Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)
THE GREAT EXCHANGE EXPLAINED
Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892) "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 Corinthians 5:21
I BRING you now…the great philosophy of salvation, the hidden mystery, the great secret, the wonderful discovery that is brought to light by the gospel: how God is just and yet the justifier of the ungodly (Rom 3:26). Let us read the text again and then at once proceed to discuss it…"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."
Note the doctrine…There are three persons mentioned here.
"He [that is, God] hath made him [that is, Christ], who knew no sin, to be sin for us [sinners] that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." Before we can understand the plan of salvation, it is necessary for us to know something about the three persons. Unless we understand them in some measure, salvation is to us impossible.
1. HERE IS FIRST, GOD. Let every man know what God is. God is a very different Being from what some of you suppose. The God of heaven and of earth—the Jehovah of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob,
Creator and Preserver, the God of Holy Scripture, and the God of all grace—is not the god that some men make unto themselves and worship. There be men in this so-called Christian land, who worship a god who is no more God than Venus1 or Bacchus!2 A god made after their own hearts—a god not fashioned out of stone or wood, but fashioned from their own thoughts, out of baser stuff than ever heathen attempted to make a god of. The God of Scripture has three great attributes, and they are all three implied in the text.
The God of Scripture is a sovereign God. That is, He is a God Who has absolute authority and absolute power to do exactly as He pleaseth. Over the head of God, there is no law; upon His arm, there is no necessity. He knoweth no rule but His own free and mighty will. Though He cannot be unjust and cannot do anything
1 Venus – Roman mythology: goddess of love and physical beauty.
2 Bacchus or Dionysus – Greek and Roman mythology: the god of wine and ecstasy.
The Great Exchange Explained
but good, yet is His nature absolutely free; for goodness is the freedom of God's nature. God is not to be controlled by the will of man, the desires of man, or by fate in which the superstitious believe. He is God, doing as He willeth in the armies of heaven and in this lower world. He is a God, too, Who giveth no account of His matters. He makes His creatures just what He chooses to make them and does with them just as He wills. If any of them resent
His acts, He saith unto them, "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" (Rom 9:20-21). God is good; but God is sovereign, absolute, knowing nothing that can control Him.
The monarchy of this world is no constitutional and limited monarchy. It is not tyrannical, but it is absolutely in the hands of an all-wise God. But mark, it is in no hands but His…This is the God of the Bible. This is the God Whom we adore. No weak, pusillanimous3 God Who is controlled by the will of men, Who cannot steer the bark4 of providence; but a God unalterable, infinite, unerring.
This is the God we worship: A God as infinitely above His creatures as the highest thought can fly, and higher still than that.
But, again, the God Who is here mentioned is a God of infinite justice. That He is a sovereign God, I prove from the words that He
"hath made" Christ to be sin. He could not have done it if He had not been sovereign. That He is a just God, I infer from my text, seeing that the way of salvation is a great plan of satisfying justice.
And we now declare that the God of Holy Scripture is a God of inflexible justice. He is not the god whom some of you adore. You adore a god who winks at great sins. You believe in a god who calls your crimes peccadilloes5 and little faults. Some of you worship a god who does not punish sin, but who is so weakly merciful and so mercilessly weak that he passes by transgression and iniquity and never enacts a punishment. You believe in a god who, if man sins, does not demand punishment for his offense. You think that a few good works of your own will pacify him, that he is so weak a ruler that a few good words uttered before him in prayer will win sufficient merit to reverse the sentence, if, indeed, you think he ever passes a sentence at all. Your god is no God…The God of the Bible is as severe as if He were unmerciful, and as just as if He were not
3 pusillanimous – lacking courage.
4 bark – small ship.
5 peccadilloes – small sins or faults.
The Great Exchange Explained
gracious; yet He is as gracious and as merciful as if He were not just—yea, more so. And one more thought here concerning God, or else we cannot establish our discourse upon a sure basis.
The God Who is here mentioned is a God of grace. Think not that I am now contradicting myself! The God Who is inflexibly severe and never pardons sin without punishment is yet a God of illimitable6 love. Although as a Ruler He will chastise, yet, as the Father-God, He loveth to bestow His blessing. "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Eze 33:11). God is love in its highest degree. He is love rendered more than love. Love is not God, but God is love. He is full of grace; He is the plenitude7 of mercy; He delighteth in mercy. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are His thoughts of love above our thoughts of despair, and His ways of grace above our ways of fear. This God, in Whom these three great attributes harmonize—illimitable sovereignty, inflexible justice, and unfathomable grace—these three make up the main attributes of the one God of heaven and earth
Whom Christians worship. It is this God before Whom we must appear. It is He Who has made Christ to be sin for us, though He knew no sin. Thus, we have brought the first person before you.
2. THE SECOND PERSON OF OUR TEXT IS THE SON OF GOD—
Christ, Who knew no sin. He is the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds: begotten, not made; being of the same substance with the Father, co-equal, co-eternal, and co-existent. Is the Father Almighty? So is the Son Almighty. Is the Father infinite? So is the Son infinite. He is very God of very God: having a dignity not inferior to the Father, but being equal to Him in every respect—God over all, blessed for evermore (Rom 9:5)! Jesus
Christ also is the son of Mary, a man like unto ourselves; a man subject to all the infirmities of human nature, except the infirmities of sin; a man of suffering and of woe, of pain and trouble, of anxiety and fear, of trouble and of doubt, of temptation and of trial, of weakness and death. He is a man just as we are—bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
Now, the Person we wish to introduce to you is this complex being: God and man. Not God humanized, not man deified; but God, purely, essentially God; man, purely man; man, not more than man; God, not less than God—the two standing in a sacred union together: the God-Man…Our text says that He knew no sin. It does
6 illimitable – impossible to limit.
7 plenitude – full supply.
The Great Exchange Explained
not say that He did not sin. That we know. But it says more than that: He did not know sin. He knew not what sin was. He saw it in others, but He did not know it by experience. He was a perfect stranger to it. It is not barely said that He did not take sin into His heart, but He did not know it. It was no acquaintance of His. He was the acquaintance of grief, but He was not the acquaintance of sin.
He knew no sin of any kind—no sin of thought; no sin of birth—no original, no actual transgression; no sin of lip or of hand did ever
Christ commit. He was pure, perfect, spotless, like His own divinity: without spot, blemish, or any such thing. This gracious Person is He Who is spoken of in the text…Now I have to introduce the third person. We will not go far for him.
3. THE THIRD PERSON IS THE SINNER. And where is he? Will you turn your eyes within you and look for him, each one of you? He is not very far from you. He has been a drunkard: he has committed drunkenness, reveling,8 and such like. We know that the man who committeth these things hath no inheritance in the kingdom of God. There is another: he has taken God's name in vain…Ah!
There is the sinner. Where is he? I hear that man with tearful eye and with sobbing voice exclaim, "Sir, he is here!" Methinks I see some woman here in the midst of us. Some of us have accused her perhaps, and she standeth alone trembling and saith not a word for herself. Oh! That the Master might say, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more" (Joh 8:11). I believe, I must believe, that somewhere amongst these many thousands, I hear some palpitating heart. And that heart, as it beats so hurriedly crieth, "Sin, sin, sin, wrath, wrath, wrath—how can I get deliverance?" Ah! Thou art the man—a born rebel. Born into the world a sinner, thou hast added to thy native guilt thine own transgressions. Thou hast broken the commandments of God, thou hast despised God's love, thou hast trampled on His grace, thou hast gone on hitherto until now—the arrow of the Lord is drinking up thy spirit. God hath made thee tremble. He hath made thee to confess thy guilt and thy transgression. Hear me, then, if your convictions are the work of God's Spirit: you are the person intended in the text, when it says,
"He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we"— that is, you—"might be made the righteousness of God in him."
I have introduced the persons, and now I must introduce you to a scene of a great exchange that is made according to the text. The third person whom we have introduced is the prisoner at the bar.
8 reveling – drinking parties involving unrestrained indulgence in alcoholic beverages and accompanying immoral behavior.
The Great Exchange Explained
God has called him as a sinner before [Himself]. He is about to be tried for life or death. God is gracious, and He desires to save him.
God is just, and He must punish him. The sinner is to be tried. If there be a verdict of guilty brought in against him, how will the two conflicting attributes work in God's mind? He is loving; He wants to save him. He is just; he must destroy him! How shall this mystery be solved and the riddle be solved? Prisoner at the bar, canst thou plead "Not guilty?" He stands speechless; or, if he speaks, he cries, "I am guilty!"
Then, you see, if he has pleaded guilty himself, there is no hope of there being any flaw in the evidence. Even if he had pleaded
"not guilty," yet the evidence is most clear. God the Judge has seen his sin and recorded all his iniquities, so that there would be no hope of his escaping. The prisoner is sure to be found guilty. How can he escape? Is there a flaw in the indictment? No! It is drawn up by infinite wisdom and dictated by eternal justice. There is no hope there…How then shall the prisoner at the bar escape? Is there any possibility? Oh! How did heaven wonder! How did the stars stand still with astonishment! How did the angels stay their songs a moment, when for the first time, God showed how He might be just and yet be gracious! Oh! I think I see heaven astonished and silence in the courts of God for the space of an hour, when the Almighty said, "Sinner, I must and will punish thee on account of sin! But I love thee; the bowels of my love yearn over thee…My justice says, 'Smite'; but my love stays my hand, and says, 'Spare, spare the sinner!' Oh! Sinner, my heart hath devised it! My Son, the pure and perfect shall stand in thy stead and be accounted guilty; and thou, the guilty, shall stand in my Son's stead and be accounted righteous!"
It would make us leap upon our feet in astonishment if we did but understand this thoroughly—the wonderful mystery of the transposition9 of Christ and the sinner! Let me put it so plainly that everyone can understand: Christ was spotless; sinners were vile. Says Christ, "My Father, treat me as if I were a sinner. Treat the sinner as if he were Me. Smite as sternly as Thou pleasest, for I will bear it. Thus, the [heart] of Thy love may overflow with grace, and yet Thy justice be unsullied,10 for the sinner is no sinner now."
He stands in Christ's stead; and with the Savior's garments on, he is accepted.
9 transposition – reversal of order.
10 unsullied – spotless.
The Great Exchange Explained
Do you say that such an exchange as this is unjust? Will you say that God should not have made His Son a substitute for us and have let us go? Let me remind you, it was purely voluntary on the part of Christ. Christ was willing to stand in our stead. He had to drink the cup of our punishment, but He was quite willing to do it.
Let me tell you yet one more unanswerable thing: the substitution of Christ was not an unlawful thing because the sovereign God made Him a substitute…the substitution was made by the highest authority. The text says, God "hath made him to be sin for us," and inasmuch as Christ did stand in my room, place, and stead, He did not make the exchange unlawfully. It was with the full determinate counsel of Almighty God, as well as with His own consent that Christ stood in the sinner's place, as the sinner doth now in Christ's place…the sinner is treated as if he were Christ, and Christ is treated as if He were the sinner. That is what is meant by the text, "[God] hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."
Let me just give you [an illustration] of this…taken from the Old Testament. When, of old, men did come before God with sin,
God provided a sacrifice that should be the representative of Christ, inasmuch as the sacrifice died instead of the sinner. The Law ran, "He that sins shall die." When men had committed sin, they brought a bullock or a sheep before the altar. They put their hand on the bullock's head and acknowledged their guilt. By that deed, their guilt was typically removed from themselves to the bullock. Then the poor bullock, which had done no wrong, was slaughtered and cast out as a sin offering, which God had rejected.
That is what every sinner must do with Christ if he is to be saved.
A sinner by faith comes and puts his hand on Christ's head. Confessing all his sin, it is not his any longer: it is put on Christ. Christ hangs upon the tree. He bears the cross and endures the shame; and so the sin is all gone and cast into the depths of the sea…Now, whosoever believeth in Christ Jesus hath peace with God because
"he hath made Christ to be sin for us, though he knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."
Now, I shall have finished the explanation of the text when I just bid you remember the consequences of this great substitution.
Christ was made sin. We are made the righteousness of God. It was in the past, long further back than the memory of angels can reach…An eternal covenant was formed between the Father and the Son, wherein the Son did stipulate to suffer for His elect. The Father on His part did covenant to justify them through the Son.
Oh, wondrous covenant, thou art the source of all the streams of
The Great Exchange Explained
atoning love! Eternity rolled on, time came, and with it soon came the Fall. When many years had run their round, the fullness of time arrived; and Jesus prepared to fulfill His solemn engagement.
He came into the world and was made a man. From that moment, when He became a man, mark the change that was wrought in Him. Before, He had been entirely happy. He had never been miserable, never sad. But now as the effects of that terrible covenant that He had made with God, His Father begins to pour wrath upon Him.
"What!" you say, "Does God actually account His Son to be a sinner?" Yes, He does. His Son agreed to be the Substitute, to stand in the sinner's stead. God begins with Him at His birth. He puts Him in a manger. If He had considered Him as a perfect man,
He would have provided Him a throne. But considering Him as a sinner, He subjects Him to woe and poverty from beginning to end. Now, see Him grown to manhood: See Him—griefs pursue
Him; sorrows follow Him. Griefs, why follow ye the Perfect? Why pursue ye the Immaculate?11 Justice, why dost thou not drive these griefs away?...The answer comes: "This Man is pure in Himself, but He has made Himself impure by taking His people's sin."
Guilt is imputed to Him, and the very imputation of guilt brings grief with all its reality. At last, I see death coming with more than its usual horrors. I see the grim skeleton with his dart well sharpened. I see behind him, Hell. I mark the grim prince of darkness and all the avengers uprising from their place of torment. I see them all besetting the Savior. I notice their terrible war upon Him in the garden. I note Him, as He lies there wallowing in His blood in fearful soul-death. I see Him as in grief and sorrow. He walks to Pilate's bar. I see Him mocked and spit upon. I behold Him tormented, maltreated, and blasphemed. I see Him nailed to the cross! I behold the mocking continued, and the shame unabated.12
I mark Him shrieking for water, and I hear Him complaining of the forsakings of God! I am astonished! Can this be just that a perfect being should suffer thus?—Oh, God, where art Thou, that Thou canst thus permit the oppression of the innocent? Hast thou ceased to be King of Justice? Else, why dost Thou not shield the perfect One? The answer comes: "Be still. He is perfect in Himself, but He is the sinner now. He stands in the sinner's stead. The sinner's guilt is on Him; therefore, it is right, it is just, it is what He hath Himself agreed to that He should be punished as if He were a
11 immaculate – spotless; undefiled; in the case of Christ, free from original sin.
12 unabated – continuing at full strength.
The Great Exchange Explained
sinner, that He should be frowned upon, that He should die, and that He should descend to Hades unblessed, uncomforted, unhelped, unhonored, and unowned. This was one of the effects of the Great Exchange that Christ made.
Now, take the other side of the question, and I have done with explanation. What was the effect on us? Do you see that sinner there dabbling his hand in lust, defiling his garments with every sin the flesh had ever indulged in? Do you hear him cursing God?
Do you mark him breaking every ordinance that God hath rendered sacred? But do you see him in a little season pursuing his way to heaven? He has renounced these sins. He has been converted and has forsaken them. He is going on the way to heaven!
Justice, art thou asleep? That man has broken thy Law! Is he to go to heaven? Hark, how the fiends come rising from the pit and cry,
"That man deserves to be lost! He may not be now what he used to be, but his past sins must have vengeance!" And, yet there he goes safely on his way to heaven, and I see him looking back on all the fiends that accuse him. He cries out, "Behold, who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?" (Rom 8:33). And when one would think all hell would be up in arms and accuse, the grim tyrant lieth still. The fiends have naught to say! I see him turning his face heavenward to the throne of God and hear him cry, "Who is he that condemneth?"…Oh! Justice, where art thou? This man has been a sinner, a rebel. Why not smite him to the dust…"Nay," says
Justice, "he hath been a sinner, but I do not look upon him in that light now. I have punished Christ instead of him. That sinner is no sinner now: he is perfect." How? Perfect? Perfect, because Christ was perfect. I look upon him as if he were Christ …This is the grand result to sinners of the Great Exchange.
From a sermon delivered on Sabbath morning, July 19, 1857, at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.
O blessed Lord! Upon my first believing and closing with Jesus Christ, Thou didst justify me in the court of glory from all my sins, both as to guilt and punishment. Upon my first act of believing, Thou didst pardon all my sins; Thou didst forgive all my iniquities; Thou didst blot out all my transgressions; and as upon my first believing Thou didst give me the remission of all my sins, so upon my first believing thou didst free me from a state of condemnation, and interest me in the great salvation. Upon my first believing, I was united to Jesus Christ, and I was clothed with the righteousness of Christ, which covered all my sins and discharged me from all my transgressions. Remember, O Lord, that at the very moment of my dissolution Thou didst really, perfectly, universally, and finally forgive all my sins.—Thomas Brooks