Sunday Devotional: 2 Corinthians 5:21

[God] made him, who didn’t know sin, sin on our behalf, so that we may become the righteousness of God in him.

Paul is reminding the Corinthian church of the reconciling work of Christ, through whom we are made new creations (v.17). We who were once at enmity with God have been reconciled to Him through Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. The gospel message is a message of reconciliation: sinful, rebellious people, enslaved to the things of this world, against whom the wrath of God burns in judgment, have been made right with God. Jesus has inaugurated the ultimate peace treaty in which his blood satisfies God’s justice and reconciles us to him.

How does Jesus’s blood reconcile us to God? God made Jesus, the spotless, sinless Lamb of God, to be sin on our behalf, that we may, in him, become God’s righteousness. By Jesus becoming sin, we are covered by the righteousness of Christ. But what does it mean that God made Jesus “sin”? It’s not that He made Jesus perform sinful acts. If that were the case, Jesus would no longer be the sinless sacrifice. Is Paul saying that Jesus carried our sin, though he himself was not tainted by it? It’s true that Jesus took on the penalty for our sins and bore their consequences on our behalf. In his death, Jesus accepted God’s wrath which was justly ours, so that we might be clothed in Christ’s righteousness as a gift of grace. We are only acceptable to God and saved from the horrendous punishment due to us because Jesus stepped in and took our place.

All that is certainly intended by Paul. But that still doesn’t explain why Paul says that God made him sin. Not “the sin-bearer” but sin itself. I think there’s a clue to this in Leviticus.

Leviticus 1-7 details the various offerings that God’s people were to make so they might properly worship Him. There were burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings, and also sin offerings. In each of these offerings, we can look back and see the work of Jesus, giving us access to God, making peace between us and God as well as one another, and so forth. The sin offering (described in Leviticus 4) makes atonement for sins committed, whether intentional or unintentional. It’s interesting that the Hebrew word we translate “sin offering” is hatt’āt, the word for “sin.” There’s not a separate word for “offering”–it’s just “sin.” We understand this to mean a “sin offering” in the context of the passage. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was the Bible used by first-century Christians, translates hatt’āt as hamartia, the Greek word for “sin.” That single Greek word is also used for the sin offering in Leviticus 4, just as the single Hebrew word for “sin” is used in the Hebrew text.

Perhaps this is what Paul had in mind when he wrote 2 Corinthians 5:21. God didn’t simply make Jesus sin, rather He made Jesus a sin offering on our behalf. He is that Leviticus 4 sacrifice to atone for all of our sins. But not just for a season, not as temporary relief from the wrath of God and estrangement from His presence, but as a once-for-all sacrifice. Every sin of ours is covered in that one sin offering that Jesus made with his own blood.

This is why John can write: “If anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2). The Leviticus 4 sin offering of bulls and sheep that Israel performed was a foreshadowing of the final sin offering that Jesus made for all his people throughout the world, in every tribe, tongue, and nation.

Jesus, our sin offering, has made it possible for us to have peace with God and boldly enter His presence. That’s why there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).