James Nisbet Commentary - 2 Corinthians 5:21 - 5:21

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James Nisbet Commentary - 2 Corinthians 5:21 - 5:21


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

‘
SUBSTITUTION’

‘For He hath made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.’

2Co_5:21

I cannot understand the mind of that man who can read the Gospel and not see ‘substitution.’ From all eternity Christ had undertaken, in the sovereignty of His grace and love, to become a surety for His people. A surety has two things to do—he has to suffer, in place of the person whom he guarantees, whatever that person would otherwise have endured; and he has to pay, if demanded, whatever demand may justly be made on behalf of him whom he represents. And the text puts the thing before us exactly in that order. We, being guilty, and therefore under sentence, our innocent Surety, having first by His humanity made Himself next of kin in order that He might do it, and then made Himself guilty and passed under the whole sentence. He was treated just as if He were in His own person all the sin that ever has been or ever will be forgiven in this world. ‘He was made sin.’

I. The sentence under which the condemned sinner laboured was fourfold exile, sin, death, and hell; and in its fourfold fullness the undeserving Surety bore it.

(a) Exile. See Him in the very fact of His presence in this world, in banishment from His Father’s kingdom, walking this cold, wicked earth so long, far away from all proper happiness, holding intercourse by prayer with Him on Whose bosom He had dwelt and with Whom He was one; till, as the consummation draws on, He goes out into further and further separation, and experiences the actual hiding of His Father’s countenance—that sinking sense of loneliness, bereft of God and man.

(b) Sin. And what is that desolate feeling which overspreads that dying hour? what is that anguish cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ Why is that Father’s eye averted from that beloved One and His departing spirit left to endure the misery such as waits on some poor outcast rebel? ‘He was made sin.’

(c) Death. But Christ goes to His death, and neither God nor man to cheer Him. Had he been the guiltiest man of all our race, He could not have died more wretchedly. There is not an accent to mitigate, not one ray of light to illume that midnight darkness. Can you explain it on any other possible ground than that He was actually ‘made sin for us’?

(d) Hell. And further, in the strong language of our Church, I do not hesitate to say of Him, ‘He descended into hell.’

And the exile, and the sin, and the death, and the hell, they all say with one voice, ‘He was made sin for us.’

II. Thus we arrive at our true, our comforting, our saving contemplation.—Those groans, that dying struggle, that heavy punishment, what are they? Sin is the cause—sin’s struggle, sin’s punishment. It is sin—my sin and your sin, if we believe it. It is sin that is dying there. Therefore the horrors of that scene. It is the dark death of that black thing, sin. It is the execution of sin. Sin is vanquished—sin is dead—sin is buried. I write sin’s epitaph, ‘It is gone!’ Therefore, brethren, it is all passed now. Death is dead—punishment is punished—hell is closed—all done. God cannot demand the same debt twice—that would not be just. He cannot punish the Surety and the man. He cannot punish Christ and me. It was His own counsel and His own hand that did it. He ‘made Christ sin’ for me, and the very reality of the whole sentence He has borne: and I will ‘go delicately, for the bitterness of death is past.’

III. Christ gave God a perfect obedience from the cradle to the grave.—He gave it Him as a man. It was God’s own righteousness—for it was just the righteousness which God loves and God requires. This righteousness, again, Christ did not work for Himself—He did not need it; but if I may so speak, He paid it into the hands of God, to be placed to the account of His Church, that it might be available for every man who really wants it and really takes it. Accordingly, every true penitent, in his turn, comes up naked, and puts on that beautiful robe, and then he is seen in it—he is seen in Christ; and, as Christ was once placed in our stead for punishment, when He was ‘made sin for us,’ we are now placed in Christ’s stead for righteousness, when we are clothed in His merit—God Himself requires nothing further—God Himself, I speak it reverently, can conceive nothing further—He sees us in Him, ‘perfect and entire, wanting nothing.’ We stand in all Christ’s obedience, and present to God a law kept in our Surety. Therefore, as surely as He, being us, was in exile, we, being Him, are in the family; as He grieved in our place, we rejoice for ever in His; as He died an accounted sinner, we live for ever accounted saints; and as He went down to hell in our name, we mount up to heaven in His.

Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustration

‘The circumstances of Our Lord’s sufferings and death are certainly the most momentous in the history of mankind, and it is trifling with the deepest experiences of human nature not to endeavour to realise and apprehend them. According to the Apostles, they are nothing less than a revelation of the love of God in bearing the consequences of our sins Himself, in order that, if possible, we may be spared those consequences. They are intended to bring home to us, in the most affecting form, the loving will of God that we should accept His truth and submit to His righteousness; and He not merely requires us to do this, or exhorts us to it, but suffers with us and for us, in the human nature He has assumed, in order that He may save us by the manifold influences of that suffering. Contemplate God in Christ, thus reconciling the world to Himself, and how can we fail to respond to the appeal which follows?—“We pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” “He Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.” ’