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Wednesday March 1, 2023
He was made sin
“…Paul (when writing to the Corinthians for whom he was an intercessor, and thus having insight into the full meaning of the Savior’s intercession for the world) opened up its total significance as no other did. ‘We are convinced,’ he in effect wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14-21, ‘that when the Savior died on our behalf it was a body death, and this means that if He died for all, then we all died.’ And what did His body represent before God? Paul tells us in verse 21 that ‘God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.’ Please note: sin is not sins. By His shed blood He ‘bore away our sins,’ but in His crucified body He ‘was made sin.’ This is fantastically deeper than ‘bearing our sins,’ wonderful though that was. ‘Made sin’ is almost unthinkable; for sin is Satan’s label, just as we might say love is God’s. Satan is, as it were, Mr. Sin, the spirit of error. Where does the spirit of error live? In human bodies, ever since Adam and Eve partook of that forbidden fruit. So when Jesus in His body hung on the cross, ‘made sin,’ that body represented all the bodies of humanity, which are all containers of sin. Yes He in His body on the cross was made the representative for all the bodies of the human race having Satan, sin’s originator, living within.
There that body died and was buried. When a body dies, the burial is to make it plain that no spirit remains in it. And so it is that Paul can so authoritatively state in Romans 6: ‘…in that He died, He died unto sin once’–not, in this context, died for our sins, but died unto sin. (That is why the blood is not mentioned by Paul after Romans chapter 5. From there onward the subject is His body death.) Christ’s burial was to signify in plainest terms that no spirit remained in it.
So now Paul just as boldly states that we believers, being buried with Him, are ‘dead to sin’–a truth way beyond being only cleansed from sins. We are no longer containers of sin (the same thought as being containers of Satan), and we are to state this truth and affirm it as completely as we state and affirm that we are justified from our sins. ‘The body of sin’ is ‘done away with’ (Rom. 6:6 NASV), meaning that our bodies are no longer sin’s dwelling place. And we are to reckon this as fact (Rom. 6:11).”
By Norman Grubb
Pages 83-84
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