GraceTrax

Part II

What can this mean: Christ was made to be sin?

It cannot mean Christ literally became guilty; and it does not mean merely that He became a sin offering.

What, then, does it mean?

It can mean only one thing: He was made sin by imputation. He was made sin "for our sake"—on our behalf; on account of our sin. He became, in a figurative sense and in a judicial sense, the embodiment and the symbol of our wickedness.

The expression is explained by the prophecy of Isaiah 53:6: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all."

Our sin, with all its guilt and shame, was imputed to Him; put to His account; reckoned as if it were His—even though it was not.

Again, this time in the words of Isaiah 53:4: "he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." What griefs and what sorrows? The punishment for our guilt. Verse 5 makes it explicit: "he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed."

That's as clear as it can be. He took the burden and the guilt of our sin on Himself without actually becoming sinful. Our sin was imputed to Him, or reckoned to His account, and He paid for it.

"Made . . . to be sin"

Try to conceive of a world of sin gathered up and concentrated in one ugly mass—fornication, murder, vile thoughts, every expression of human cruelty, and every evil manifestation of human wickedness in one hideous heap. You and I, fallen and sinful creatures though we are, could not bear to look at it. How much less could a pure and holy God stand to see it?

But God the Father treated His own Son as if He represented that mass of sin—as if He were the pure, distilled essence of everything a holy God cannot endure-as if He were the very personification of everything God must judge with an outpouring of divine wrath and banish from His presence.

And Christ drank that cup of wrath "for our sake." That's what the text is saying. Paul is actually describing a double imputation in this verse. In other words, the imputation goes both ways: the believer's guilt imputed to Christ, and Christ's righteousness reckoned to the believer. The parallel is precise, purposeful, and clear. That’s why 2 Corinthians 5:21 is impossible to explain adequately without understanding the concept of imputation that lies at the heart of Paul's teaching on justification.