Chapter Four: The Great Exchange

No. God’s justice must be satisfied. The least sin in our eyes is rebellion against God’s sovereign authority and must be justly punished. God cannot, in view of the infinite perfection of all His attributes, exalt one at the expense of another, and so God cannot exalt His mercy at the expense of His justice; justice must be satisfied.

Therefore, on what basis did God forgive Isaiah’s sin? He did it on the same basis for which He forgives our sin: the death of Jesus Christ, which would occur, as we reckon time, about seven hundred years later, but in God’s eternal timelessness, before the foundation of the world. The Bible is quite clear that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). And John wrote in Revelation 1:5, “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.” So Isaiah’s guilt was taken away and his sin atoned for because Jesus died and shed His blood for Isaiah as well as for you and me. God’s justice and God’s mercy met at the cross, and both are duly magnified.

The seraphim touched Isaiah’s mouth with the burning coal from the altar. It was Isaiah’s unclean lips that made him so painfully aware of his sin, so it is his lips that are cleansed with the burning coal. The gospel addresses all of our sin, but there are times when we need it to address specific sins in our lives. There are times when we are so painfully conscious of some sin that we need to hear the words of Colossians 2:13, “He forgave us all our sins” (NIV), addressed to that specific sin.

The late New Testament commentator Philip Hughes wrote concerning this verse, “There is no sentence more profound in the whole of Scripture; for this verse embraces the whole ground of the sinner’s reconciliation to God.” And nineteenth-century theologian Charles Hodge wrote, “There is probably no passage in the Scriptures in which the doctrine of justification is more concisely or clearly stated.”

Speaking personally, 2 Corinthians 5:21 is my all-time favorite verse. If in old age my memory begins to fail, I pray that I can at least remember this verse.

What is the solution? Paul continued in Ephesians 2:4-6,

Peter said in 2 Peter 2:4 that God did not spare angels when they sinned but cast them into hell to await the final judgment. God could have done the same with the human race and been perfectly just. He could have allowed each of us to be born, to live out a miserable existence in a sin-cursed world, and then die and be cast into hell. Instead, God, out of His own love and mercy, did something for us. God did something to His Son for our sake.

The writer of Hebrews said that Jesus was tempted in every respect as we are but without sin (see 4:15). He had no internal warfare, but He was confronted with every kind of external temptation. Jesus did not grow up in a morally sterile environment. He had four half brothers and several sisters (see Matthew 13:55-56). Though they were all probably well-taught Jewish children, they all had a sinful nature, as we have. There were undoubtedly frequent external temptations to sin as Jesus interacted with His brothers and sisters, but He never sinned. As a teenager and young adult, He undoubtedly was confronted with many temptations peculiar to that age, but He never gave in to them. At the beginning of His public ministry at about thirty years of age, He was severely tempted by the Devil (see Matthew 4:1-11) but successfully resisted those temptations. In every respect, He was without sin.

The apostle Peter testified that in the face of reviling and suffering, “he committed no sin” (1 Peter 2:22-23). The apostle John wrote that “in him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5). Thus we see that the four major writers of the New Testament letters — Paul, Peter, John, and the writer of Hebrews — all testify to the sinlessness of Jesus.

But an even greater testimony comes from the mouth of Jesus Himself. John 8:12-59 records an increasingly hostile dialogue Jesus had with a group of Jews. At one point, Jesus said to them, “You are of your father the devil” (verse 44), and at the end of the confrontation, the Jews picked up stones to throw at Him (see verse 59). In the course of that hostile dialogue, Jesus said of Himself, “I always do the things that are pleasing to [the Father]” (verse 29). And again, after He had said to them, “You are of your father the devil,” He dared to ask them, “Which one of you convicts me of sin?” (verse 46). He dared to ask the question because He was confident of the answer. He was without sin. Throughout His entire lifetime, Jesus perfectly and completely obeyed all the law of God. To use His own words in Matthew 5:18, He obeyed every iota and dot (or, as many of us are more familiar with from King James, every jot and tittle) of the law.

Why this emphasis on the sinlessness of Jesus? There are two reasons. First, in order to die for our sins, He had to be sinless Himself. He had to be morally without blemish or spot (see Hebrews 9:14; 1 Peter 1:19). Second, as we will see more as we continue through 2 Corinthians 5:21, He had to compile a record of perfect righteousness that could be transferred to us. But for now, the next question is what did God the Father do to His sinless Son?

Peter expressed it a little differently. He said, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree [that is, the cross]” (1 Peter 2:24). So what happened as God made Jesus to be sin, or to bear our sin? God poured out His just and holy wrath on His own Son, whom He had made to be the very embodiment of sin. The most vivid description of God’s action is in Isaiah 53. Consider certain phrases I have extracted from that beautiful chapter:

How then do we become the righteousness of God? The answer is that when by faith we trust in Jesus, God credits His perfect obedience, or His perfect righteousness, to us. We can see now the second necessity for Christ’s sinlessness or, to state it in the language of 2 Corinthians 5:21, His righteousness. Just as God made Christ to be sin and charged the guilt of our sin to Him, so He credits the righteousness of Christ to those who have faith in Him. This is why 2 Corinthians 5:21 is so often called the Great Exchange. God exchanges our sin for Christ’s righteousness.

But it is the representative union with Christ that is in view in Paul’s use of “in him” in 2 Corinthians 5:21. To understand this phrase, “representative union,” we must go to Romans 5:12-21, where Paul taught us that Adam was appointed by God to represent the entire human race. In a sense, we were all “in Adam,” just as we are “in Christ.” Therefore, when Adam sinned, we all sinned, and the guilt and consequences of his sin fall upon all humanity. That is why we are all born spiritually dead, subject to the domain of Satan, and by nature children of God’s wrath (see Ephesians 2:1-3).

But Paul drew an analogy and by contrast taught us that just as Adam was the representative head of all humanity, so Christ is the representative head of all who trust in Him as Savior. So just as we must say, “When Adam sinned, I sinned,” we may also say, “When Christ died on the cross, I died on the cross.” In fact, this is what Paul essentially said when he wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20). Furthermore, we may also say, “When Christ lived a perfect, sinless life, I lived a perfect, sinless life.” I realize that this last statement is breathtaking, but that is what Paul was saying in his words, “In him we might become the righteousness of God.”

This representative union with Christ is key to understanding the gospel. In fact, more than that, it is what makes Christ’s life and death effective for us. If Christ did not legally represent us, all that He did would be of no avail to us.

The living union is best represented by the metaphor of the vine and the branches that Jesus used in John 15:1-6. Just as the branches derive their life and nourishment from the vine, so we derive our spiritual life and nourishment from Christ through this living union. We will address this union more in chapter 8. Meanwhile, keep in mind that the representative and the living union are only two expressions of the one union. In the one expression, we stand righteous before God. In the other, we experience the life and power of Christ in our daily lives.

There is an old play on the word justified, that it means “just as if I’d never sinned.” That expression speaks to the forgiveness of our sins. When God charges our sins to Christ, they are no longer ours. He has removed them from us as far as the east is from the west (see Psalm 103:12). He remembers them no more (see Hebrews 8:12). The penalty has been paid. God’s justice is satisfied. His judicial wrath has been fully exhausted on His Son. Truly we stand before Him just as if we’d never sinned!

But there is another play on the word justification, that it also means “just as if I had always obeyed.” That is also a glorious truth that is based on the perfect obedience of Christ — the obedience that, as we have already seen, was lived out over thirty-three years of real human life in a real world.

In chapter 2, we saw that the holiness of God includes His infinite moral purity. Consider this: Jesus in His humanity was just as holy as God sitting on His throne. There was not one iota of difference. And what Jesus was in His life, we are in our standing before God because Jesus was our representative in both His life and death. So as far as our standing before God is concerned, when He lived a perfect life, we lived a perfect life. When He died on the cross, we died on the cross. All that Jesus did in both His sinless life and sin-bearing death, He did as our representative and substitute.

That’s why the apostle Paul could write, “As by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Obviously, based on the overall teaching of the New Testament, the “many” in those two comparisons are not equal in extent. The first many who were made sinners refers to the entire human race (except, of course, Jesus). The second many refers to all who are united to Christ by faith. Paul is not teaching a universal salvation of all humankind.

So because of God’s Great Exchange, all who trust in Christ as Savior stand before God “just as if we’d never sinned” and “just as if we had always obeyed.” Once after I had spoken on the Great Exchange, a man said to me, “I still don’t understand the difference.” He had already told me he was a self-employed landscape contractor, so I said to him, “Suppose you have been working on a job all day and you come home sweaty and dirty and your clothes all grimy. What do you need to do before you sit down to dinner?”

He replied, “I need to take a shower and put on clean clothes.”

“How about just putting on clean clothes without taking a shower?”

“No, I would never do that,” he replied.

“Then how about taking a shower and putting your grimy work clothes back on?”

“No, I wouldn’t do that either.”

“So you need to both take a shower and put on clean clothes?”

“Yes,” he replied, “that’s what I need to do.”

I said, “That’s what God does to you. He washes you clean in the blood of His Son and clothes you in His perfect righteousness.” He smiled and said, “I get it.”

The question is, do we “get it”? Do we really believe that every day our standing before God is based entirely, as the old hymn puts it, on “Jesus’ blood and righteousness”? Our natural drift is toward a performance-based relationship with God. So if my concept of sin consists of only the more flagrant sins of society of which I am not guilty, I will tend toward a confident self-righteousness epitomized by the Pharisee who prayed in the temple, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men” (Luke 18:11). On the other hand, those who have a tender conscience and see so much of their own “respectable” sins will often live under a continual sense of God’s displeasure.

What is the solution to a performance-based relationship with God that tends toward either self-righteousness or a continual sense of guilt? It is a daily living in the reality of the Great Exchange. It is a daily believing that however vile my sins are in my eyes, God has said, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). It is believing that in every instance where I have failed to obey, Jesus has already obeyed in my place (see Philippians 3:9). In short, it is a daily embracing of the gospel, looking outside of myself to Jesus and His shed blood and righteousness. And we will see what that looks like in the next chapter.