jesus hung on the cross, the Roman centurion cried out, “Truly this was the Son of God.” (Matthew 27:54)
Don’t miss the irony here. The people who hated and despised Jesus – they were the ones who confessed and knew that He was without sin.
He knew all about sin, but He never sinned, not even once. He lived in a sinful world, but the stain of sin never tarnished His character. Of all the billions of people who have lived on this earth, He is the only one about whom it can be truly said that He never sinned in thought, word, or deed.
He faced temptation, but He never gave in, never flinched, and never even came close to sinning. He never confessed a fault because He had no faults to confess. He never asked for a pardon because He never needed one.
In John 8:46 He asked the Pharisees, “Which one of you convicts me of sin?” They had no answer.
The first point in understanding the sufficiency of the sacrifice of Jesus, is that He was without sin, which leads to our second point: He became sin for us.
This is the second miracle in 2 Corinthians 5:21.
Here Paul tells us that God made Him to be sin. Other translations say that Jesus became sin for us. What does this mean, and how can this happen?
The first point to stress here again is that at no point did Jesus become a sinner.
He remained personally sinless while hanging on the cross. He never committed a sin and therefore never became a sinner. However, in some sense that is beyond our understanding He “became sin” for us. Possibly the best way to try and understand this is to say that while Jesus hung on the cross, God treated Him as if He were a sinner. Isaiah 53:12 says He “was numbered with the transgressors.” (Even though He was not a transgressor).
He not only died between two sinners, but He was numbered with them and died as they died - a criminal’s death on the cross.
While on the cross, Jesus took my place, and He took yours. This is the doctrine of substitution; that Christ died in the place of guilty sinners.
His nails were meant for us, the crown of thorns should have been on our heads, the spear should have pierced our sides, and the jeers and insults were meant for us. It should have been us hanging on that cross, but it wasn’t, because Jesus died in our place.
One of the great stumbling blocks which stands in the way of understanding the Gospel is the fact that in order to acknowledge the death of Jesus on our behalf, we need to admit our sin and guilt, and this does not sit well in a world which teaches that we are basically good.
Proclaiming the Gospel accurately and faithfully is an offence to the natural mind. Human wisdom has always stumbled over the cross of Calvary. “Why can’t we all just get along? Just try to live a good life, and treat others as you would like to be treated.” These are the things we hear in a world that wants nothing to do with Christ.
The death of Jesus offends those who want a cultured, bloodless religion, and the Gospel stands directly opposed to this. The truth is that the Bible is a book of blood from beginning to end. Take out the blood and you have taken out God’s plan of salvation. As Hebrews 9:22 says, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”
You cannot avoid the doctrine of substitution because this is the teaching of Scripture. It is not just that Jesus was horribly treated by His enemies as He died. It is that God ordained His death on the cross. When He died, Jesus died taking the place of the very people who put Him to death.
He took our penalty. He became sin for us.
On the cross Jesus became the sinless sin-bearer. He paid the debt we owed to God, a debt that we could never pay. His death satisfied God’s righteous decree that sin must always be punished.
In Leviticus 16, God gave Moses detailed instructions on how the high priest was to perform the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement.
Two goats were involved in this sacrifice. One was slaughtered by the priest, who would then sprinkle some of its blood on the altar. He would then then place his hands on the head of the second goat, confessing the sins of the people. Leviticus 16:21 says, “Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat.”
Then the goat was taken into the desert and released. This pictured the removal of sins by placing them on an innocent victim. This is where we get the word “scapegoat” from. This second goat symbolically took the sins of the people on itself.
Now back to the cross. What the goat did symbolically, Jesus did literally.
Isaiah 53:6 says, “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” This is what Paul meant in 2 Corinthians 5:21 when he said that “made Him to be sin.”
The third point, the third miracle of 2 Corinthians 5:21 is that because of what Jesus did, we become the righteousness of God.
Our greatest need is to be made right with God, and to have this death sentence which hangs over each us cleared, and this is precisely what happened on the cross.
On the cross we find what has been called the Great Exchange: Jesus was condemned that we might be justified.
He bore our sin that we might be set free. He died that we might live. He suffered that we might be redeemed. He was made sin, that we might be made righteous.
This is the doctrine of imputation. When we turn to Christ in repentance and faith, our sin is credited to His account and His righteousness is credited to our account. He takes our debt and in exchange we receive His credit. He paid what we owed and could never pay, and He gives us what He has and we could never earn.
Charles Spurgeon wrote, “You will find 100 books that say this is impossible. Sceptics call this a legal fiction. How can the righteousness of one man be given to another? On earth I cannot literally take your sin and you cannot literally take my righteousness. The answer to the dilemma is profoundly simple: With man this is impossible, with God all things are possible. ‘I cannot accept it,’ you say. Then you will never be saved.”
There is no salvation apart from Christ because receiving His righteousness by faith is what salvation is all about. God does not have a Plan B for people who don’t like Plan A. You come to God by way of the cross or you don’t come at all.
There is nothing except your sin that stands between you and God. God’s wrath was turned away in the death of His Son. His justice has been satisfied, and His love has been poured out to the world.
All we have to do is make the choice: We either choose our sin, or we choose Jesus Christ. We choose damnation, or we choose salvation.
Those are the only two options available to us.
God’s perfect Lamb took the sins of the world upon Himself, laid down His life, and died in our place. The only acceptable sacrifice for sin is a perfect offering. If we died for our own sins, it would not be sufficient payment. We are not perfect. Only Jesus, the perfect God-Man, fits the requirement, and He laid down His life for ours willingly. There was nothing we could do to save ourselves, so God did it for us.
The Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 53 makes the substitutionary death of Christ abundantly clear. Verse 5 says, “He was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.” That’s the Gospel.
Will we ever fully understand this? Probably not.
How can one man’s death in the place of every human being who ever has and ever will live, be enough to cover the cost of every sin ever committed?
How can the death of just one righteous man be enough to make us all acceptable to God?
How can one death be enough to provide eternal benefits for billions of people?
It just doesn’t make any sense.
But the real question is not whether it makes sense. At the heart of the Gospel of Christ is this: Do you believe it?
Because unless you believe Jesus’ substitutionary death on your behalf is true, you have no hope. He said in John 8:24, “I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am He you will die in your sins.”
Again, this message is offensive to the world.
As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
If we are going to proclaim the Gospel faithfully, we need to know the opposition we will face. The truth is that the Gospel of Christ makes no sense to the mind of sinful man. The world does not know God, and cannot know Him apart from divine revelation.
This is what we know: That Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world and that in His death God Himself has suffered on our behalf. We believe that God in Christ made Himself sin for man, and that man in Christ is now made the righteousness of God. This is a true miracle, and like all miracles it cannot be fully explained but it cannot be refuted either. It can only be believed or denied.
“For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is the mystery that we contemplate today – that God would do what He did for us.
Finally, who is ultimately responsible for the death of Jesus Christ?
The answer may surprise you.
Isaiah 53:10 says, “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him; He has put Him to grief.”
Jesus died because the Father willed it.
We just cannot imagine the enormity of this truth, but it stands and cannot be denied: Jesus died because His Father willed that He should die.
The torture and suffering that Jesus experienced did not happen by chance nor did it happen just because the Jewish leaders wanted it and Pilate was too cowardly to deny them their wish.
It is God, and God alone who sent Jesus to the cross. Until you understand that fact, the true meaning of the death of Christ will be lost to you.
“For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”