That it was this that necessitated the miraculous begettal of Christ of a human mother, enabling Him to bear our condemnation and, at the same lime, to be a sinless bearer thereof. and, therefore. one who could rise after suffering the death required by the righteousness of God.” Article IX of the B.A.S.F.
In Article VIII (quoted in the last issue erroneously as Article VT) we read, “Jesus Christ . . . was to obtain a title to resurrection by perfect obedience, and by dying abrogate the law of condemnation for himself . . ” Let us now focus our attention more precisely upon the Lord Himself and the means by which He obtained a title to life.
The Sin Bearer
Jesus was indeed, a partaker (by inheritance from Adam) of our sin-defiled and condemned nature. His mission to remove sin necessitated His being so. Being burdened with our nature, and never yielding to its inherent weakness, Christ became the suitable representative of sinners. Their transgressions were ceremonially borne away by Jesus in His sin offering, thus, providing a means by which the Father could forgive the sins of those who identified themselves with His sacrificial death.
It is possible for us to take a too narrow view of these matters if we attempt to find in Christ personally a reason for His violent death. Obviously Jesus did not die for Himself in the same sense in which He died for us. He died for our sins”. whereas He had no sins to be forgiven. Yet, there was certainly a sense in which he did die for Himself. As part of the obedience which the Father required of Him, Jesus had to die upon the torture stake. His failure to comply would assuredly mark Him as unfaithful, and place Him in the same position as the sinners He came to redeem.
The suggestion that the Lord was in some way deserving of the violent death He suffered, makes His offering unacceptable to God. The death-deserving nature of all sacrificial victims under the law (since they stood in representation of the sinner) rendered them ineffective in the removal of sin. The Lord’s absolute sinlessness was the element in His offering which made it acceptable to God and guaranteed His own emancipation from the grave.
The whole basis of our forgiveness lies in the sacrifice of a sinless bearer of our nature. Because of the ceremonial condemnation of sin in the Person of the sinless one, God condescends to forgive repentant sinners unto eternal life. This will immediately become clear to us when we tall to mind the significance of the ssn-offering. In the ritual symbolism of sacrifice the sins of the offerer were regarded as transferred to the victim; the offering thus becoming ”sin”, which was then Representative destroyed. The following quotation from Dr. John Thomas as it appeared in The Christadelphian for 1880 (page 7) clearly shows the ritual significance of sacrifice: “Under the Mosaic Law on the day of atonement the High Priest first offered for his own sins and then for the people’s–to cover up their transgressions. Hence it was called a day of covering, or atonement. There were two goats, one for Jehovah which was slain, and one for Israel, called the Scapegoat. On the head of the latter was laid, or supposed to have been laid, a mountain of sins committed during the previous year. A clean person then led it away into the wilderness. In the same way our sins were laid on Christ who carried them away by going to the Father in heaven . . We get to the cross not literally, but by faith, and our sins are remitted, being regarded as having been borne by Christ on the cross.”
Made “Sin for us”
With the foregoing we may perhaps perceive a deeper meaning in Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:21; “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.” The popular conception of this statement limits Christ’s having been made “to be sin” to his nature. That this meaning is included in Paul’s declaration cannot be denied. He did indeed partake of our dying and sin-inclined nature, and thus, by metonomy, be said to be sin. There is, however, a secondary meaning which probably is the most important, and which truly conveys the meaning intended by Paul. The word translated “sin” in the Greek is “HAMARTIA”, and has the meaning of “missing the mark”. This same word is the New Testament equivalent of Hebrew “CHATTATH”. In the Old Testament we find “CHATTATH” rendered by the term “sin-offering” no less than 116 times. “The Septuagint translates the Hebrew word (CHATTATH) by “hamartia” in ninety-four places in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. where our version translates the word not sin but an offering for sin.” Adam Clarke) When Paul states that Christ “was made sin for us”, he did not mean that Jesus was an actual sinner;but that he was made an offering for sin for us.
In a similar way, Peter says, who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” ( I Pet, 2:24) Only on the principle of type and anti-type could these words be intelligible to us. Just as all the sins of the congregation on the day of atonement were alleged to have been transferred to the scapegoat who then carried them away, are our sins borne away by Jesus. Not literally, of course, but ritually. Our transgressions, thus laid on Him constituted Him the victim. This is why sin-offerings were regarded as sin, the Hebrew word (chattath) being the same.
That Jesus was regarded ritually as sin is apparent from the facts: He suffered and died an ignominious death due to sinners. He was treated precisely as one would treat sin — destroyed! Like the clean and blemishless sacrificial victims under the law, Jesus was made subject to the wages of sin. This was necessary to reveal the righteousness of God in His dealing with sins committed under the first covenant. Bro. John Carter, writing on Romans 3:25-26, says: “Christ has been set forth as the place of meeting and communion between God and man. it is through faith on man’s part that it becomes such to him. It is ‘in his blood’ that it has been established as the mercy seat, just as the typical mercy seat was blood-sprinkled. God has done this ‘to declare his righteousness.’ Why was this necessary? ‘Because of the passing over of sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.’ For four thousand years God had ‘passed over’ (a different word from the one usually translated ‘remission’, as the R.V. and A.V. margin shows) sins. Did God then lightly esteem sin ? No. He forbore for a time in view of this exhibition of His righteousness. He foreordained this work, ‘that a death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, they that have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance (Heb 9:1.5)
The declaration of God’s righteousness involved the blood of His Son, shed in an offering for sin. By His death on the cross in this form, Jesus revealed the Father as intolerable to sin. It displayed God’s wrath against and condemnation of sin in all its manifestations. and thus, paved the way for forgiveness. To suppose that Jesus Himself was the object of God’s wrath distorts the whole picture and leads one logically to the idea of substitution. Sin was only ritually sentenced and condemned, and could only be so, because the victim contained within Himself the cause of sin. Because of this, Jesus became a true representative of the race.
The resurrection of Jesus to immortality inevitably followed His sinless life. Peter declared that ”it was not possible that he should be Holden of it (death)” (Acts 2:24) By his perfect obedience to all which the Father commanded Him, Jesus obtained a title to resurrection, and the life that followed. His expiration upon the cross was all that mortality could claim from Him Thus nothing stood in the way of His own awakening on the third morning, as the Master fulfilled His own prophetic utterance, “I am the Resurrection and the Life”.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One