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2 Cor. 5:21 Revisited
By John R. Gavazzoni
What I'm referring to, in the title of this essay, is how two of expansions or amplifications of the Greek text of 2 Cor. 5:21 resonate with me powerfully re: what is meant by Jesus dying for (for, per the KJV) our sins. Better, according to the JMNT translation, is "over our sins," or "in behalf of our sins." In this translation expansion or amplification or alternate renderings, I find perfect scriptural support for what the Spirit of Truth so patiently taught me even from the limitations of conventional translations on the subject.
On offer, in place of conventional translations including the KJV, about Christ becoming sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him, it has the options of, "He (God) made Him (Christ) a failure over our sins, and He accomplished a miss of the target for us."
Though it's presumed, from conventional translation, that Christ dying for our sins means Christ endured, instead of us, God's righteous punishment for breaking His law or for offending His righteousness, there's actually nothing even in the "for our sins" translation that leads to that conclusion, except that we project onto God our sense of vengeance being righteousness.
With some pondering under the light of the Spirit of Truth, God making Jesus a failure over our sins, with the further complementary explanation, that He accomplished a miss of the target for us, is completely consistent with how God, in/as love, would respond to our missing the mark.
The issue of the demand of the law being satisfied should not enter into understanding the atonement at all. There's no legal transaction involved in God reconciling man to Himself. It's totally a personal matter, of God taking responsibility for our needful condition and taking on (not a legal responsibility) the essence of our missing the mark, i.e., our deep, mostly unconscious sense of abandonment by God.
Nothing misses the mark more than that, in the face of the love of mankind's Heavenly Father. That ignorant misperception lies at the heart of man's enmity against God: the sense of His being unfair in abandoning us in our condition.
Jesus bore that very fallen false perception at that moment when God, obviously withheld the light of His love for Him on the cross plunging Him into mankind's essential darkness: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Of course, we know the Father did not, could not, forsake His Son, but the Son could be, as here translated, made a failure over our sins, accomplishing a miss of the target for us.
In Christ, as the Son of God/as the fulness of Godness bodily, and as the Son of Man inclusive of all men in Him, God and man met in the Christ Event: man, in Him, experienced the full depths of their missing the mark, while God experienced mankind's reaction of enmity.
From, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me," to "Father, into Thy hands I commit My Spirit," we were all, in Him, seminally, delivered from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son. That utter solidarity of God with man into the darkest regions of hades, began, I believe, way back with the first man/first Adam and was culminated in/with the Second Man/Last Adam. It's been a co-journey all the way.
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