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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