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 “For he made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us,

 that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

The Second Epistle to the Corinthians 5:21

 

Father Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor)


 

AS MUCH AS THIS IS A FRIGHTENING TRUTH it is at the same time a comfort and joy that gives us the inheritance of Christ Himself, and thus become accepted and loved before God.

Is it logical that He who did not know sin should for us become sin? We declare and repeat that Christ did not only become sin when He bore our sins on the cross, but adopted sin itself in His body to be able to kill it through His death. It is an amazing matter to grasp!

The essence of sin is death even though death has no metal nor substance! Nay death is total negativism, meaning that originally it did not exist at all but the enemy of righteousness himself exploded it when he disobeyed God. He fell to the lowest of the low and was driven out from God’s presence, his place in heaven becoming vacant. He descended to earth to take his revenge on God’s creation without right, because originally he was a stranger to our nature. For we are created in God’s image while he is God’s severed enemy. He persecutes us because we are in God’s image so he takes his revenge against God on us. His only weapon is sin and his only work is to make us fall into sin to become his slaves being the leader of sin. Sin’s source is his originally i.e. opposing God and resisting His purpose deriving its existence from the devil. It is the hostile weapon against God killing man unjustly, and spuriously.

God could not bear that His image be humiliated in us and that we should swallow the cup of death. God’s main worry was to free us from the power of that despot, save us from death, breaking his sole destructive weapon which is sin, the poisoned thorn of death.

It was not possible through man or prophet to uproot this poison and break the poisonous thorn alien in origin to God’s image. Due to God’s love to man it became easy for Him to send His Son, equal to Him in glory, to don man’s flesh and bear this deadly sin (sin has no substance as substance concerns truth and verity while sin is neither truth nor verity) actually dying with it to sever it from man’s nature and thus remove the devil’s yoke releasing man to become free from the enemy’s hold. Christ thus died on the cross, condemned by the priests of being a sinful and blasphemous man who had denuded the high priests from the truth accepting sins and blasphemy in his flesh. He died with it, and therefore sin died and was uprooted, Christ on the cross having conquered the devil with all his collaborators delivering him to the source of eternal damnation.1

God thus made His pure and Holy Son don sin, and become in aspect as if he were sin. It was for our sakes. As for us we received instead Christ’s righteousness to become before God righteous having been sinners condemned to death. This way sin and the power of sin were destroyed and the devil was brought down to the darkness gloom preserved till the fearful day of judgment where he will receive the death sentence.

As for us we have gained forgiveness through the cross and were freed from death when Christ resurrected from the dead, and “raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places”2 Therefore “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?”3 The sting of death is sin, which Christ removed through his death, as for the victory of Hades Christ destroyed through his resurrection.

Where are you man in relation to sin and Hades? Is it not sad and truly amazing that man should prefer to be a slave to sin after Christ removed it thus presenting himself to Hades after Christ destroyed it?

1 Col 2:15.

2 Eph 2:6.

3 1Cor 15:55.

 

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