The Basis of Reconciliation

Few verses state the heart of the gospel with the concentrated power of 2 Corinthians 5:21. In one sentence, the Apostle Paul brings together the sinlessness of Christ, His sacrificial death, divine judgment, reconciliation, and the believer’s standing before God. The whole work is of God, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf.”

The basis of reconciliation is not man’s improvement, religious works, or moral reformation. It is the finished work of Jesus Christ. God has provided in His own Son everything necessary for sinful man to be reconciled to Himself.

The Sin Offering

The language of 2 Corinthians 5:21 takes us directly to the great truth illustrated by the Old Testament sacrifices. Christ was made sin for us in the sense that He stood in the place of sinners and bore the judgment that sin deserved. He became the true and perfect sin offering.

Under the Mosaic Law, the sin offering demonstrated that sin could not simply be ignored. Sin demanded judgment, and sacrifice involved substitution. The innocent victim died in connection with the guilt of another. Yet the sacrifices of the Old Testament could never finally remove sin. They anticipated the perfect sacrifice that would ultimately be offered in Christ. Isaiah prophetically described the substitutionary character of His suffering, “But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him” (Isaiah 53:6).

At Calvary, Christ bore divine judgment as the perfect sin offering. The judgment that our sins deserved fell upon Him. Reconciliation, therefore, rests upon a sacrifice that has already been accomplished.

The Sinless One

Paul is careful to identify the One who was made sin as Him “who knew no sin.” This is fundamental to the gospel. Christ could bear our sins precisely because He had none of His own.

Jesus Christ knew no sin. Sin was entirely foreign to His holy nature. He lived among sinners and encountered temptation, suffering, hatred and every form of human wickedness, yet He remained perfectly holy.

He never sinned. His thoughts, words and actions were always in complete harmony with the will of His Father. Peter wrote that Christ “committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth” (1 Peter 2:22).

There was also no sin within Him. Christ was not merely a man who successfully resisted an inward sinful nature. Unlike fallen humanity, there was no principle of sin within Him. He was “holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26).

Indeed, Christ was incapable of sin because He is the holy Son of God. His temptations were real, but there was nothing within His divine and holy Person that could respond to evil. The One who went to the cross was therefore the spotless Lamb of God, the only One qualified to stand in the sinner’s place.

Made Sin for Us

What, then, does Paul mean when he says that God “made Him…to be sin on our behalf”? It cannot mean that Christ became personally sinful. There was no moral change in Him. The spotless Son of God did not become a sinner upon the cross. His Person remained exactly what He had always been: perfectly holy.

Nor was there any change in the Father’s love for His Son. The Father did not cease loving Christ at Calvary. Christ remained the beloved Son even while fulfilling the terrible work that the Father had given Him to accomplish.

What changed was His judicial position. Christ voluntarily took the place of the guilty before the judgment of God. He was treated as the sin-bearer and endured the judgment associated with that position. This is what the Bible calls substitution. Christ’s death was a substitute, He took the place of guilty sinners and bore the penalty of such sinners on the cross. Christ’s substitutional sacrifice was for all sinners, and anyone can be reconciled to God by faith in that once-for-all blood sacrifice of Christ Jesus.

The sinless One stood where the sinner deserved to stand. The judgment was real because sin is real. God’s holiness could not overlook sin, but His love provided the sacrifice by which sin could be judged and the sinner reconciled. The cross therefore displays both the severity of God’s judgment against sin and the immeasurable greatness of His grace toward sinners.

The Display of Divine Righteousness

The final words of the verse are equally remarkable, “that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Christianity does not merely teach that our sins can be forgiven. The believer receives an entirely new standing before God in Christ.

We are no longer viewed merely according to what we were in Adam. We have been brought into Christ and stand before God in association with Him. Our acceptance does not depend upon our personal righteousness but upon Christ and His accomplished work.

This is the great exchange presented in the verse: the One who knew no sin was made sin for us so that those who possessed no righteousness of their own might become the righteousness of God in Him.

This displays divine righteousness in a remarkable way. God has not compromised His holiness in saving sinners. Sin has been judged. The righteous demands of God have been answered at the cross. Therefore, God can reconcile and justify the believing sinner while remaining perfectly righteous Himself. The believer consequently possesses a standing before God that rests entirely upon Christ.

Reconciled Through Christ

Second Corinthians 5 places this truth within the wider doctrine of reconciliation. Paul had already declared, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Verse 21 explains the righteous basis upon which that reconciliation can be offered.

God does not reconcile sinners to Himself by pretending that sin does not matter. He reconciles through the cross, where the full seriousness of sin was demonstrated and divine judgment was borne by the sinless Substitute.

This is the foundation of reconciliation and one of the greatest truths of the gospel. At Calvary, the holiness of God, the judgment of sin, and the love of God met perfectly in the Person and work of Jesus Christ. The sinless One took our place so that we might possess a place before God that we could never obtain for ourselves. Our reconciliation is therefore not founded upon what we have done for God, but upon what God has done for us in Christ.