RECONCILIATION
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.
Sin is a fundamental relationship; it is not wrong doing, it is wrong
being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. The Christian
religion bases everything on the positive, radical nature of sin.
Other religions deal with sins; the Bible alone deals with sin. The
first thing Jesus Christ faced in men was the heredity of sin, and it
is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the Gospel
that the message of the Gospel has lost its sting and its blasting
power.
The revelation of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took upon
Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took upon Himself the heredity
of sin which no man can touch. God made His own Son to be sin that He
might make the sinner a saint. All through the Bible it is revealed
that Our Lord bore the sin of the world by identification, not by
sympathy. He deliberately took upon His own shoulders, and bore in
His own Person, the whole massed sin of the human race - "He hath
made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin," and by so doing He put
the whole human race on the basis of Redemption. Jesus Christ
rehabilitated the human race; He put it back to where God designed it
to be, and anyone can enter into union with God on the ground of what
Our Lord has done on the Cross.
A man cannot redeem himself; Redemption is God's "bit," it is
absolutely finished and complete; its reference to individual men is
a question of their individual action. A distinction must always be
made between the revelation of Redemption and the conscious
experience of salvation in a man's life.
Daily Reading of My Upmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers