2nd Corinthians chapter 5 and
I just want to read verse 20 and 21. So this is the Apostle Paul who's
writing and he says, Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ,
as though God did beseech you by us. We pray you in Christ's
stead, be ye reconciled to God. 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. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this reading. Paul has been speaking about
the Gospel that he preached and I trust that it is the Gospel
that we preach also. We endeavour to identify and
to understand and to uphold and maintain that same Gospel that
the Apostle preached, the Gospel of which he was able to say,
I am not ashamed, of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power
of God unto salvation. And we do believe that the gospel
of God's free and sovereign grace is that gospel which is unto
salvation. So like the Apostle Paul who
valued and appreciated these great truths, we endeavour to
emulate him and follow his pattern. and the gospel that he preached.
He speaks in this passage about the word of reconciliation and
he speaks about this word having been committed to him and his
fellow apostles and we reminded ourselves that that was just
another way of speaking about the gospel because it's the gospel
that reconciles, it's the gospel that teaches us about the reconciliation
that has taken place and informs and appraises and enables us
to lay hold upon these great truths of God's purpose. The
gospel is the doctrine of peace and reconciliation by the blood
of Jesus Christ. It is the word of reconciliation. And ultimately, this is what
the gospel comes down to. It is the teaching of God's peace,
reconciliation and our free justification by the redemption that is in
Christ Jesus. God's grace and mercy and his
acceptance of sinners like us by the work of the Lord Jesus
Christ on the cross. We often say that if you don't
understand what happened on the cross, you don't know the gospel. And these verses that we have
before us today teach us what happened on the cross. So what
we're going to do is just take a few minutes and hear again
what Paul has to tell us about this ministry of reconciliation
as he describes it here in these last two verses. And we're going
to take these two verses and we're going to split them into
four. So I've got four little points that I want to leave with
you from these two verses and I trust they will be of encouragement
to us. The first thing is that the apostle
says, we are ambassadors for Christ. Now an ambassador does
not come to tell you what he or she thinks. An ambassador
brings and delivers a message that he or she has been given
to deliver. by the king or by the government
or by the authority of another land. And this ambassadorship
of which the apostle speaks is no more and no less than that. We don't come with the gospel
in order to negotiate with sinful men and women. we're not offering
terms to them, we're not consulting with them or discussing possible
ways and means for reconciliation and peace with God. We're empowered
and authorised only to convey the message of peace exclusively
by the blood of Jesus Christ. This is a declaration that has
boundaries and that has an extent and it is our responsibility
as preachers of the gospel and as upholders of the gospel to
declare that message as ambassadors in the place of Christ. And it
seems that when the apostle comes to speak about this, he's aware. of the Corinthians. It's almost
as if it sort of, I don't want to say it dawns on him as if
he had forgotten, but he wants to involve and include the Corinthians
and their peculiar and particular circumstances, the trouble that
they've been facing with these false teachers that we've read
about in past weeks and in past passages. the teaching that these
men were bringing about works and self-righteousness. And his
pastoral care shines through even in this deeply doctrinal
passage, as indeed it should. Because the preacher is also
a pastor. He's a shepherd and an under-shepherd
to the sheep that is in his care. And that's what the Apostle Paul
was remembering and recognising here. so that his pastoral care
shines through and he stresses that this is the only message
that he has and is able to bring and also that if it wasn't him
but Jesus Christ himself that were here, he would have no other
message and he would give no other ground of acceptance but
his own precious blood. And so the apostle is saying
here that, as a first point, as it were, we are ambassadors
for Christ. And then he goes on to say, and
secondly, we pray you in Christ's stead be reconciled to God. be reconciled to God upon this
ground of the Lord Jesus Christ's shed blood and no other. And that of course is something
that men and women cannot do by nature until they're made
the new creatures of which the apostle has been speaking earlier
in this chapter, until they've been born again. and enabled
by the grace and effectual calling of God the Holy Spirit to go
to Christ. To go to Christ by faith upon
the merits of his blood. And Paul had that good hope for
the Corinthians. He had said of them in the first
chapter, our hope of you is steadfast. And like the apostle Paul, My
hope as a preacher, as an ambassador for Christ, preaching this message
week in, week out, preaching to you who hear, preaching to
all who will hear, that we all will be given such grace to believe
and to be reconciled to God, not by any creature power, but
on the foundation of blood atonement. And Paul's next words set out
the great work of representation and substitution, the last verse
of this chapter five, by which this atoning purpose is accomplished. Let me just quote a little paragraph
here before we touch upon the verse. Robert Hawker, he says
of this verse, and these are his words from now. Volumes might
be written on this most blessed verse of scripture, and when
all the powers of the human mind had been drained to express everything
the imagination could conceive of blessedness contained in it,
numberless things would be left unsaid and unwritten. So infinitely
full are the blissful contents. And I think there's, this is
me speaking now, I think there's wisdom in that observation. This
is truly a an amazing verse in the scriptures
as far as the Apostle Paul opening up to us those deep and eternal
principles upon which our acceptance with God has been achieved and
accomplished. And here's the third point then
of the four that we have. For he hath made him to be sin
for us who knew no sin. And for all the writer Robert
Hawker says volumes might be written, at the very least this
verse tells us that this work of making him to be sin for us
who knew no sin is the work of the triune God. So this whole
work of redemption, this whole work of reconciliation, this
word of reconciliation, this gospel message is in its entirety
the work of the triune God. There is no man made Christ to
be sin. God made Christ to be sin. It was God who laid on him the
iniquity of us all. True it is that men crucified
Christ, men shed Christ's blood and they will carry the guilt
of doing so for eternity. but it was God who laid our sin
upon his own son and God it was who called out to the law to
punish that sin in his son. Zechariah chapter 13 and verse
7 says, So it was God who made Christ to be sin. and he made him to be sin. Here's another thing about this
passage. God made him sin. Christ did not become a sinner
by sinning, but he was made to be sin for us. That is, he was
made sin for the elect of God. Representatively, substitutionally,
he was put in that place. And that's important because
Christ was our sin carrier. He was our sin bearer. Our sin became His sin, though
He never committed sin and had none of His own. Yet He owned
this sin that was placed upon Him. And it's not merely, let
me stress this and make sure you understand it because it's
an important point. It's not merely that Christ carried
the guilt of our sin. He did do that, but he carried
the guilt of the sin because he carried the sin itself. And that's important. Many people
will tell us that we still carry the sin. but Christ took the
guilt and the punishment for it. But that's wrong. God would
not be just in doing that. God would not be just in punishing
someone who had no sin, even although he was doing it on behalf
of someone else. That transference of sin had
to take place in order for the justice of God to be vindicated
in punishing that one who was literally sinful and guilty. That sin was imputed to Christ. It was laid on Him. He has borne
our griefs and carried our sorrows. And that's the significance of
the scapegoat symbol in the Old Testament. He has taken our sin
away. It no longer rests upon us. And while we still commit sin
and while we shall be plagued by sin until the day of our glorification
when we are freed from this corrupt flesh, yet even now sin is not
imputed to us because it has been imputed to Christ. And that's, I think, starting
to scratch something of the surface here of what Hawker meant by
the volumes that might be written on this most blessed verse. Let
me just say one more thing about it. Christ knew no sin except
for the sin he was made to be. How grievous that must have been
for the holiness and the purity of God's Son. We often think
of the agony of the punishment, but there was suffering in becoming
sin as well. There was pain in touching that
unclean thing. The physical, the mental, the
emotional, the spiritual distress and the misery and the heartbreak
of the Saviour knew no bounds. That's why we sometimes are able
to catch a glimpse of this and enter into it to a small extent
when we read together the book of Psalms and David speaks about
all his trials and his problems and his persecutions and we think
to ourselves, my, he went through an awful lot, but it wasn't David
Not in the real sense of that, but that he was a type of the
broad, expansive sufferings that the Lord Jesus Christ underwent. But even in this, here is success. And here's the fourth point that
I just wanted to leave with you, and then we're done. that we
might be made, He was made to be sin for us, that we might
be made the righteousness of God in Him. That is, we for whom
the Saviour died, we whose iniquities were laid on Him, we whose sins
He carried in His own body on the tree. and all for this cause,
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Again, there's
so much in just these little phrases, these few words that
it's beyond our comprehension in many ways. But this is what
it is to be in Him. In Him speaks of the covenant
purpose of God, the eternal will of God, the everlasting decrees
of God. But being in him also speaks
of intimacy, and union, and love, and fellowship, and familiarity. So that we've got these very
pastoral, personal things coupled together with the truly transcendent
and multidimensional understanding of things, eternal things that
are beyond our comprehension in Him because all of these things
come together in the God-Man. There is a people who in God's
everlasting love were placed in Christ before the creation
of the world. And being in Him, we are justified
with God. We are accepted in the Beloved. We are reconciled upon the merits
and the sacrifice of the Son of God, our substitute. And we shall spend the years
of eternity plumbing the depths of what in Him really means. But what it gains for us being
in Him is God's righteousness. Justification is being made righteous. and reconciled to God and we
are justified in Him. We are reconciled in Him. We are atoned for in Him and
not because God overlooks our sin and credits us with being
better than we really are, but because He has made us perfect
and holy and pure and just with the very righteousness of God
himself. We are as acceptable to God as
is Christ. We are as holy as the Holy Spirit. We are as righteous as God himself. And I want you to notice this.
It's not the righteousness of the law that we have been given. but the righteousness of God. We have been redeemed by Christ
from the curse of the law, but we have not been justified by
the righteousness of the law. We are justified by the righteousness
of God. And Jesus Christ himself is the
Lord of righteousness. And once again, we confess we're
wading in deep waters here. But may the Lord be pleased to
teach us more of what this glorious verse and this passage declares
for and to the redeemed saints of God. Amen.