2 Corinthians 5:21

2 Corinthians 5:21 condenses the ground of Paul’s appeal and expresses it in another paradox. This verse explains the "how" of full reconciliation and takes us to the very heart of the atonement.

"In these few direct words the Apostle sets forth the gospel of reconciliation in all its mystery and all its wonder. There is no sentence more profound in the whole of Scripture; for this verse embraces the whole ground of the sinner’s reconciliation to God and declares the incontestable reason why he should respond to the ambassadorial entreaty. Indeed, it completes the message with which the Christian ambassador has been entrusted." [Note: Hughes, p. 211. Cf. Broomall, p. 1272.]

Paul probably intended that we understand what he wrote about Jesus Christ becoming sin in three ways. First, God treated Jesus as if He were a sinner when He poured out His wrath on Jesus, who bore the guilt and penalty for all people’s sins. Jesus’ sinlessness is a clear revelation of Scripture (Isaiah 53:9; Hebrews 4:15; Hebrews 7:26; 1 Peter 2:22; 1 John 3:5). Second, Jesus Christ became a sin offering (Leviticus 4:24; Leviticus 5:12), the perfect and final one. Some Hebrew words mean both "sin" and "sin offering" (i.e., hatta’t and ’asam; Isaiah 53:6; Isaiah 53:10). Third, He became the locus of sin under the judgment of God, the place where God judged sin.

"So complete was the identification of the sinless Christ with the sin of the sinner, including its dire guilt and its dread consequence of separation from God, that Paul could say profoundly, ’God made him . . . to be sin for us.’" [Note: Harris, p. 354.]

Jesus Christ was the target of God’s punishment of sinners God having imputed the sin of all humankind to Him (cf. Romans 8:3; 1 Corinthians 15:3). Now God makes us the targets of His righteousness and imputes that to us (1 Corinthians 1:30; Philippians 3:9). The effect of God imputing righteousness to believers is that now God sees us as He sees His righteous Son, namely, fully acceptable to Him.

"Paul has chosen this exceptional wording ["made sin for us"] in order to emphasize the ’sweet exchange’ whereby sinners are given a righteous status before God through the righteous one who absorbed their sin (and its judgment) in himself." [Note: Bruce, p. 211.]

"Here, then is the focal point to which the long argument has been building up. Paul, having himself been reconciled to God by the death of Christ, has now been entrusted by God with the task of ministering to others that which he has himself received, in other words, reconciliation. 2 Corinthians 5:20 then follows from this as a dramatic double statement of his conception of the task . . . That is to say, when Paul preaches, his hearers ought to hear a voice from God, a voice which speaks on behalf of the Christ in whom God was reconciling the world. Astonishingly, the voice of the suffering apostle is to be regarded as the voice of God himself, the God who in Christ has established the new covenant, and who now desires to extend its reconciling work into all the world. The second half of the verse should not, I think, be taken as an address to the Corinthians specifically, but as a short and pithy statement of Paul’s whole vocation: ’On behalf of Christ, we make this appeal: "Be reconciled to God!"’

"What the whole passage involves, then, is the idea of the covenant ambassador, who represents the one for whom he speaks in such a full and thorough way that he actually becomes the living embodiment of his sovereign-or perhaps, in the light of 2 Corinthians 4:7-18 and 2 Corinthians 6:1-10, we should equally say the dying embodiment." [Note: N. T. Wright, "On Becoming the Righteousness of God," in Pauline Theology. Vol. II: 1 & 2 Corinthians, pp. 205, 206.]