Part 3: Did Jesus Literally Become Sin? | Hyperlinking Easter to Psalm 22 Series

This is Part 3 of a multipart series connecting Jesus to Psalm 22. Part 1 of this series began with the question: Did God the Father forsake Jesus on the cross. Then in Part 2 I tackled the erroneous, but well intentioned, assertion that God cannot look upon sin. It is my hope to bring this series to its conclusion on Good Friday.

REVIEW
In addressing the problem with asserting the Father abandoned Jesus on the cross, I listed two premises that led to the common misunderstanding held by many Christians. As a review, the syllogism is as follows:

Premise 1: God in his purity cannot look on evil or sin (Hab 1.13)
Premise 2: Christ literally became our sin on the cross (2Co 5.21)
Conclusion 1: Hence, God in his purity cannot look on Christ who was sin
Conclusion 2: Hence, God in his purity cannot be in the presence of sin that was in Christ
Conclusion 3: Therefore, God must turn his back on Christ and abandon him on the cross

Now hat I’ve debunked Premise 1, I want to explore Premise 2 of the syllogism.

INVESTIGATING THE TEXT
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul explained that God made Jesus, the sinless one, “to be sin” for our sake. However, what did he mean by “made to be sin”? Scholars over the ages offer three possible interpretations. Colin Kruse summarizes as the following in his commentary 2 Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary (Tyndall New Testament Commentaries, Intervarsity Press):

1) Christ was made a sinner. The idea is that just as Christ’s righteousness is imputed on the believer, in the same way, our wickedness is imputed on him. Thus he became an actual sinner—possessing sin itself—in this exchange when he bore the sins of the world.

2) Christ was made a sin-offering. This idea is supported by Paul’s use of sacrificial terminology, i.e., Christ as our Passover Lamb (Rom 3.25; 1Co 5.7). Further, the word for “sin” (hamartia) is used in the Septuagint to mean “sin offering” (Lev 4.24; 5.12).

3) Christ was made a sin-bearer. This idea is supported by appeal to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where he speaks of Christ’s death in terms of his bearing the consequences of our sins (3.13).

Considering these three interpretations, we must reject the first because it’s contrary to the biblical teaching on Jesus’s character. Further, that’s not how imputation works. When Christ’s righteousness is imputed on us it doesn’t mean we’re no longer sinless. It means the sins we have now and will have in the future are covered by his righteousness. The demand for justice through penalty has been paid on our behalf, which takes us to the second interpretation.

Christ is our sin offering for John the baptizer stated as much in John 1.29, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” John alludes to Jesus as the better Passover Lamb. While Colin Kruse acknowledges this idea is supported by the Septuagint’s usage of the word, he declares, “The word (hamartia) is never used in this way in the New Testament, and it is doubtful whether it carries that meaning here.” He continues his thought that although sacrificial death for sin is consistent with Pauline theology, it’s probably not the best explanation to this passage, which takes us to the third interpretation.

Kruse considers this interpretation is the best by arguing as bearer of sin’s consequences it parallels with “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” He says in the New Bible Commentary (emphasis added),

If becoming the righteousness of God means that God has pronounced judgment in our favour and put us in right relationship with himself, then to become sin, as the opposite of that, would mean that God had pronounced judgment against Christ (because he took upon himself the burden of our sins; cf. Is. 53:4–6, 12).

Colin G. Kruse, “2 Corinthians” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson et al., 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1198

I believe that both the second and third interpretations have merit and are consistent with biblical teachings of penal substitutionary atonement. It’s not an “either/or” proposition but rather a “both/and” one. Jesus is both the final, perfect sacrifice—the spotless Lamb of God in John’s Gospel—and the sin-bearer that appeased God’s demand for justice from human transgressions against a holy and righteous God.

THE LAMB AND TWO GOATS
We are familiar with Jesus as the Passover Lamb, who took away the sins of the world. But the foreshadowing of Jesus can be seen in another festival observance, the two goats offered on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16.3-22. The symbolism of the two goats offered on the Day of Atonement ultimately pointed toward Christ.

The purpose of these goats—treated as two parts of the same sacrifice—was to purify and to purge. In light of the cross, Jesus was both the sin-offering goat that purified and the sin-bearing goat that purged. Foreshadowed by the first goat, he was slaughtered as the sin-offering goat with his blood “sprinkled” on the faithful to purify them so that they are fit for dwelling in God’s sacred space, in the true “tabernacle”: Jesus Christ. This was the point of Hebrews 9.18-22.

As for the second goat, on the Day of Atonement the priest places his hand on it as sign of transferring sin from the guilty to the innocent. It became the national sin-bearer for Israel. Once transferred the priest sets it loose into the wilderness, the symbol for purging sin from the camp.

This latter part of the ceremony has always puzzled theologians and scholars because the goat is reserved “for Azalea”. Some scholars translated “Azazel” as “the scapegoat” to avoid any suggestions of the goat being a sacrifice to appease a demonic power, in light of Leviticus 17.7. However, this translation isn’t completely accurate because it doesn’t take into account the cultural context of the Israelites during the exodus. According to an Egyptian superstition, Typhon, the evil spirit that lived in the wilderness. This was a common ancient view of the wilderness or desert as a place of desolation because it represented a place that is devoid of life, i.e., no vegetation or herding. Hence, it symbolized a place of evil and death. 

During the exodus, as long as the Israelites were inside the camp, they were in God’s sacred space. When people became unclean, such as leprosy, they were sent outside the camp, into the wilderness, because they’re unfit for the camp. Their uncleanness polluted God’s sacred space. Jewish scholars affirm this idea and consider Azazel to be the proper name for a demonic being who lived in the wilderness. In the First Book of Enoch, written during the third to second century BC, Second Temple Jews considered Azazel to be the name of the chief of the “sons of God” that led the rebellion in Genesis 6.1-4.

This second goat is a picture of Jesus nailed to the cross on Golgotha, a place outside of the city of Jerusalem, i.e., “outside the camp”. He carries away the sins of God’s people into the land of desolation, into Sheol, the land of the dead. His sacrificial death on the cross was the symbol of God’s total forgiveness of sin. He purged it from his covenant people. The author of Hebrews may have had this in mind when he wrote in Hebrews 13.10-13—Jesus was both the goat for sacrifice and the goat for Azazel:

10 We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. 11 For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. 12 So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. 13 Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. 14 For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. And it’s all because Christ became the sin-bearer and took away all our sin so that it is purged from God’s sacred space, the “heart” of every believer.

Regardless whether you see Jesus as the two-goat offering or not, one thing is clear, under no circumstance did Jesus ever become a sinner in exchange with us. He is still the only one who was, is and will be sinless in human history. Therefore, we can conclude that Premise 2 is false.

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Jesus can’t become literal sin. To suggest such is circular reasoning. It was yet another attempt to explain the erroneous presupposition that God the Father abandoned Jesus on the cross. And, whereas the first premise was result of poor exegesis, the second premise is completely ad hoc, if not heretical, since it means Jesus, who is God, literally took on our sin-nature in him.

In Part 1 I quoted Billy Graham for saying, “And in that moment He was banished from the presence of God, for sin cannot exist in God’s presence. His cry speaks of this truth; He endured the separation from God that you and I deserve.” Using this statement, I want us to do a thought experiment by constructing the following logic presented in it:

P1: God banished Jesus from his presence
P2: Sin cannot exist in God’s presence
P3: Jesus separated from the Godhead
C: Therefore, Jesus can’t be God

Jesus was co-eternal with God, he was the agent of creation, and he and the Father are one (Joh 1.1-3; 10.30). So this conclusion goes against all the teachings of the New Testament authors on Jesus’s divinity. It’s scandalous! It’s heretical! (I’m not saying Billy Graham was a heretic; all I’m just saying is by carrying these three premises to their logical conclusion we will end up making a claim we must never entertain.) 

It just goes to show that ideas have consequences. When it comes to making a theological statement regarding God’s nature, we must examine all its implications fully or else we might end up with heresy.

Now, some preachers have tried to soften this conclusion by providing another ad hoc explanation—when Jesus cried out the opening line from Psalm 22, he was speaking as the human Jesus. Again, ideas have consequences. This time error begets more errors. If their rationale were true, then it totally redefines the biblical concept of the “hypostatic union”—how God the Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human nature, yet remained fully God at the same time (John 1; 10.30; Rom 1.4; Col 2.9; 1Ti 2.5). The scripture teaches Jesus had two natures—both human and divine—which were inseparable. He wasn’t a mixture of half divine and half man; instead he continued to exist as God when he became a man by adding human nature to himself (Phi 2.5-11). When Jesus acted, he didn’t act as “the human” Jesus or the “divine” Jesus; he always acted as the “God-man” Jesus. To strip away Jesus’s divinity from his humanity or vice versa is committing the heresies of Docetism, Apollinarianism and Arianism. Consequences of these heretical teachings either nullifies Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross because he didn’t have an actual physical body or it turns Christianity into a polytheistic religion.

CONCLUSION
By taking the idea that God the Father had to abandon Christ at the cross—because he cannot look on or be in the presence of sin—to its logical conclusion, we can confidently and scripturally claim that the Father neither turn his face away from looking at Jesus because of sin nor abandoned him so that Christ had to endure the pain of the crucifixion alone. Instead we can rest in the hope that whenever we cry out to God, he is ready to hear and act as our Good Shepherd.

YOUR THOUGHTS
With both premises debunked, the erroneous view of Jesus’s cry on the cross has been corrected. In the forthcoming blogs I will deal with the reason Jesus quoted Psalm 22 as his last words to those standing underneath the cross.

But until then, I’m interested to hear your feedback. Do you agree or disagree with my conclusion? Why or why not? And what are your thoughts on Jesus being the two-goats of Atonement?