He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that
we might become the righteousness of God in Him. —2 Corinthians 5:21
Sin is a fundamental relationship— it is not wrong doing,
but wrong being— it is deliberate and determined independence from God.
The Christian faith bases everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of
sin. Other faiths deal with sins— the Bible alone deals with sin.
The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and
it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the gospel that the
message of the gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.
The revealed truth of the Bible
is not that Jesus Christ took on Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took on
Himself the heredity of sin that no man can even touch. God made His own Son
“to be sin” that He might make the sinner into a saint. It is revealed
throughout the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through
identification with us, not through sympathy for us. He
deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in His own body, the
complete, cumulative sin of the human race. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin
for us…” and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race
solely on the basis of redemption. Jesus Christ reconciled the human race,
putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone can experience
that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what
our Lord has done on the cross.
A man cannot redeem himself—
redemption is the work of God, and is absolutely finished and complete. And its
application to individual people is a matter of their own individual action or
response to it. A distinction must always be made between the revealed truth of
redemption and the actual conscious experience of salvation in a person’s life.
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