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For those who are bi-lingual, I now have a second blog, in the French language, that publishes twice-monthly. Go to: https://crazyrevfr.blogspot.com/

22 Oct 2010

He became sin

 It wasn't so very long ago that I was reading, in my personal 'Quiet Time', in Paul's second letter to the young church in Corinth.  At the end of what we know as chapter 5 (although, of course, Paul didn't write his letters in chapters and verses any more than you or I would!), I read, "For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." (v.21; RSV).

It was those words "... made Him to be sin ..." that suddenly jumped out at me.  Paul is telling us that, when He hung on the cross, Jesus, the sinless, holy, perfect and without blemish Lamb of God, did not merely take my sin upon Himself, and pay the penalty that I owed.  He says that He became the very essence of sin.  He didn’t just die for my sins; He became all that sin is – all the ugliness, and blackness, and virulence, and bitterness, and maliciousness, and pollution, and poison, that is sin.  Was that what Isaiah saw as he was allowed to look over the horizon of time and get that glimpse of Calvary centuries before the event?  He had no form or comeliness that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him.” (53:2).  No wonder that, for a brief moment of human time, the Father could not even look upon the Son, causing Jesus to cry out, in anguish, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matt.27:46; Mark 15:34)
And He did all of that; He became sin; for you, and for me!  The hymn-writer didn’t quite get the message when he wrote “O help me understand it, help me to take it in; what it meant to Thee, the Holy One, to bear away my sin.” (K.A.M.Kelly).  H.G.Spafford was closer when he wrote “My sin – oh the bliss of this glorious thought – my sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to His Cross, and I bear it no more; Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul
I thought of all of that when I watched the video below - posted on Facebook by my good friend Margaret Ollivier, a GLO missionary in Quimper, France.  I found it to be both beautiful, and powerful.  I trust that you will find it to be the same.

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