6.6.26 – Ahead of, Not Instead of, Part 2

Continuing from part one: what about 2 Corinthians 5:21? Isn't that Penal Substitutionary Atonement?

"For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."
(2 Cor. 5:21)

Read with a substitutionary lens, that sounds like a celestial transfer: Jesus was innocent, sin gets imputed to Him, God treats Him as if He were a sinner, the penalty falls, the transfer is complete, and you go free. But that is not what Paul is doing. Reread 2 Corinthians with the rest of Paul's letters open. You will notice that for Paul, "made Him to be sin" is not a courtroom transaction. It names full participation, not a transfer.

Skip to Romans 8:3: "God sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh." Read carefully: God did not condemn Jesus; He condemned sin in the flesh. Jesus had taken on the same human condition every one of us lives in. He entered the ground where sin had ruled, and from inside that flesh, He condemned the power that had been ruling it. Substitution says Jesus took something we never had to experience. Participation says He entered the experience we were already in, and from inside it, defeated the power that had been ruling it. That is what "made Him to be sin" means. In 2 Corinthians, it does not mean God transferred guilt onto an innocent victim. It means Jesus entered the sphere, the condition, the realm in which sin had dominated. It is not a punishment swap. So 2 Corinthians 5:21—supposedly a substitutionary slam—when read alongside Romans, turns out to be one of the clearest participatory statements in the whole Pauline corpus.

If you want to know what Paul does with the cross, do not start in 2 Corinthians 5:21. Start with Romans 6. Paul writes: "All of us who have been baptized into the Messiah were baptized into His death. We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that just as the Messiah was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." Baptized into death, buried with Him, raised with Him, walking in newness of life. That language is the opposite of substitution. Substitution says He did it all instead of you. Romans 6 says you died with Him, you are walking with Him, you will be raised with Him.

Paul keeps going: "We know that our old self was crucified with Him." The Greek word there is synestaurothe, which means "crucified alongside." That word already existed—it meant two men crucified alongside Jesus. But Paul takes it and turns it into a claim about us: not next to Him, but crucified with Him. And that is not a one-off. Paul uses these "with" compounds throughout his letters—syn words: co-buried, co-raised, co-alive, co-heirs, co-sufferers. The vocabulary itself is participatory.

Then in Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Messiah. No longer I live, but Messiah lives in me." That is the grammar of participation, not substitution. "He died, so you do not have to"? No. Paul says He died, your old self also died with Him, and you are now called to walk in the life that comes on the other side. That is everywhere in the New Testament: Romans, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Colossians, 1 John, 1 Peter. We died with Him, we will live with Him. His blood does what it does because His life was poured out and we receive it.

So here is what the New Testament is doing. There is a two-way participation in the gospel. First direction: He participates in us. He enters the death-dying condition, carries the sickness, bears the sin, walks the path we could not walk. He goes ahead. Second direction—often underemphasized or ignored because it does not preach well—we participate in Him. We are baptized into His death, we share in His suffering, we bear in our bodies the dying of Yeshua so that the life of Yeshua may also be manifested. The cross is the meeting place of those two directions. He came down into our condition so that we might be raised up into His, to follow after Him.

On this 14th day of counting toward the firstfruits of the vine, may we celebrate in what He did by identifying with a lifestyle of what He did.

Shabbat Shalom!
Alan