“We Are God’s Righteousness” 2 Corinthians 5:21

In the opening chapter of Job, God asks Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8).

I’ve always looked at that verse and thought how it must be to be declared righteous by God Himself. It’s one thing to have others say that about us, but for God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, to say that about someone tells us that the person is really precious in God’s sight.

The good news is that, like Job, we are called righteous in God’s eyes. According to today’s verse, God, acting through Jesus, declares us to be His righteousness in Christ.

Background

Paul continues his letter to the Corinthians. This letter is written in preparation to a return visit from Paul to the city of Corinth. He has written three previous letters, only one of which we currently possess. He mentions a previous letter in 1 Corinthians, and in 2 Corinthians he mentions a hard letter that brought a sorrow that led to repentance on behalf of the Corinthians. The tone of this letter is much kinder than the previous letters we know of. Paul is using this letter to explain how God works in us and the ministry He calls us to as His people.

One of the ministries Paul references is this ministry of reconciliation found in 5:11-6:2. In this ministry, Paul writes that God is at work in us to bring us into reconciliation with Him. The relationship between ourselves and God was broken when we chose to sin. As a result of our sin, we were incapable of restoring our relationship with God on our own. We were dead in our sins, incapable of doing anything to bring ourselves into God’s good graces.

But God had other plans. He created a ministry of reconciliation, bringing us into fellowship with Him through the ministry of Jesus Christ. Just as God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ, so, too, has He given us this same ministry of reconciliation. God, through Christ, expects us to share the good news that “God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19a). He has made us His ambassadors—His representatives—to a lost and dying world, a world covered in darkness and ignorance. It is our task to share the good news with the world, to bring life into our world, the life that was the light of men, Jesus (cf. John 1:4).

To make us this ambassador and to give us the ministry of reconciliation, God had to work in us to make us worthy to stand as His representative in the world. And God chose to do all this through Christ Jesus our Lord.

Central Truth: Jesus paid the price that we might become God’s righteousness.

Jesus Knew No Sin (21a)

There are a lot of things that you and I don’t know. We don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a small Italian village, for instance. Sure, we could read about it and study it. We could probably see films about it, but while we may gain insight and awareness of growing up in a small Italian village, we can never really know what it’s like.

We also don’t know what it’s like to be sinless. There is only one person who has ever lived who can make that claim, and that person is Jesus.

In Hebrews 4:15, the Bible says that Jesus can sympathize with us because, like us, He was tempted in every way, only is without sin. John writes in 1 John that in Christ there is no sin.

Because Jesus is without sin, He alone is qualified to take away our sin. Because He was able to deny Satan’s best efforts, He was able to stand before God the Father and make atonement for our sins.

One of the most amazing things about Jesus is that He was tempted in every way. That means He knows every temptation that is known to man, and probably more. Think of some of the temptations we endure, and then multiply that by the millions and millions of people who have lived on earth since its beginning. From Adam and Eve to present day, all of these temptations from around the world were thrown upon Jesus, and yet He was without sin.

Look at some of the ways Jesus was tempted in the Bible. We know of the wilderness temptations, where Satan tried to lure Jesus to sin through hunger, hubris and worshipping a false god. Satan tempted Jesus through Peter and through others who loved Him. He tempted Jesus to come down from the cross as the crowd taunted Him and those who believed begged Him to show His true nature and come down from the cross. Gethsemane shows the temptation to find another way out, one that did not require such sacrifice.

And Jesus, in all His temptations, shows us how we also resist temptation. Jesus used Scripture when tempted in the wilderness. He used His awareness of God’s will for His life in resisting Peter’s efforts to prevent Jesus from going to Jerusalem. He used prayer at Gethsemane. Jesus shows us that the way to overcome sin is to be in close fellowship with the Father, just as He was and is.

Jesus knew no sin. He was without sin. And so He is uniquely qualified to atone for our sins.

Jesus Became Sin (21b)

It was precisely because Jesus had no sin that God could lead Him to Calvary and there become sin for us.

There are those who believe the wording in this verse should read, “God made Him who had no sin to be a sin offering for us.” They cite the example of the scapegoat used in the Day of Atonement sacrifice in the Old Testament. On that day, the High Priest would slaughter a goat. He would then take the blood of that goat and sprinkle it upon another goat. That second goat was then released away from the camp or the city and was left to wander and fend for himself. Symbolically, the scapegoat had taken the sins of Israel and removed them from the people.

The image is a good one, but here it is more accurate to read it as it is written. Jesus, who had no sin, became sin for us. That is, by hanging on the cross and become our atonement, Jesus took on the sins, not symbolically, but literally. Every sin in the world fell upon Him and He endured that horror as He hung on that cross for three hours of darkness.

When the Bible describes the crucifixion, Matthew, Mark and Luke all describe that a darkness came over the land from noon to 3 p.m. Luke alone records it as the sun simply stopped shining. Just as the Bible used the light to demonstrate God’s presence and Jesus on earth, so the darkness represents sin and evil in our world. As the darkness came, I believe the sins of the world fell upon Jesus. It was at this time that He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

God had not abandoned Jesus. The darkness could not hide Jesus from God, just as dark nights or rooms do not hide what we do from God. He knows all things and He is everywhere. But the darkness at the crucifixion was a depiction of the world’s sins falling upon Jesus, and for the first time, Jesus knew sin. He did not know His own sin, but He knew the sins of our world, past, present and future.

I cannot imagine the horror and the pain and the sorrow that must have filled Jesus at that time. It was the greatest price paid for our redemption. Because He who knew no sin became sin for us, we are now set free from that sin and are now free to serve a new Lord, Jesus Christ.

Our Righteousness is Found in Jesus (21c)

All of this—Jesus’ sinlessness and becoming sin for us—was part of God’s plan from before the beginning of time to not only set us free from sin but to also brings us into a right relationship with Him. As a result of what Christ did for us, and only because of what Christ did for us, are we now able to become the righteousness of God. That righteousness is found only in Christ, and it is a factual statement of faith that you and I, because of what Christ did for us, are now declared righteous. Like Job, God looks upon us and says, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

This righteousness of God is found only in Jesus. We do not have a righteousness we can call our own, but one that is uniquely and intimately identified with Jesus. It is a righteousness that infuses us as the Holy Spirit lives in us. It is a righteousness that is a remarkable gift from God’s grace upon us.

And this righteousness gives us the same ability to stand up to Satan and say no to him. We follow Jesus’ example. We become familiar with the Bible so we can refute the devil with Scripture. We become transformed by God’s Spirit so that we can know God’s will and distinguish it from the things of man. We go to God in prayer when tempted. James writes that if we will resist the devil, he will flee from us. When we draw near to God, He draws near to us, and we can resist the devil.

The righteousness we have is derived from our relationship with Jesus. It is a righteousness that empowers us to be able to minister to others in His name, and allows Him to minister to others through us. Because we have been made the righteousness of God, we are enabled to become His ambassadors and be actively involved in a ministry of reconciliation with others. We can draw the world to Jesus by His power and His Spirit and His righteousness.

Conclusion

There are times when we don’t feel very righteous. There are times when we feel that the biggest lie is that we are the righteousness of God. You and I, we sin. We fall short. We don’t always do what God wants us to do, and we don’t always not do what God doesn’t want us to do.

It’s at those times that Satan wants us to embrace our feelings. He wants us to forget the promises of faith that are found in our Bible.

But understand this: even though we may not always feel it, we are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. It is a statement of fact from God Himself through His written word. Yes, we sin, and God is not pleased with our sinful acts, but He knows we are His righteousness, precisely because we are in Christ Jesus and He is in us.

Knowing this, we can begin to walk the walk of faith and let Jesus demonstrate His righteousness through us. We can do it today, we can do it now.