(Lincoln’s Inn, Trinity Sunday, June 11, 1854.)
‘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.’—2 Cor. v. 21.
This verse is commonly interpreted by the addition of a word. He hath made Him to be a Sin Offering for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. You will not suspect me of objecting to the word which this paraphrase introduces. I have endeavoured, for many weeks past, to show you that the revelation of God is the revelation of a Sacrifice. And though I have maintained that sacrifice is entirely independent of sin—that the most pure and perfect state we can conceive, is the state of which sacrifice is the Law,—I have contended, as strongly, that nothing but sacrifice can take away sin. This was the subject of my sermon last week. We learnt from the Epistle to the Hebrews, that Sin lies much deeper than the offences and transgressions which are the outward manifestations of it; that it has its seat in the Conscience. The legal sacrifices, the Epistle taught us, were good, as means of doing away with transgression, of restoring the offender to his right position as a member of the divine commonwealth. But sacrifices of this kind, he said, were totally inadequate to take away Sin, for they could not reach the conscience. The sacrifice of a Son who came to do His Father’s will, who entirely gave Himself up to do it, did reach the conscience; it did take away sin. How rightly then may this sacrifice be called a Sin-Offering! What possible objection can any reader of Scripture raise against such an expression?
But this is the very reason why we should be most careful not to alter the language of the Apostle, or to substitute for it language of our own. We have seen what errors men have fallen into, in their attempts to conceive the nature, and object, and effects of sacrifice. We have seen how much it has been the design of God’s revelation of Himself to deliver us from these errors, by setting forth its true relation to Him and to man, to the perfect righteousness and to the creature who has wandered from that righteousness. We have seen with what carefulness Evangelists and Apostles have brought out before us one and another aspect of ‘this offering,’ contrasting it with the counterfeit notions which men had devised for themselves.
This is, evidently, one of the passages which is to instruct us in the character and effects of the Divine Sacrifice, which is to show wherein it consists, and for what end it was presented. How dare I, then, put in the phrase which I want to have explained, as if I understood it sufficiently without the Apostle’s help? To make me know what God’s Love to man was, how He reconciled the world to Himself, St. Paul says, He made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin. That I may not be forced to inquire what these wonderful words import, I coolly and deliberately take all the force out of them. He sets me before a startling antithesis, that I may meditate upon it. I destroy his antithesis as if it were an idle figure of speech, and insist that the same word should mean two different things in two different clauses of the same sentence. Could you bear to see any writer who was not an Apostle, whom you did not recognise as a canonical writer, treated after this fashion? Would you not say to his interpreter, ‘Either the man whom you undertake to expound is not worth your trouble; he is one who uses words at random, he does not understand himself; or else you are behaving most unfairly and irreverently to him; you are not grappling with his thoughts, but putting yours in the place of them?’ Is the case altogether changed because we are listening to a man who is uttering, as we believe, the oracles of God; because he is speaking of the question which most of all concerns us, and on which we are most liable to make mistakes? Are we at liberty to play with his modes of speech just as we please, to thrust in among them any inane tautological formula,—as if for the very purpose of escaping from the truth which he would make known to us?
No one can seriously think over these words, ‘He hath made Him to be sin for us, which knew no sin,’ without feeling that the paradox which is in them is meant to be in them; that the Apostle purposed to force it upon our attention; that if he could have avoided it he would; but that he had no way of avoiding it, without mangling and distorting the message which he was appointed to deliver. If you read over the memorable passage with which this sentence winds up, beginning with those words in the second chapter, in which he speaks of his ministry as a savour of death unto death, and of life unto life; in which he declares that he does not corrupt the word of God, but that as of sincerity, as of God, in the sight of God, speaks he in Christ; you will scarcely persuade yourselves that he ended with a mere verbal contradiction which was to surprise us, and which he expected us to find some easy method of explaining away. Between these two points of his discourse, he has been speaking of the ministration of righteousness and the ministration of condemnation; of the glory that was under a veil, and of that which was unveiled, and therefore might be presented with plainness of speech; of renouncing the hidden things of dishonesty; of commending himself by the manifestation of the truth to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. He has been declaring that all must be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ; that if he is beside himself it is to God, that if he is sober it is for their cause; that the love of Christ is constraining him, because he thus judges, that if One died for all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live to themselves, but unto Him who died for them, and rose again. He had just been gathering up all that he had written, all that he had ever spoken to the Corinthians, in the words, ‘All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. 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.’ The verse before us is the climax of these vehement protestations, of this appeal to God’s judgment, of this declaration of God’s will to men as accomplished in Christ, of this earnest exhortation to men not to refuse the gift which has been bestowed on them. Can you seriously believe that at this moment he adopted a phrase to describe the work of his King and Redeemer, which was strange and ambiguous, either from carelessness or through the paltry vanity of a rhetorician?
No, my brethren, this is doing just what the Apostle is protesting that he dares not do, what he wants us not to do: it is handling the word of God deceitfully.
We may think that it is our business to extricate the writers of the New Testament from apparent contradictions; but we have no such vocation. They are as well aware as we can be, that their language sounds perplexing; they know that it must sound so. All sin is contradiction; if you speak of it, you must denote it by words that cross and seem to confute each other. Unless men were spirits, you could not complain of them for acting as beasts; unless they proved every moment that they were framed for fellowship and mutual dependence, you could not blame their selfishness; if you were not sure that they were intended to obey God’s gracious will and to walk in His ways, you could not accuse them of ruining themselves by determining, each one of them, to have a will and way of his own. You may get rid of the strife by ignoring either set of facts; by assuming that there is no moral order, or by pretending that it is not resisted. The man may come to think his transgressions are themselves laws; the delusion is easy enough, it is one of the signs of his derangement, and he may adapt his phraseology to this conception. It may be consistent with itself, but for that very reason, it will be inconsistent with much of what he feels and knows.
Keeping these thoughts in mind, and beseeching the Holy Spirit to lead us into those depths, in which, without His guidance, we must be utterly bewildered and lost, either through the cowardice which shrinks from the light, or through the boldness which stumbles on in the darkness, let us ask what St. Paul can intend by saying that Christ was ‘made sin for us, though He knew no sin.’
There was a time in our Lord’s life on earth, we are told, when a man met Him, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, whom no man could bind; no, not with chains. That man was possessed by an unclean spirit. Of all men upon earth, you would say that he was the one between whom and the pure and holy Jesus there must have existed the most intense repugnance. What Pharisee, who shrank from the filthy and loathsome words of that maniac, could have experienced one-thousandth part of the inward and intense loathing which Christ must have experienced for the mind that those words expressed? For it was into that He looked; that which He understood; that which in His inmost being He must have felt, which must have given Him a shock such as it could have given to no other. I repeat the words; I beseech you to consider them; He must have felt the wickedness of that man in His inmost being. He must have been conscious of it, as no one else was or could be. Now, if we ever have had the consciousness, in a very slight degree, of evil in another man, has it not been, up to that degree, as if the evil were in ourselves? Suppose the offender were a friend, or a brother, or child, has not this sense of personal shame, of the evil being ours, been proportionably stronger and more acute? However much we might feel ourselves called upon to act as judges, this perception still remained. It was not crushed even by the anger, the selfish anger, and impatience of an injury done to us, which, most probably, mingled with and corrupted the purer indignation and sorrow. Most of us confess with humiliation how little we have had of this lively consciousness of other men’s impurity, or injustice, or falsehood, or baseness. But we do confess it; we know, therefore, that we should be better if we had more of it. In our best moments we admire with a fervent admiration—in our worse, we envy with a wicked envy—those in whom we trace most of it. And we have had just enough of it to be certain that it belongs to the truest and most radical part of the character, not to its transient impulses. Suppose, then, this carried to its highest point, cannot you, at a great distance, apprehend that Christ may have entered into the sin of that poor man’s spirit, may have had the most inward realization of it, not because it was like what was in Himself, but because it was utterly and intensely unlike? And yet are you not sure that this could not have been, unless He had the most perfect and thorough sympathy with this man, whose nature was transformed into the likeness of a brute, whose spirit had acquired the image of a devil? Does the coexistence of this sympathy and this antipathy perplex you? Oh! ask yourselves which you could bear to be away; which you could bear to be weaker than the other? Ask yourselves whether they must not dwell together in their highest degree, in their fullest power, in any one of whom you could say, ‘He is perfect; He is the standard of excellence; in Him there is the full image of God.’ Diminish by one atom the loathing and horror, or the fellowship and sympathy; and by that atom you lower the character; you are sure that you have brought it nearer to the level of your own low imaginations; that you have made it less like the Being who would raise you towards Himself.
I have taken a single instance, because you can better apprehend the whole truth in that instance, and because from it you may understand that I am not speaking of abstractions, but of that which concerns us as human beings, as conscious sinners. But now carry on your thoughts beyond that particular man with the unclean spirit: carry them to any man in the crowds whom our Lord fed, and to whom He preached: carry them to these, because they were specimens of the race; because His knowledge of their evils is that which He must have had of the evils which are in all the world; because His sympathy with them is the sympathy which He must have had with all who bore their nature; —and then you will, I think, begin to doubt whether St. Paul could have diluted the language which you find in the text without cheating us of a divine treasure. If he had said that Christ took upon Him all the consequences of our sins, would this have been an equivalent for the words, ‘made Sin?’ There might be a deep meaning in that assertion. The sympathy which I have spoken of, extended, as we know, to all the ills of which men are heirs. The evangelist says, speaking of His healing the sick, Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses; as if every cure He wrought implied an actual participation in the calamity. He endured in this sense the consequences of sin in particular men; He endured the death which is the consequence of sin in all men. But men have asked more than this. Their superstitions show how much more is required to satisfy them; they have asked for some god, or demigod, who could not only sympathise in their sorrows, but in their evil; they could only conceive of sympathy coming through participation of it; the gods must do like them—be like them, or they are cold and distant objects of reverence. The demand is indeed monstrous; all the perverseness and bewilderment of sin lie in it. But to get rid of the falsehood of the desire, you must vindicate its truth. Here is the vindication; He knows no sin, therefore He identifies Himself with the sinner. That phrase, identifies Himself with the sinner, is somewhat nearer, I think, to the sense of the apostle than the phrase, takes the consequences or the punishment of sin. But still, do you not feel how much feebler it is than his, feebler in spirit more even than in form? It conveys no impression of the sense, the taste, the anguish of sin, which St. Paul would have us think of, as realised by the Son of God,—a sense, a taste, an anguish, which are not only compatible with the not knowing sin, but would be impossible in anyone who did know it. The awful isolation of the words, ‘Ye shall leave Me alone,’ united with the craving for human affection in the words, ‘With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you,’—the agony of the spirit which is gathered in the words, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me,’ with the submission of the words, ‘Not as I will, but as Thou wilt,’—above all, the crushing for a moment even of that one infinite comfort, ‘Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me,’ when the cry was heard, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’—these revelations tell us a little of what it was to be made Sin; if we get the least glimpse into them, we shall not dream that the Apostle could have spoken less boldly, if he was to speak the truth.
We might for a moment wish to translate his language into that which we find elsewhere, respecting the taking, or bearing of sins. The force and the worth of these expressions I believe to be unspeakable; they correspond to some of the most inward and deep, however perverted, necessities of the human spirit. A man feels that he is carrying a burden; it is his own; no one can share it with him; his friend, his wife, does not know what it is; he asks to be freed from it, but that seems asking to be freed from himself. Is there one higher than himself who knows what it is, really, actually? Could he bear it? could he take it away? The question is asked with strange and awful doubt. How can that be possible? how can I transfer to another that which is so absolutely and inherently mine? Yet there is such a necessity for a friend who would be willing to do this; such a witness that there must be one willing and able to lift us out of misery by any participation in it, that the heart bounds even at the distant rumour of an act which declares that its hopes were not delusions. There is no selfishness in that first exulting bound; it is the deliverance from selfishness; the recognition of one in whom selfishness has no place; who can do all and suffer all for love. But selfishness may soon intrude itself into these thoughts, and may convert the whole message of a sympathising friend who bears our burdens, and so fulfils the law of love, into a scheme by which we escape from the penalty of our misdoings through His endurance of it. Even that scheme is so closely involved with the sense of an infinite Charity and Compassion, has so evidently risen out of it, that no one should touch it with a rude or careless hand. Till we are convinced that the tree is dying from the pressure of the fungus which has attached itself to it, we cannot have courage to incur the risk of tearing one from the other. And if we make the attempt, it must be with no instruments of ours. A man using carefully the Scripture language, and the Scripture analogies—resolving to follow them steadfastly out and then applying them, first of all, to the detection and exposure of his own crude notions and fancies, will acquire by degrees the power of discerning between that, in the popular statements respecting Theology, which he must cling to for life and death, and that which he must part with that he may preserve the rest.
The text is a strong instance. Those expressions concerning Christ bearing sins, which we meet with so often, sound much less difficult and more natural than the apostle’s phrase, being made Sin. But if we look seriously at that, we find it explains the others, and gives them the full force, which, in our use of them, they are apt to lose. We quickly attach to them some coarse and material sense; we suppose it is possible to transfer that which belongs to the conscience and spirit, as we might give up a schedule of debts to one who undertook that he would discharge them. Comparisons which, if they are resorted to with exceeding caution, sometimes assist the fancy, but which do not go directly home to the man himself, the actual sufferer and sinner, may so entangle us, that they take the place of the very truths which we would illustrate by them. But the words, made sin, carry us out of these and beyond them; they lead us directly to the spirit of man; they become monstrous if they are tried by any other tests than its tests. So tried, they set forth just that which man asks heaven, and earth, and hell to tell him of—one who knows all his evil, one who enters into it, feels it, because He is not soiled and debased with it; one who does this, because in no other way can He raise a voluntary and spiritual creature out of a voluntary and spiritual death to a right and true life.
For the Apostle goes on, ‘that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.’ Here, as everywhere, St. Paul declares that it is the end of all God’s acts and dispensations towards men, to make them righteous; to bring them out of that condition which they have chosen for themselves,—the condition of distrust, alienation, sin,—and to bring them into that state for which He has created them, of dependence, trust, union with Him. He is declared, here as everywhere, to be the only Reconciler of His creatures. Here, as everywhere, they are assumed to have no righteousness but His; none but that which they obtain by owning Him and confiding in Him. The giving up of His Son to take upon Him their flesh and blood, to enter into their sorrows, to feel and suffer their sins; that is ‘to be made Sin:’ the perfect sympathy of the Son with His loving will towards His creatures, His entire sympathy with them, and union with them; His endurance, in His inmost heart and spirit, of that evil which he abhorred; this is God’s method of reconciliation; by this He speaks to the sinful will of man; by this He redeems it, raises it, restores it. The acts which express His love to man; the acts by which the Son of God proves Himself to be the Son of man; these are the means of destroying the barrier between heaven and earth, between the Father and the children; the means of taking away the sin of the world. In each man the sin—the alienation and separation of heart—ceases, when he sees that he has a Father who has loved him, and given His Son for him; when he confesses that this Son is stronger to unite him with his Father and his brethren, than sin is to separate them; when he is sure that the Spirit of the Father and the Son will be with him to resist all the efforts of the spirit of enmity and division to renew the strife.
But this faith of the individual man implies much more than the deliverance of his own soul. In the great annual act of atonement among the Jews, the priest laid his hand upon the head of the scape-goat and confessed over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions and all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness, that he might bear their iniquity into a land not inhabited. Thus the whole body of the people were taught that God, who had accepted them as a holy people to Himself, purified them, as a body, of that which had set them at war with Him. The individual Israelite could not be satisfied with his own sin-offering or peace-offering, unless he was thus assured that he belonged to a redeemed and purified society. In like manner there is no sure peace and freedom for the conscience of any one man under the New Covenant, while he thinks only or chiefly of peace and freedom for himself. The sin which he supposes he has cast aside will appear again; it will seem to him as if it was not the blood of sprinkling, but his own momentary act of faith, which had purified him from it. But if we believe that Christ has taken away the sins of the world, we are led to a deeper and safer foundation upon which our hopes may rest. For then we see beneath all evil, beneath the universe itself, that eternal and original union of the Father with the Son which this day tells us of; that union which was never fully manifested till the Only-begotten by the Eternal Spirit offered Himself to God. The revelation of that primal Unity is the revelation of the ground on which all things stand, both things in heaven and things in earth. It is the revelation of an order which sustains all the intercourse and society of men. It is the revelation of that which sin has ever been seeking to destroy, and which at last has overcome sin. It is the revelation of that perfect harmony to which we look forward when all things are gathered up in Christ; when there shall be no more sin, because there shall be no more selfishness; when the law of sacrifice shall be the acknowledged law of all creation; when He who perfectly fulfilled that law—the Lamb that was slain shall receive blessing, and honour, and glory, and power; when the confession of His Name shall be felt and known to be the confession of the Father of an Infinite Majesty in whom He delighted, and of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, who proceedeth from Them, and with Them is worshipped and glorified for ever.