I'd invite you to please open your copy of God's Word to 2 Corinthians 5. 2 Corinthians 5. And I will begin reading for us in verse 11, but the sermon text and our focus is all going to be dialed in on verse 21. 2 Corinthians chapter 5, I'll begin reading in verse 11, give ear now to God's holy, inerrant, and life-giving word. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others, but what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you cause to boast about us so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, that one has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God who, through Christ, reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself. not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. And our verse, for our sake. He made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. I would remind you of the words that Moses left the Israelites with in Deuteronomy. This is no empty word for you, my friends. This is your very life. Let us pray. Great God of heaven, We give thanks to you for your word, for we know that every word that proceeds from your mouth is life for us. Would you sanctify your people now even in the truth? Your word, oh Father, is truth. Amen. There is a famous scenario that plays out in many sales job interviews. At the end of the interview, the prospective employer will lean over the table and look in the applicant's eyes and say, sell me this pen. The purpose of the exercise is to see if the applicant understands the art of sales. Now, what most commonly happens in this exercise is the would-be salesman begins exalting the virtues and the glories of the pen. How elegant it writes, how finely it's crafted, the quality of the ink, and all other manner of things like that. But what the interview is looking for is a skilled salesman. And a skilled salesman does not begin by exalting the product, but rather a skilled salesman begins by highlighting and exalting the potential customer. They will ask questions about the needs and the desires of the customer so that then they can tailor the presentation of the pen to the needs of the client. That's all well and good for sales, but unfortunately in our day and age, many evangelical Christian organizations and even churches treat the presentation and proclamation of the gospel just like that. Find out what the people want and make the message of Jesus fit that in some way or the other. The list is virtually endless. There's even one relatively well-known outlet that recently published an article, The Gospel According to the Lyrics of Taylor Swift. This is a thing that happens. And the Apostle Paul would remind us that we are not salesmen. He says explicitly earlier in this letter, 2 Corinthians 2, 17, we are not like so many others, peddlers of God's word. But as men of sincerity, as committed, commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ. And while Paul is not a salesman, he does have a way of cutting through all the distractions, cutting through all of the confusion and getting right to the heart of the matter, getting right to the heart of the need of those with whom he is speaking. And if you know anything about the church at Corinth, you know that there were a lot of needs. There were a lot of problems with this church. In 1 Corinthians chapter 5, we read that there is not only toleration of, but celebration of sexual immorality. Read later in 1 Corinthians and you'll see that people are getting intoxicated or showing up intoxicated to the Lord's Supper, God forbid. It's a church that's greatly wrought with division. Some say, I follow Apollos. Others say, I follow Cephas. And yet others say, I follow Paul. And on top of all this, the church had what was, at best, a strained relationship with the Apostle Paul himself. He speaks in 2 Corinthians 2 of a painful visit that had taken place in the not so distant past. And all of these problems in the church, they had given way to the rise of wicked men. They had given way to the rise of rival teachers who took power to themselves in Paul's absence. They attacked Paul's ministry as one that is marked by weakness and suffering. They even said his preaching was weak, which I confess is, that's a hard charge to levy against the Apostle Paul in my mind, that his preaching would be weak. It may be unpalatable, but weak. These so-called super apostles, though, were telling the people at Corinth, The reason that you're weak, the reason that you're suffering is you're following this guy who is weak and suffering. And after all, who wants to be weak and suffering like Paul in this world? And so Paul will spend a lot of time in this letter defending his ministry. But he does so in a way that is very different than many of us would be tempted to do. He doesn't say, you call my preaching weak, I will show you strong preaching. No. He doesn't defend his ministry by exalting and lifting up himself. Instead, he focuses on their greatest need. He focuses on our greatest need. It is as though throughout 2 Corinthians, Paul says, yeah, I know they're saying lots of bad things about me. And I would like to instead talk to you about the Lord Jesus Christ. And 2 Corinthians 5.21 is really the centerpiece of that argument. Colin Cruz says of this verse that Paul makes a highly compressed but extremely profound statement concerning the work of Christ. the great old Princeton theologian and professor B.B. Warfield called this verse Paul's mantra. He said that it is the carefully compressed, but extreme, excuse me, he said that it was the well-weighed and carefully compacted expression of the very core of Paul's gospel. Now ordinarily, I would make the effort to summarize our passage in a single sentence and then give you section headings. But because our passage is a single sentence, I will instead just give you the section headings. Today, what we're going to consider from 2 Corinthians 5.21 is what God did and why God did it. Simply put, what God did and why he did it. First of all, what did God do? Well, among other things, according to our verse, He made him to be sin who knew no sin. Sometimes we can get lost in the pronouns of it all, so if I could put it a different way, he's saying, God the Father made God the Son to be sin. And if we're going to appreciate the rest of what this verse says, we need to spend time reflecting on that simple statement. We must meditate on the sheer audacity of that clause. A more literal rendering out of the Greek, at least with respect to word order, would be, the one having never known sin, he uses a very strong negation, the one having never known sin, sin became or sin was made. To say that he never knew sin is not a denial of his awareness of sin, certainly not. That's the reason for the incarnation, right? That he might put away, that he might destroy the works of the evil one. Jesus is certainly aware of sin and aware of its consequences. Rather, the word no here, it has the idea of to have a personal acquaintance or experience with. And Jesus never had a personal acquaintance with sin. Sinners, yes. Sin, no. He is the creator of the universe, the eternal son of God, the second person of the Trinity. He is in absolutely every way perfect and pure. The true apple of his father's eye. The cheapest among 10,000. The one who is altogether lovely. He alone. did not know sin, not in thought, not in word, not in deed. What is sin anyway? Westminster's Shorter Catechism, number 14, very helpfully and succinctly defines the Bible's teaching on what sin is. Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. We tend to think more about the latter of those two than the first. We tend to, and rightly, often think of sin as breaking God's law, transgressing God's law, doing those things that we ought not to do. This is what many people call sins of commission, things that you commit that are contrary to what you ought to be doing. But that catechetical definition gives us a helpful balance. It's also the want or lack of conformity unto God's law. It's not only doing things you ought not to do, it's failing to do things that you ought to do. These are sins of omission, sins that you do by omitting certain actions you ought to have taken. And it gets heavier than that. As any serious student of the Bible will tell you, Obedience to God's word, it also has a heart element to it. This is what Moses told the Israelites in Deuteronomy chapter 10. You must be circumcised in the foreskin of your heart. Or Paul would rejoice over the Christians at Rome in Romans 6, 17, praising God that you have become obedient from the heart. Parents understand this distinction very well. I don't know about your home, but it is not uncommon in the early home for a child to do precisely as they are told, but with such an attitude that takes the obedience to the letter of the law and makes it disobedience to the heart or the intention of the law. And so with all of that understanding in mind, we're not only saying that Jesus never once violated the law of God, What we're saying is that he always kept it in its fullest sense. Put a different way, consider, for example, the ninth commandment. You shall not bear false witness. When we say that Jesus knew no sin, we are not only saying that he never lied, nor are we only saying that he always told the truth, though both of those things are correct. We're saying he always told the truth, In love, he always did the right thing the right way. He was the one who said, to do the will of my father is my meat and drink. Now I trust that in a church such as this, And I stood at the back of the sanctuary this morning as we were all coming into worship, and I'd taken an informal survey, and I had asked you, do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth is absolutely perfect and pure in every way? I like to think that this congregation would have done quite well on that survey. The results would have been pleasing to your pastor. So I'm under no delusion of imparting new information to the majority of you. But, I labor the point because we often take the sinlessness of Christ for granted. And we brush it off and we say, well, I mean, he is God after all, and so he is. But he is also fully man. As the Chalcedonian definition puts it, he is perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity. The same truly God and truly man. The author of Hebrews would put it this way. He, that is Jesus, had to be made like his brothers, me and you, in every respect. Hebrews 2.17. And then he says again in chapter 4. that that is why Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he has been made like us in every respect yet without sin. This one who is like us in every way never sinned. Consider how much of our sin, yours and mine, that we freely chalk up to our own human frailty. I'm sorry I fell through on that commitment. I'm just really tired and exhausted. I'm sorry I was short with you in the hallway. I'm just under a lot of stress and pressure at work. I'm sorry I yelled. I was just really hungry. Jesus had all those human frailties. He got tired. He suffered stress to the point that he's sweating drops of blood in the garden of the Gethsemane. He got hungry. He had all those human properties and infirmities, and yet he never sinned. Not once did he neglect a duty due to oversight or fatigue. Not once did he ever speak an unloving word. Not once did he ever lash out in uncontrolled anger. That is the one who knew no sin. That is the pearl of great price, the Lord of glory himself. And what did God the Father do to this one? He made him to be sin. That's what our verse says. That's what God has done. Before we move on, though, we have two questions to answer. First, when? And then secondly, in what way was Christ made to be sin? When was he made to be sin? That's a very easy question to answer. God made him to be sin on the cross. Our passage, as we heard in the broader reading of it, is all about the ministry of reconciliation. And whenever the Apostle Paul speaks about reconciliation, he is always talking about the sin-atoning death of Christ on the cross. Consider just some of these verses. Romans 5 and verse 10, Paul writes, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. Ephesians 2, 15 and 16, that he, that is Christ, might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross. Colossians chapter one and verse 20, and through him, that is through Christ, to reconcile to himself, that is God the Father, all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood the cross. On the cross, which is the epicenter of redemptive history, that is where God made him who knew no sin to be sin. this great sin offering. It's what all of the patriarchal sacrificial system pointed to. It's what the tabernacle was about. It's what the temple was about. It's what the four gospels were written to record. It's what all of the epistles seek to explain the implications thereof in one way or another. And what happened there is that he made him who knew no sin to be sin. In what way then? certainly not by anything that he did, nor by anything infused into him. He did not change nature into a sinner. He was made to be sin by way of imputation. Imputation is a technical theological term familiar to many of you, but perhaps not all. What it means is he was made to be sin by having the sin of others, namely the elect, credited to his account. It's as though all of the sin that was on my register and yours was taken off of me and not put into him, but laid on top of him. He was crushed. The prophet Isaiah says, not for general iniquities, not for theoretical iniquities, not for possible iniquities, for our iniquities, Isaiah 53.5. So we ask the question, why was he flogged by Roman soldiers, beaten within an inch of his life by them? Because your sins were imputed to him. Why was the crown of thorns pressed on his head? Your sins were imputed to him. Why were there nails driven through his wrists and his ankles? Your sins were imputed to him. Why, oh why, did his God forsake him? Because your sins were imputed to him. As we'll sing in a few moments, who was the guilty who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee. T'was I, Lord Jesus, I, it was I, crucified thee. He was delivered. for our trespasses. This is what we have to understand by that expression. He made him who knew no sin to be sin. At the cross, our sins, the sins of all who believe, were taken from us and they were laid upon the Lord Jesus along with all of the hellish punishment that goes with them. Not in part, but the whole. That is what God has done. And now, with our remaining time, We'll consider the second question, why? Why would God do such a scandalous and hard thing? Let's look again at our verse. He made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that, in order that, for the purpose that, we might become the righteousness of God in him. God made Christ to be sin so that he might make you righteous. The gospel is not only that you can have your sins forgiven, though I don't say only in any way to diminish that, but it is more than that. It is that being united to Christ by faith, you are made righteous. In other words, while Jesus absolutely took to himself a true body and a reasonable soul for the purpose that he might die for the sins of his people, that is not all that he did for you. He took to himself a true body and a reasonable soul so that he might live the perfect sinless life that you were called to live and have failed to do. that he might do that on your behalf. This doctrine is often called the active obedience of Christ, and it's referred to in many places in the New Testament. I think maybe most profoundly in that well-known episode where Jesus comes to John the Baptist, and he's seeking baptism. And John says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not the way it should be. You ought to be baptizing me. And what's our Lord say? Suffer it to be so. Allow it to be so, for it is fitting that you and I should fulfill all righteousness. Christ died on your behalf, the death you deserve to die, but he also lived the life that you are called to live. The glory of 2 Corinthians 5.21 is it does not only teach the imputation of our sins to Christ, but it teaches the great Protestant doctrine of double imputation, our sins to him and his righteousness to us. Without this doctrine of double imputation, we have no gospel, we have no hope, If I could say reverently and somewhat provocatively, it is not enough that Jesus died and that he died for thee. I love that hymn and I love what it's getting at, but there's more. If Jesus, all he did for you was die for your sins, you would still be unable to stand before God on Judgment Day because the requirement is personal perfect righteousness. J. Gresham Machen explains, the passive sufferings of Christ, by which he means the crucifixion, among other things, but primarily the crucifixion, the passive sufferings of Christ discharged the enormous debt that we owe due to our sins and the sin of Adam. In effect, Jesus' passive obedience alone would bring our account from helplessly overdrawn back to a balance of zero. Our debt would be retired. But having our debt retired and our sins forgiven does not get us into heaven. It simply returns us to the original starting point. More must be done if we are to gain heaven. Righteousness must be completely fulfilled, either by us or by another on our behalf, close quote. This, my dear friends, is the fullness of what Christ has done for you. He paid for your sins by dying on the cross, and he perfectly kept God's righteous law on your behalf and for your sake, and we have that verified and confirmed and are assured of it because he no longer is dead, but he has risen. Jesus says in John's Gospel, chapter 14, because I live, so you also will live. R.C. Sproul has a great children's book called The Priest with Dirty Clothes. And I would tell any parents of young children, we live in a time of wonderful Christian children's literature. Take advantage of that. This is one such example. I actually just read it to my children last night. And this book, it beautifully illustrates this doctrine of double imputation. In the story, there's a newly christened young priest named Jonathan. And he receives as his first assignment that he is to go to the king's royal palace to preach his first sermon. And on the way, there's a massive rainstorm and he falls off of his horse and he lands in the mud and his garments are ruined. Hoping for the best, he trucks on to the king's palace. And there's malice to accuse him and say, you cannot stand in the king's presence dressed like this. And you know what? He's right. And the king agrees. The king says, Jonathan, look, I'm sorry for whatever happened to you, but you can't be here dressed like that. Go home. Get straightened out. Get cleaned up. Come back next week and preach your sermon. So Jonathan, grateful for the second chance, he goes home and he spends all day the next day trying to scrub out the mud and the filth of his garments. And wouldn't you know it, he only made it worse. He only made them more filthy, more polluted by these attempts. And so the next day he goes to the town fuller, the town launderer, someone who cleans clothes for a living. He says, can you help me? Sorry, Jonathan. There's nothing I can do about this. Maybe you can go to the bishop and he can give you a new set of priestly clothes. So he goes to the bishop the next day and the bishop says, I'm sorry, there's only one garb per priest. There's nothing I can do for you. Finally, having exhausted all other options like we so often do as well, Jonathan goes to the great prince. He says, what can I do? The prince says, go. to my father's house, I'll take care of everything. So nervously, he goes. He's dressed in his filthy garments. And as malice is accusing him and the king is very concerned, the doors at the back of the room, they swing open. And there's the great prince. But he's not wearing his royal garbs. He's wearing a filthy undergarment And he walks up to the front of the sanctuary with a gift under his arm, and he says, Jonathan, give me your ropes. Let me put those on. And he hands him the present, and he opens it. It's the prince's royal garbs. And the prince looks to his father, and he says, Father, can he stand before you? The father says, yes, my son, as long as he wears your robes, he can stand in my presence. This is an allegory for what the Lord Jesus has done for me and for you. He has taken your filthy garments from you and he has given you his righteous robes. And Sproul here, he's drawing on the prophet Zechariah who writes of this very similar scene in Zechariah chapter 3, Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you. I will clothe you with pure vestment. You see, when you are united to Christ by faith, His very real righteousness is credited to you. Just as your sins and all the punishments that go with them were laid on Christ at the cross, So also His righteousness and all the blessings and all the privileges that go with it are laid on you when you repent and believe the gospel. So why is it that you can approach the throne of grace boldly in prayer? It is because the righteousness of Christ was imputed to you. Why can you, sinner though you be, sinner though I am, why can we have peace of conscience? Because Christ's righteousness It's been imputed to us. Why can you be assured that no condemnation will come upon you? Because Christ's righteousness is imputed to you. What is your hope of eternal life? Christ's righteousness, imputed to you. What a comfort this is for the Christian. Because Jesus died for your sin and gave you his righteousness, you can walk with God in confidence because all that was necessary for your right standing before God was accomplished by him. You are therefore given the spirit of adoption and not fear. With confidence you can now draw an eye because before the throne your surety stands and your name is written on his hands. As comforting as that is for the Christian, it ought also to be sobering for any here today who have not professed faith in Christ. If that is you, either as a covenant child who has yet to profess faith, or perhaps you're visiting and you don't know the Lord, or perhaps you're a member in good standing, but you haven't personally put your faith in Christ, this is a sober warning that apart from that, you are still in your sins, And you must pay for them. And the wages of sin is death. And so it is my prayer for you here this morning, if you have not Christ, that you would put your trust in him alone for salvation. And if you do His sacrifice, it will atone for all of your sins, past, present, and future. And His righteousness will be perfectly yours. You will be, in the words of our passage for 2 Corinthians 5.17, a new creation. The old will pass away, and behold, the new will come. You can walk with Him in confidence. You can also walk with Him in holiness. Because it's not just what he has done for you, it's what he is also doing in you, conforming you to the image of Christ, making you more like him. It's your assurance of glory. Not your works, but his. There's one more reason in our verse why God would do such a thing. The first is to make you righteous. And the second is very related to it. Isaiah 53 10 says, it pleased the Lord to crush him. It pleased the father to crush the son. In what way could that possibly be true? What could possibly motivate the father to send his only begotten son so that whosoever should believe in him should not perish but have eternal life? What could be the possible motivation for that? For God so loved the world. Look at 2 Corinthians 5.21 again. How does it begin? For our sake. The love of God is why He made him who knew no sin to be sin. Specifically, the love of God for you. The cross of Christ is both an expression of God's just and holy wrath against sin, but it is also an expression of His love for His covenant people. God is love. In this the love of God was manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us. and send his son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4, 8-10. Propitiation being another one of those technical theological terms if you're not familiar with it. It means sin atoning, wrath absorbing sacrifice. How does God show his love for his people? He shows it by sending his son. This is not an impersonal transaction. It's true that God has, in a sense, a love for all creatures. It's true that he has common grace blessings sending the rain on the just as well as on the unjust. But the blood of Christ is far too precious to be generic. What does that do? for your love for Christ when you realize that his work on the cross was specifically and personally for you. What assurance this provides for our eternity because we are secured not by our works, which could never be good enough to merit salvation, nor are we secured by our faith, which ebbs and flows more than we would like to admit. I remember some of the greatest parenting advice I ever got happened in the parking lot of this church a couple years ago. And my little girl, I think she was about two at the time, she kept running out into the parking lot, which is a nightmare for every parent. I would run and I'd grab her and bring her back. And then she'd walk back out there. And I'd run and I'd grab her and I'd bring her back. A mother in this congregation, she gently and lovingly told me, Jeff, always cherish when you can physically remove her from danger. See, she was kept safe, not by her desire to be safe, but by me who was trying to keep her safe. Now, the day that I can physically protect her from harm and danger, that's not too much longer. But the day that your Heavenly Father can keep you, that will never end. He will always love you. You are secured spiritually by that love of God that will never let you go. How would it change your anxiety in this present age, your fears about the future, about family, about personal problems, financial concerns, all these things, if you knew that you had a heavenly Father who knows all things and controls all things? And I trust that in a church like this, we all know that well. But what if we added to the equation, he knows all things, he controls all things, and he loves me. I'm really partial to the language of the Heidelberg Catechism. when it's unpacking the Apostles' Creed that we say so often here, and it's explaining what we mean by God the Father Almighty, and the answer in question 26, it says, this means I trust God so much that I do not doubt He will provide whatever I need for body and soul, and will turn to my good whatever adversity He sends upon me in this veil of tears. He is able to do this because He is God Almighty. And he desires to do this because he is a faithful father. I'm sure we all know what it's like to have things on your to-do list that maybe you're able to do, but you don't desire to do. And so they don't get done. Or perhaps you have things that you desire to do, but you're not able to do. And in that case, they still don't get done. This will get done. He is able to and He desires to. If you ever doubt His fatherly disposition towards you, look to the Lord Jesus. Look to 2 Corinthians 5.21 and see what He has done for you in Christ. He gave His very best for you and for your sake, not because you were so lovely. but because he is so loving. He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor death, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8, 32 and 38 and 39. It's a verse I often encourage our young people to memorize. Jeremiah 31.3, the Lord says, I have loved you with an everlasting love. And therefore, I will continue my faithfulness to you. And that verse can't fall from my lips without thinking of what is perhaps the greatest line that ever flowed from Gerhardus Voss's pen. And if you know me, that's a big statement. He says, this is the great proof that God will never stop loving you. Because in a very real way, he never began, he just always has. If you believe that, if you believe that for your sake, he made him who knew no sin to be sin, then you can know that God loves you. And not just the father, but also the son who said before his crucifixion, greater love has no man than this, but that he should lay down his life for his friends. Whereas Paul would describe him in Galatians 2.20, the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who what? Who loved me and gave himself for me. And yes, if you believe that for your sake he made him who knew no sin to be sin, then you can be assured also that the Holy Spirit loves you. For these things were not revealed to you by flesh or blood, They are spiritually discerned. And it is the Apostle Paul who writes, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. My friend, the triune God loves you. That changes everything. That love is what makes all the difference in the world in our understanding of the gospel message. While the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is your greatest need, namely to be cleansed of your sin and to commune with God. It is no sales pitch. I hope that everyone in this room is all in on Jesus Christ. I really do. I hope that if you're here or under the sound of my voice, you have been reconciled to God, as Paul would put it. But the gospel is not a sales pitch. The really profound thing about the gospel of Jesus Christ is it is not something for you to buy into. It is a proclamation of the means by which God has bought you. Namely, the broken body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus. Amen. Let us pray. Oh, righteous Father, Truly, your love knows no bounds. And we can never thank you enough for what you have done for us in Christ, but we do ask that by your Spirit, you would work through your word preached to grow us in the grace and knowledge of your beloved Son, of our Savior, Redeemer, and even our friend. We ask that you would grow us in affection for the Lord Jesus, in his name, amen.