Let’s not miss the implications of this. At the cross, Jesus paid the penalty we should have paid, by enduring the wrath of God we should have endured. And this required him to do something unprecedented. It required him to provide the ultimate level of obedience—one that we’ll never be asked to emulate. It required him to give up his relationship with the Father so that we could have one instead. The very thought of being torn away from the Father caused him to sweat great drops of blood (Luke 22:44). And at the crescendo of his obedience, he screamed, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). The physical pain he endured was nothing compared to the agony of being separated from the Father. In all of history, Jesus is the only human being who was truly righteous in every way; and he was righteous in ways that are truly beyond our comprehension.

Our Sin Transferred to Christ

The second truth to note in 2 Corinthians 5:21 is that “for our sake he made him to be sin.” This is Paul’s way of saying God caused Jesus to bear our sin. Peter wrote something similar: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). So did the prophet Isaiah: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). Paul is telling us that God the Father took our sin and charged it to God the Son in such a way that Christ was made to be sin for our sake.

Now we can see what Paul meant in Galatians 3:13 when he said, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” He became a curse for us because he’d become sin for us. And by those words for us, Paul indicates that Christ did this in our place and as our substitute.

Imagine there’s a moral ledger recording every event of your entire life—all your thoughts, words, actions, even your motives. You might think of it as a mixture of good and bad deeds, with hopefully more good than bad. The Scriptures, however, tell us that even our righteous deeds are unclean in the sight of God (Isaiah 64:6). So Jesus has a perfectly righteous moral ledger, and we have a completely sinful one. However, God took our sins and charged them to Christ, leaving us with a clean sheet.

The biblical word for this is forgiveness. In and of itself, forgiveness is a monumental blessing. Paul echoed David on this when he wrote, “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin” (Romans 4:7–8; Psalm 32:1–2). But how did God do this and yet remain perfectly holy and just?

He did it by causing the sinless Son to bear our sins, including everything that goes with them: our guilt, our condemnation, our punishment. That’s what it took for God to wipe our moral ledger sheet perfectly clean and at the same time preserve his holiness and justice—the price had to be paid on our behalf; so the sentence was executed on our Substitute.