2 Corinthians 5:21 may be the most horrifying verse in Scripture, for it reveals the fact that Jesus, who was holy, righteous, and perfectly sinless, became sin for us. God made Him who knew no sin, to be sin for us.
The Horror of the Cross
Can you imagine the horror, the shame, and the guilt that poured upon Jesus while He hung upon the cross?
We, who are born in sin and who are accustomed to sin’s constant presence within us, still feel shame and guilt when we sin. Imagine then how it would feel for God in the flesh, who is perfectly holy and righteous, and for whom sin is the exact antithesis and opposite of everything about His being, to not just take on a few sins, but to actually become sin for the entire world? It is shocking and horrifying to think about.
The Love of the Cross
But it is also incredibly loving, for God, who alone knows the full ramifications and consequences of sin, knew that only in this way could He have the relationship and fellowship with us that He so desires. Only by taking sin upon Himself could He finally, ultimately, and completely defeat sin, death, and the devil. So He did it.
Jesus became sin for us and gave us His righteousness.
Jesus accepted our sin into Himself.
He breathed it in, soaked it up, and allowed it to consume Him from within.
Why? Because He loves us, and He knows that if He does not become sin for us, if He does not let sin consume Him, it will destroy and consume us.
Jesus Became Sin
The truth of 2 Corinthians 5:21 is for every single person who has ever lived and who will ever live. It is for every single person who has drawn breath. It is for every single sin that has ever been committed and ever will be. Jesus draws them all into Himself and becomes sin for us!
On the cross, Jesus is both the most beautiful thing the world has ever seen, and the most loathsome. Jesus is the most righteous and the most sinful. The cross of Jesus is full of love and horror.
Love, because of what Jesus did, but horror, because of what Jesus became: He became sin. This is the truth of 2 Corinthians 5:21. Jesus became sin for us. God made Him to be sin. Jesus was despised, rejected, and loathed (Isa 53:2-6). People looked upon Him with revulsion. Even God rejected Him (Matt 27:46).
God Became Sin
All of this helps us understand exactly what was going on in the violent portrayals of God in the Old Testament. If it is on the cross that Jesus most fully reveals God, and it is on the cross that Jesus became sin for the world, then this means that God also was becoming sin for the world.
Just as Jesus became repulsive on the cross by taking on the sin of the world, the proper response to reading about the violence of God in the Old Testament is to be repulsed. We are repulsed by the violence of God in the Old Testament because we are supposed to be repulsed. The violence of God in the Old Testament is God taking on the sin of Israel.
This is a challenge thought, I know, so let us approach it from another perspective, from the perspective of God Himself. To do this, we must remember everything we have seen in this series so far (see the list of posts below).
We must remember that the Bible is inspired and inerrant. It records exactly what God wanted recorded. We must remember that when we read about God in the Old Testament, we read Jesus back into those passages, rather than read those depictions of God forward onto Jesus. We must remember that Jesus came to destroy the devil’s work, and that the primary way Jesus did all this is by taking all the devil’s work into Himself upon the cross by becoming the sin of the world.
God inspired the Old Testament authors to write about Him in a violent way so that He could do the same thing for Israel that Jesus did on the cross: Just as Jesus became sin for us, God became sin for Israel.
I will further explain and unpack this idea in future posts… for now, how does it strike you?
How can a God who says "Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) be the same God who instructs His people in the Old Testament to kill their enemies?
These are the sorts of questions we discuss and (try to) answer in my online discipleship group. Members of the group can also take ALL of my online courses (Valued at over $1000) at no charge. Learn more here: Join the RedeemingGod.com Discipleship Group I can't wait to hear what you have to say, and how we can help you better understand God and learn to live like Him in this world!
Was Jesus becoming sin for us, a process that began in the garden and finishing on the cross or just while He was on the cross?
You wrote:
Jesus accepted our sin into Himself.
He breathed it in, soaked it up, and allowed it to consume Him from within.
Jesus became repulsive on the cross by taking on the sin of the world
The principle of non-contradiction alone precludes the possibility of God literally becoming sin. Something cannot be one thing and its opposite at the same time. To clarify, “A cannot be non-A. That is, nothing can possess incompatible properties.” This is a “first principle and the firmest principle.” “Not only must the texts of Scripture cohere with each other, the doctrines derived from Scripture must be non-contradictory as well.”
God’s holiness “implies that every excellence fitting to the Supreme Being is found in God without blemish or limit.” All that God does is holy—every work—“for there is no inconsistency between God’s being and God’s activity.” Redemption’s work is no exception.
As “the technical term for ‘putting to one’s account,’” imputation means “‘setting to one’s credit’ or ‘laying to one’s charge.’” God applied to Christ’s account the debt man owes. Being morally bankrupt, man cannot pay his debt. Christ has no sin on his account, and his sinlessness has infinite merit; he is the perfect offering. Because of this inexhaustible resource, Christ is able to pay man’s debt without becoming bankrupt (i.e., sinful).
Jesus could not be tainted by the imputation of man’s sin to his account. John Owen repudiates such a notion. Calling it a “manifest mistake” and an “err in judgment,” he insists this belief would “overthrow the whole nature of gracious imputation.” Properly understood, imputation speaks “exclusively” of sin’s “legal forfeitures and liabilities.”
Thomas J. Crawford laments the circulation of a “great deal of misconception . . . regarding the true import” of imputation. Seeking to clarify its meaning, he writes: “the imputation of our sins to Christ implies only that He was made liable, in terms of His own voluntary undertaking, to the endurance of their legal forfeitures or penalties, without any transference to Him of their moral turpitude or ill-desert.” Transferal of “moral qualities . . . is impossible in the nature of things.”
It was the penalty of sin, and only that penalty, which Christ bore for the Church. He did not bear sin’s filth. Penal substitutionary atonement has suffered from this type of misunderstanding in the past. John Brine addresses the error in 1757. “Imputation is not transfusion,” and it “is a great mistake” to think Christ was defiled by it.
Charles Hodge asks if anyone “has the hardihood to charge the whole Calvinistic world . . . with believing . . . that the moral turpitude of these sins was transferred to him?” He finds this doctrine offensive, and he goes so far as to write he would have “no communion with the man who taught it.”
Francis Turretin distinguishes the results of sin as “pollution and guilt. The former is the spiritual and moral pollution with which the soul of man is tainted. Guilt is obligation to punishment.” Christ assumes guilt—in other words, the obligation to punishment—for the Church. This is “separable . . . by the mercy of God” from “those whose sins are pardoned.” In so doing, Jesus does not assume sin’s pollution.
Henri Blocher points out, “Guilt has two components. The sinner’s personal unworthiness is not transferrable. . . . But guilt is also liability to punishment [and] may be transferred.” This transferrable aspect of sin or guilt—its punishment—is death. “But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death” (Colossians 1:22).
Starting with Numbers 14:34, James Denney demonstrates the correlation between sin and its punishment:
“After the number of the days in which ye spied out the land, even forty days, for every day a year, shall ye bear your iniquities” — the meaning clearly is, bear the consequences of them, take to yourselves the punishment which they involve. Or again, in Leviticus 5:17, “If any one sin, and do any of the things which the Lord hath commanded not to be done, though he knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity” — the meaning is as clearly, he shall underlie the consequences attached by the law to his act. Or again, in Exodus 28:43, where the sons of Aaron are to observe punctually the laws about their official dress, “that they bear not iniquity and die:” to die and to bear iniquity are the same thing, death being the penalty here denounced against impiety.
Bearing guilt is synonymous with bearing sin. Jesus Christ endures the punishment and dies the death that mankind deserves. “It means neither more nor less.” This applies to 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13.
Clarifying their intent, Augustine addresses Deuteronomy 21:23 and Galatians 3:13. In a study of this work, Peter W. Martens summarizes Augustine’s approach.
Terms like “sin” and “curse” are used ambiguously to refer either to an evil action itself or the punishment of this action, death. This distinction is, of course, crucial . . . . In the case of Deut. 21:23, to say that Jesus was “cursed” when he hung on the tree is to say he underwent death, the punishment or result of sin, not that he was a sinner. . . . [Moses was] simply prophesying the manner of his death, and in so doing, neither impugned nor slandered Jesus.
Any time you try to limit God, you’re going to fail. “A cannot be non-A. That is, nothing can possess incompatible properties.” This is a “first principle and the firmest principle.” Unless of course that A is a particle, like an electron. Oh, wait. That’s a wave. No, it’s a particle. No, it’s a wave…
Thank God not everyone buys into this Bible Belt tradition. I have been horrified by hearing this twice from the pulpit recently. Absolutely maddening!
It is a common mistake to say Jesus became sin. However the translators got it right in using “made to be” which carrys a far different meaning. The word became in referring to Jesus is never used in relation to sin.
Jesus “became” sin is different to Jesus “carrying” our sin. Clarify this for me please
I was utterly horrified when both the pastor and youth pastor preached the message that God Incarnate, perfectly holy and Who cannot abide sin embodied all the Sin in the world. They in effect said Christ became Lust, Perversion, pedophilia, filthy lucre, and genocidal mania. This is absolute horror, because it is blasphemy! A gross misunderstanding of a term long used to mean the sin offering. The Jews commonly referred to the sacrifice as the sin it represented. Calvin admitted as much but refused to acknowledge this is what Paul meant Calvin never Trump’s the truth of Who God is
It amazes me how many sermons have been preached on this miss translation. Jesus became a “sin sacrifice” not sin itself
He, Jesus Christ, the perfect lamb of God, without spot or blemish became our sin OFFERING.
I believe it would be a contradiction of Scipture to say “He became sin” since there is no other agreement in Scripture to that point. The consistent agreement is that He was a “Sacrifice” or “Offering”.
A quick review of the Strongs Concordance for “Offering” and “Offerings” shows that the use of those two words (about 1000 times) was only included about 50% of the time by the translators of the Scriptures because it was in the original text and the other 50% it was added for clairity because it was “implied” by the text.
It makes sense the Apostle Paul “implied” the same. A few Bible versions do render that text correctly as “sin offering”.
Christ was made to bear our sin, which means He carried that load and even suffered (not same as punished) under it.
But since there was no sin in Him, He was able to carry it away (like the Scapegiat) without becoming it, as far as the east is from the west. God, never to bring it to remembrance again.
It is stated as such because our sin still exists (not paid), but is forever removed (I think deposited in hades without us).
Whether you like this analogy or not, hopefully you get the point…
In the movie series “The Lord of the Rings”, Frodo is a truly innocent of heart person and is found to be the only one capable of carrying the “One Ring” without being influenced by its evil (at least for a while).
“It was his burden to bear”, depositing it in the eternal fire along with Gollum (whom sort of represents our inner old self).