The Son Becomes God’s Sin-Offering

“That which the Law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do, God has done. By sending his own Son in the likeness of our sinful nature as a sin offering (peri hamartias), he condemned sin in the flesh.” Romans 8:3 New Catholic Bible (NCB)

“The law was without power because it was made weak by our sinful selves. But God did what the law could not do: He sent his own Son to earth with the same human life that everyone else uses for sin. God sent him to be an offering to pay for sin. So God used a human life to destroy sin.” Easy-to-Read Version (ERV)

“For our sake he made the sinless one a victim for sin, so that in him we might become the uprightness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 New Jerusalem Bible (NJB)

5:21 Christ, who never sinned. Lit., “Christ did not know sin.” The NLT reflects the Heb. yada’ [3045, 3359] (to have personal acquaintance or experience with) behind the Gr. ginōskō [1097, 1182] (to know). Paul affirms that Christ was aware of sin but did not have any personal involvement with it.

to be the offering for our sin. Lit., “to be sin” (hamartia [266, 281]). Paul is probably following a use of “sin” similar to Isa 53:10, LXX, or Lev 4:24, LXX.

so that we could be made right with God through Christ. This expression may be understood as participation in the righteousness of God—people do what God considers right—but the most common meaning of ginomai [1096, 1181] (NLT, “be made”) indicates a change in status. This verse presents a juxtaposition—while God reckoned Christ as “sin,” he reckoned believers as “righteous.” (Ralph P. Martin and Carl N. Toney, “2 Corinthians,” in Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, vol. 15 [Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2009], p. 319; emphasis mine)

The images are drawn from the Old Testament, most likely the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, who bore the sin of many and became an offering for sin. Yet the language baffles close analysis and contains several expressions not found elsewhere in Paul (e.g., believers becoming the righteousness of God in 5:21). This suggests that Paul was using creedal material that was known in the churches (akin to 1 Cor 15:3–5) but adapted by him to serve his purposes. The modern reader, however, is left to puzzle over these profound teachings. For instance, how did the crucified Christ become sin for us? And, from the standpoint of exegesis, why does Paul use the appeal, “Come back to God” (more accurately, “Be reconciled to God”), to believers at Corinth, who presumably have already been reconciled as forgiven sinners?

The first question finds its answer in the spiritual reality that Christ became a substitutionary offering through his death on the cross. The leading thought is of Christ’s sacrifice as the sin offering mentioned in Isaiah 53:10 (or less likely as the animal of Leviticus 16). Christ’s death became the death of all in the sense that he died the death they should have died. The penalty of their sins was borne by him, so he died in their place. This is why his love has such a compelling power over believers and engenders in them such undying gratitude (Tasker 1958:86)…

The teaching in 5:18–21 has been often overlooked in the debate on penal substitution, meaning that God in Christ took the penalty for human sin, bore its consequences, and in Christ’s death opened the way to forgiveness and a new life. Critics of penal substitution have fastened on some unguarded statements, for example, by W. Grudem (1994:575), who writes: “God … poured out on Jesus the fury of his wrath: Jesus became the object of the intense hatred of sin and vengeance against sin which God had patiently stored up since the beginning of the world.” It is not surprising that such a view of the cross leads to the accusation that it presents a caricature of God as a “cosmic child abuser” (S. Chalke and A. Mann 2003:182): “The cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father punishing his Son for an offence he has not committed.”

Admittedly, the historical events of Good Friday were marked by violence, but the apostle Paul is careful never to say or imply that God was angry with his Son. Rather, as this text states, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. As I. H. Marshall (2007:62) writes, “God … initiated the cross and … he … bore the sin of the world.”

So in 5:18–21, we have the center of Paul’s teaching on the Atonement, with its stress on human estrangement from God by reason of sin and the accomplishment of God “when in the death of Christ He put away everything that on His side meant estrangement, so that He might come and preach peace” to guilty sinners (Denney 1900). Or, as A. M. Hunter (1954:91–92) puts it in remarking on 5:21, the Cross was “a divine deed wherein, by God’s appointing, our condemnation came upon the sinless Christ, that for us there might be condemnation no more.” The same writer adds a further elucidation: “Christ’s suffering was ‘penal’ in the sense that He had to realize to the full the divine reaction against sin in the human race in which He was incorporated.”

Nor should we overlook the application of this teaching. What God has done in Christ needs to be brought home to sinners. It is important to grasp the sense of these verses. It is not so much that God calls on us to lay aside our hostility to him and be at peace. Rather the accent falls on objective atonement. He invites us to enter into the peace with himself that he has made possible by the sacrifice of his Son (Rom 5:1). The reconciliation on his side is complete, for Christ’s work on the cross is accomplished (John 19:30). Paul’s gospel call, therefore, is “Receive the reconciliation. Believe that God has at tremendous cost, through the death of his sinless Son, who took the sinner’s place and died under sin’s curse (Gal 3:13), put away all that on his part stood between you and peace (Rom 5:6–11).”(Ibid., pp. 319–321; emphasis mine)

The reason trespasses are not credited to our account is that God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (v. 21*). The fact that Christ had no sin is well documented in the New Testament. He was tempted as we are “yet was without sin” (Heb 4:15); one “set apart from sinners” (Heb 7:26). The niv had no sin is actually “knew no sin” (ton mē gnonta hamartian). The verb ginōskō (to know) denotes personal acquaintance with something. Christ did not possess the knowledge of sin that comes through personal experience. He did not sin either in thought (“in him is no sin,” 1 Jn 3:5) or in action (“he committed no sin,” 1 Pet 2:22).

The rest of verse 21 is theologically elusive. The first problem is to determine the sense in which Christ was made … sin for us. There are three major approaches. One approach is to understand made … sin as “treated as a sinner.” As our substitute, Christ came to stand in that relation with God which normally is the result of sin, that is, estranged from God and the object of his wrath (Barrett 1973:180). The second approach is to identify made … sin with Christ’s assuming a human nature. Through the incarnation Christ was made “in the likeness of sinful man” (Rom 8:3). The final approach is to interpret verse 21 sacrificially as “made to be a sin offering.” This draws on the Old Testament notion that God made the life of his servant a guilt offering (Is 53:10).

On the whole, this last interpretation seems the likeliest one. The equivalent Hebrew term hatta’t can actually mean either “sin” or “sin offering” (as in Lev 4:8–35). Also, the logic of verse 19 almost demands it. If our debts are not posted to our account, it is because someone else has legally assumed them—much as the scapegoat did on the Day of Atonement (Lev 16) and the guilt offering did on other occasions (Lev 4–5). This is why God can make overtures of friendship toward those who are otherwise his enemies.

If the exact point of “made sin” is lost to us, the thrust is clear. So closely did Christ identify with the plight of humanity that their sin became his sin. In the final analysis this is not so different from the idea in 1 Peter 2:24 that Christ himself bore our sins in his body up onto the tree. Paul may well be thinking of Isaiah 53:12, where the servant of the Lord is to be numbered with the transgressors and bear the sin of many.

In identifying with our sin, Christ paved the way for us to become identified with the righteousness of God. The genitive can be subjective (“the righteousness that God gives”—that is, a righteous character), objective (“the righteousness we have before God”—that is, a right standing) or possessive (“the righteousness that God possesses”—that is, we share the righteousness that characterizes God himself). In Paul’s writings the noun dikaiosynē typically is used of character. It is not merely that we acquire a right standing or do good works; we actually become righteous—although the latter may well presume the former. This is no legal fiction. For in Christ (or perhaps “through Christ,” en autō) we truly assume his righteousness, just as Christ assumed our sin (Brown 1978:169). (Linda L. Belleville, 2 Corinthians, vol. 8, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series [Westmont, IL: IVP Academic, 1996], 2 Co 5:18–21; emphasis mine)

21. Before proceeding to his appeal to the Corinthians in 6:1–13, for which he prepares the way in verse 20, Paul makes a highly compressed but extremely profound statement concerning the work of Christ: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us. This is the way Paul (in this letter) describes the basis upon which God reconciled us to himself. From this statement we get some idea of why the cross, as the expression of the love of God in Christ, had such great motivating power in the apostle’s life.

Paul describes Christ as one who had no sin (ton mē gnonta hamartian; lit. ‘who did not know sin’). To ‘know’ sin in this context is not to know about sin, but to know it by being personally involved in it. The consistent witness of the New Testament is that Jesus did not sin (cf. Matt. 27:4, 24; Luke 23:47; John 8:46; Heb. 4:15; 1 Pet. 1:19; 2:22). There may be an allusion here to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (‘he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth’, Isa. 53:9). It may be inferred from Paul’s statement that Christ had no sin, that only a sinless one could, through his death, be the agent of reconciliation (cf. 1 Pet. 1:19).

What Paul stresses is that God made the sinless one to be sin for our sake. Various interpretations have been suggested for this profound statement: (a) Christ was made a sinner; (b) Christ was made a sin-offering; (c) Christ was made to bear the consequences of our sins. The first suggestion is rightly rejected out of hand. The second can be supported by appeal to Paul’s use of sacrificial terminology elsewhere to bring out the significance of Christ’s death (e.g. Rom. 3:25; 1 Cor. 5:7). It has also been pointed out that in Leviticus 4:24 and 5:12 (lxx) the same word, ‘sin’ (hamartia), is used to mean ‘sin-offering’. It appears to be used in the same way in Romans 8:3, and it probably carries this meaning here in verse 21 as well. The third suggestion, that Christ was made to bear the consequences of our sins, also has merit. It is supported by the fact that in Galatians 3:13 Paul interprets the work of Christ in terms of his bearing the consequences of our sins: ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.”’ A ‘both and’ approach is probably best—Christ was made a sin-offering and as such bore the consequences of our sins.

The statement, God made him who had no sin to be sin for us (v. 21a), is balanced in antithetical parallelism by the words, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (v. 21b). We must construe the former in such a way that the latter is understood as its antithetical counterpart. In seeking to understand what it means to become the righteousness of God, we receive assistance from other passages where Paul touches upon the same subject (Rom. 3:21–26; Phil. 3:7–9). The righteousness of God, understood as that which believers have or become, is the gift of a right relationship with God, based upon the fact that God has adjudicated in their favour by refusing, because of the death of Christ in their place, to take account of their sins.

If becoming the righteousness of God means God has adjudicated in our favour and put us in right relationship with himself, then to be made sin, being the antithetical counterpart of this, will mean that God has adjudicated against Christ (because he took upon himself the burden of our sins; cf. Isa. 53:4–6, 12), with the result that the relationship of the human Jesus with God was (momentarily, but terribly beyond all human comprehension) severed. If this interpretation is correct, then we can perhaps begin to understand something of the agony of Gethsemane: ‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done’ (Luke 22:42), and the awful cry of dereliction from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46). We obviously stand at the brink of a great mystery, and our understanding of it can be only minimal.

Early Church Fathers wrestled with the implications of this mystery. ‘It is not “as if, when Jesus was fixed upon the wood of the cross, the Omnipotence of the Father’s Deity had gone away from Him; seeing that God’s and Man’s nature were so completely joined in him that the union could not be destroyed by punishment nor by death” (Leo I, Serm. 68.1).”’ ‘“It was not he who was forsaken either by the Father or by his own Godhead,” wrote Gregory of Nazianzus. “But, as I said, he was in his own person representing us. For we were the forsaken and despised before” but now by his representative act saved (Orat. 30.5).’ Colin G. Kruse, 2 Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary, ed. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Second edition, vol. 8, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries [Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2015], pp. 172–174)