What does it mean that Jesus became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21)?

Verse 21. "For He made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin," etc. We have now, in this closing verse, a bold and emphatic statement of the ever-blessed truth which forms the basis of this marvellous negotiation between the God of all grace and those who consent to sit down at His feet in Jesus, and receive His words (Deut. 33:3). Two things are here contemplated by the Spirit: the positive work of God, and its definitive intent; and in connection with these we have the Lord Jesus and His work presented to us under two entirely opposite aspects, though morally the truth is one. He is represented first as having been made "sin," and secondly as being personally and eternally the "righteousness of God." And first, let us carefully distinguish between being made sin and being made a sinner.* A sacrificial substitute is of necessity distinct from what it represents, and the more strongly marked this difference is, the more exactly is the idea of vicarious expiation realized, which is that innocence suffers in the place of guilt. Under the law a clean beast was the appointed means of showing forth at once, both the principle of vicarious satisfaction, and the insufficiency of anything that man could lay upon God's altar to make an effectual atonement for his soul. For while contrasted in its moral condition, the substituted victim must in nature be identical with what it represents. The language here employed by the apostle receives an ample illustration from the detailed account recorded for us in the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus of the sacrificial ordinances of the annual day of atonement. Because the offered victim had transferred to it on that great day the whole measure and variety of Israel's sins, it was made by that act to be, in the eye of the Avenger, the thing it bore, and from which it had its sacrificial name. So is it also with our divine Redeemer and His passion. For the suffering of death He was made a little lower than the angels, but before the hour of His mortal pains arrived, He had lived, and borne, and wrought, and spoken, in such sort as to prove Himself to be in truth the Holy One of God. From beneath, as well as from above, this witness had been borne to Him whom men alone despised (Mark 1. 24). Jesus was made sin for us, when having accepted at the Father's hands the cup which crowned the measure of His perfect obedience, He, by the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God. For upon the Lamb, thus self-devoted, but of old ordained, God laid in His good pleasure the iniquity of us all. Things that He knew not were then laid unresisted to His charge, and in the completeness of His character as our Substitute, He appropriates the burden then imposed, confessing what He knew not as His own. For us God made Him to be sin; putting on Him who knew no sin the thing which makes as naturally what we are; and treating His well-beloved Son, for our sakes, as if He were indeed the very thing which then in our stead He bore.

But while the Godhead of the Saviour is everywhere attested by the Spirit, and shines brightly and steadily for faith through all the varied manifestations of that "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" which it is the believer's wealth to know (2 Cor. 8:9), and never more vividly than when hanging on the cross, the point of the apostle's teaching in these words is the exhaustive completeness of God's great work of propitiatory reconciliation through the dying obedience of His Son. In the brevity of the statement its great force consists. When God made Him to be sin for us, all that by divine propriety of speech could be thus designated was objectively contemplated by the eye of Him who is the Judge of all, as He looked down upon His dying Christ. It is a positive act, a new and strange work, and which never could be wrought a second time, that the Holy Spirit here attests; and the terms which He employs are evidently chosen with a special reference to the magnitude of that which is described. God made the worlds by Jesus Christ, and will create them yet again; He made also Him who knew no sin to be sin in our stead (amartian epoiesen). No language can express more forcibly both the absoluteness of His will who did not spare His Son, and the natural and perfect spotlessness of Him who came to do it. Had there been in the man Jesus any thought or natural capacity of sinning, God could not have made Him to be sin. Such speech would then be both superfluous and untrue. He does not make us sinners. What we are by birth, and inheritance He suffers to appear in practice to our own confusion, and then lays upon the holy and blameless One the iniquity of us all. Let the tried half-believer, who with a thoroughly awakened conscience may be toiling in spirit under the weight of his own sins, consider well these gracious words, and learn quickly the first lesson of an acceptable obedience by consenting to the will of God. He has wrought this wondrous thing. Shall we refuse or hesitate to own His hand? He has transferred sin from sinners to the Just One; shall we dispute the fact because of its contrariety to our thoughts? Nay, He has both done it, and done it for our sakes, that by wisely considering His work we may learn to know and love the God with whom we have to do.

Nor has love's great sacrifice been made without a worthy end. If God's beloved was made sin by Him, it was that we might become (hina hemeis genometha) the righteousness of God in Him. Let us first notice a significant distinction which exists between the words which the apostle is here taught to use when speaking of the Saviour on the one hand, and on the other of the fruit of the travail of His soul — a distinction but imperfectly expressed in our translation. When he demonstrates the imputation of our sin to Christ, the strongest possible term is employed, in order to impress the completeness of the sacrificial transfer of all our burden to the Lord: "He made Him to be sin for us." But when the result is in contemplation, there is a change also of expression; it is not said "that we might be made,"but "that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." We are not made, or constituted substantively, any other thing than that we naturally are. Our guilt is indeed transferred to Him, but not in the same sense His worthiness to us. We cease to be guilty in the sight of God, but does He cease to be the Just One? By imputation we are as He is, but in living fact He only is the righteousness of God. We become so by our faith in Him. Sinners are sinners, whether saved or lost. A saint is a sinner saved, since by virtue of the faith which joins him to the Saviour, he is become by imputation what his dead and risen Sponsor personally is. Now in name, in action, and in everlasting truth, the Lamb of God is equally the righteousness of God.

Now this same liberty of access is proclaimed, but the ground of it is an already accomplished work: "He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin." The main feature of atonement is here very clearly given; and the force is made plainer by the contrast of words and thought. In the same sense was Christ made sin for us as that in which we are made righteousness; and as the sin was the sin of man, so the righteousness is the righteousness of God. Moreover, as it was not in Himself that He was made sin, for He knew none; so not in ourselves are we made divine righteousness, but in Him. The antithesis in all this no one can doubt to be designed; and it makes evident the meaning of the whole. Christ who knew no sin was identified with it upon the cross; we as the fruit of His work, in our place in Him, are identified with the righteousness of God. In Him dying upon the tree is seen the sin of man; but the righteousness of God is seen, wonderful to say, in sinners being accepted in the Beloved.

"Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though GOD DID BESEECH you by us; WE PRAY YOU in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. FOR he has made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." What a message! God now beseeching you to be reconciled to Himself, because He once on the cross took up with Christ the question of sin. There and then His judgment of it fell upon Christ, so that now whoever believes in Him stands before God in all the value of that work by which God has been glorified and sin put away. God's righteousness, and His estimate of that work, are seen not only in His taking Christ out of the grave into glory, but by His putting the believer in Christ in the very same place before Him that Christ now has. In death on the cross He took our place, in life now before God He gives us His place. What righteousness and what love!

There is a profound depth in verse 21 that defies all our feeble attempts at explanation. That God should make Christ to be a sacrifice for sin might be explained in terms of those Old Testament sacrifices that furnish a type of His sacrifice. But that God should make Him, who knew no sin, TO BE SIN for us baffles all explanation. Again, we might offer some explanation of how we are justified, of how righteousness is imputed to those who believe. But how we may in Him be MADE THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD is beyond us. Sin wholly characterized us, and all that we were He was made when He died on the cross. Righteousness wholly characterizes God, and that which He is we are made in Christ.

I would also observe here that there is much force and value in the word "made:" it shows out most fully that righteousness was just as foreign to the nature of man as sin was to the nature of Christ. Man had no righteousness of his own, or in other words, he knew no righteousness, and therefore he had to be "made" righteousness. Christ "knew no sin," and therefore had to be "made sin" in order that we might be made righteousness, even "the righteousness of God in Him." But further, we learn from the passage to which we are referring that the Lord Jesus having been "made sin for us," is not more real, not more true, not more palpable, than that the believer is "made righteousness in Him."

Crucifixion, as the reader is most probably aware, was not a Jewish, but a Gentile mode of punishment; but hanging on a tree was practised by the Jews on the bodies of those whom they judged worthy, not of death only, but of especial infamy as well. With a prophetic reference to the death of deaths which Christ must undergo, not only as the fore-ordained and acceptable Lamb of God, but also as the despised and rejected of men; Moses declared the person who should be thus treated to be "the curse of God" (Deut. 21:23, margin). Surely, the solemn and marvellous force of this is evident. Without sin no curse could have existed; the curse causeless cannot come. But it cleaves, as its very shadow, to iniquity. Now, the blessed God who cursed in His holiness the first sinner and original tempter of mankind, without hope of revocation, and for his victim's sake cursed also the ground on which he walked, had provided in His eternal purpose, not a curse, but a blessing for the predestined heirs of grace. But sin had meanwhile been demonstrated, by the law, in its exceeding sinfulness. Transgression provoked wrath, and the law's curse was the voice of inexorable justice, which blood only could appease. Sins must be penally visited, as well as sacrificially annulled, and righteousness must be established in its place, before the curse could be supplanted by the blessing. And both these things were accomplished by the cross, when God "made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might become the, righteousness of God in Him." Made sin sacrificially for us, as the offered Lamb, He becomes also, in the manner of His sacrifice, "the curse of God." For the law curses every description of iniquity, and all that can be comprehended in the one word "sin" was, by the grace of God to usward, laid judicially upon His ever-blessed Son.

The words "for he has made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin," show the bearing of His holy life as proving Him to be a suitable victim to take our sin upon Himself, because He knew it not; and those which follow, "that we might be made the righteousness of God in him," in making this the result of His having "been made sin," show that God's righteousness is exhibited — in reference to His having borne it, and all the consequences of it, in death and judgment — in setting Him at His own right hand, and also in giving us a place morally before Himself, according to the value of that which has been done for us. For when all the punishment of our sin had been gone through fully by that holy One, the righteousness of God must of necessity respond to it in this way, in taking Him out of the grave, placing Him, and us in Him, beyond the reach of the effects of the sin He had so borne.

It is of moment to see the difference between these two verses. Sin had to be put away abstractedly out of God's sight, and hence He had to be perfectly glorified in respect of it, in that place where sin was before Him. Christ was made sin, appeared to abolish it out of God's sight, "to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." Besides this, our sins (guilt) were in question, and Christ bore them in His own body on the tree. The sins are borne, and Christ has them no more. They are gone as guilt before God for ever. The work for the abolition of sin in God's sight is done, and God owns it as done, having glorified Jesus who has glorified Him as to it when made sin. So that for God the thing is settled, and faith recognizes this; but the result is not produced. The work is before God in all its value; but sin still exists in the believer and in the world. Faith owns both, knows that in God's sight it (the work) is done, and rests as God does in it; but the believer knows that sin is still in fact there and in him, only he has a title to reckon himself dead to it, (knowing) that sin in the flesh is condemned, but in the sacrifice for sin, so that there is none for him. The "putting away" of sin is not accomplished, but what does it is; so that God recognizes it, and so does faith, and stands perfectly clear before God as to sin and sins. He that is dead (and we are, as having died with Christ) is justified from sin. Our sins have all been borne. The difficulty partly arises from "sin" being used for a particular act, and also abstractedly. In the word "sins." there is no such ambiguity. A sacrifice for sin may apply to a particular fault; sin entered into the world is another idea. This ambiguity has produced the confusion. J. N. Darby.

Unspeakably solemn is it to consider that the holy and beloved Son of God, Himself knowing no sin, yet as "made sin for us," entered into that awful darkness, and was tried by the fire of God's wrath against it. So indeed it was. He was the Substitute under our penalty, and endured the penalty. Ours it was of course, not His; but He endured it, and endured it as the necessity of holiness, to set His people free.