There could be no reconciliation unless God initiated it.There could be no reconciliation unless God activated it. There could be no reconciliation unless God applied it.
He has to design it and He has to execute it. It cannot come from any human source. Nothing man could do, nothing man could not do could produce reconciliation with God. It isn’t anything we do or don’t do. In fact, all of our efforts in the religious realm amount to filthy rags, the Bible says.
The world is literally filled with religion and all of that religion, apart from Christianity, is man producing a plan with the aid of Satan in which he can initiate reconciliation with God. That is the fatal flaw of all world religions no matter what name they come under. Romans chapter 3 says, verse 10, “There is none that does good, there is none righteous, no not one; there is none that understands; there is none that seeks after God.” Nobody, absolutely nobody.
“2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 3 For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God.” Romans 10:2-3.
That’s what false religion is, in a word, it’s the religion of human achievement. But they never can accomplish it because the only way that reconciliation could ever occur is if God reached out to sinners.
It was God who made Him who knew no sin to be sin. It was God’s plan. He designed it, He initiated it and He executed it. So that Jesus went to the cross not because men turned on Him, though they did; Jesus went to the cross not because seducing spirits orchestrated the minds of the religious leaders of Judaism to plot His death, though they did; Jesus went to the cross not because an angry mob screamed for His blood, though they did. Jesus went to the cross because God planned it. God purposed it. And God designed it as the absolutely necessary means by which and by which alone reconciliation could take place.
That’s why Jesus said, “I came into the world to do the Father’s will.” That’s why in John 18:11 He said, “Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given Me?” meaning the cup of wrath. That’s why in Hebrews chapter 10 the Lord Jesus is quoted as saying, “A body Thou hast prepared Me and I have come to do Thy will, O God.” That’s why in Acts chapter 2 when Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost and preached to the population of Jerusalem, many of whom had been screaming for the blood of Jesus and been guilty of calling for His execution, Peter says to that crowd, “You have killed the Son of God by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” In other words, you did your evil deed but it was all in the plan of the Father.
Only God could call the second member of the trinity to become incarnate and come into the world and humble Himself and take on the form of a man and be obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Only God could ask that of Him. Only God could design an atonement for sin that would satisfy His justice because only God knows what it takes to satisfy His justice. Only God knows what propitiates His wrath. We don’t know. Only God could decide how His own infinite holiness, intense hatred of sin and inflexible justice could be perfectly satisfied without destroying the sinner in that satisfaction.
5 Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.7 “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.”8 Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.”9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? John 14:5-9.
Only God could know what it would take to make a sinner acceptable to Him so that that sinner could escape eternal hell and live in the very presence of God in His own house. Only God could determine how the spiritual nature and the supreme authority and the unchangeable perfection of His law which is holy, just and good could be completely satisfied and the lawbreaker completely justified and rightly and purely forgiven and accepted, though fallen, guilty and depraved. Only God could bring all of those components to reconciliation. Only God knew what it would take. Only God knew how to solve the dilemma. Only He knew what would satisfy His righteous requirement. Only He knew how He could spend His wrath so that wrath was consummated. Only He knew what it took to bear the burden of sin, to endure the punishment of His fury, only He knew.
And so while the world may call the gospel and the work of Jesus Christ foolish, foolishness, it is to those who believe the wisdom of God, is it not? It may seem foolish to the world but it is the purest and profoundest wisdom that the infinitely holy God could devise a plan consistent with His infinite holiness to reconcile utterly wicked sinners, only God. So God is the benefactor. He is the one who made the plan, He is the one who must execute the plan. That is so important, beloved, absolutely important. It all flows out of this great reality. “God so loved the world that have gave His only begotten Son, that who ever believes in Him should perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16
And that is exactly what Paul says in different terms in Romans chapter 5 verse 8, “God demonstrates His own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died in our place.” It all came out of God’s love. “While we were enemies” – verse 10 says – “we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.” And God initiated it because He loved us. “God” – Ephesians 2:4 says – “who is rich in mercy for the great love wherewith He had loved us” – has granted us salvation. God loves sinners. That’s why in Colossians chapter 1, the apostle Paul says, “Thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.” Only God knew what the qualifications were. Only God could qualify us. He was the only one who could know the standard. And thanks to Him, for He delivered us from the domain of darkness. He transferred us to the Kingdom of His beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
That is exactly why the apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter 1 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” It was the Father who chose us in Him before the foundation of the world. It was the Father who predestined us to the adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. Everything is through the praise of His glory. It is He who freely bestowed on us salvation in the beloved, who gave us redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, etc., etc. It was the Father who designed to lavish on us all wisdom and insight and all riches of grace.
Listen. This is very different in the religions of the world. The religions of the world basically operate on a premise of fear that God is an angry, hateful or indifferent God who could really care less about the prosperity of beings who grovel around underneath Him in this world. And so the goal of most all religions is to somehow appease an otherwise hostile and angry God. Somehow, they have to devise a system if they’re going to be reconciled to God so that He doesn’t crush out their life and punish them eternally. They’re going to have to appease this God. And so they are busily inventing systems of appeasement by which through certain religious ceremonies or through certain religious duties and actions or certain good works they can somehow appease this deity and somehow hold back His deadly fury.
On the other hand, Christianity proclaims a God who loves, who loves so much He is a Savior, God our Savior who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. We have a God who doesn’t hate but a God who loves sinners and has Himself designed a way for them to have fellowship with Him forever and ever. We don’t have to appease God. God loves the sinner. And God in His love provides the sacrifice and wonderfully and graciously and freely and magnanimously and eagerly offers the gift of forgiveness. This is the good news. The good news is you don’t have to appease God. The good news is you don’t have to figure out a plan of – of reconciliation. The good news is you don’t have to somehow work out your own righteousness. The good news is God is the benefactor. He knows what satisfies His righteousness and His holiness. He has effected that satisfaction. The price of sin has been paid and He now offers you forgiveness and reconciliation. That’s the gospel.
Now what did it take? It took death because, as it says in the Old Testament in Ezekiel 18:20, the person who sins will die. As it says in Romans 6:23 in the New Testament, “The wages of sin is death.” God knew what the requirement was. The requirement is death and God made that abundantly clear throughout the whole Old Testament economy. Because the Jews spent most of their lives, of course, either coming from or going to a sacrifice. They had to continually massacre animals, millions and millions and millions of them to deal with sin, to show the people how wicked they were and how sin required death.
It wasn’t that those animals took away their sin. They didn’t, they couldn’t. But what they demonstrated to the people repeatedly was that the wages of sin is what? Is death. Death, death, death, death, death, death. And every time they would sin it was back to another death, back to killing another animal. And they were wearied of that and longing for the ultimate Lamb who once and for all would take away the sin of the world and end this carnage. The animals were symbols that God’s law can only be satisfied through death and made the people long with all their hearts for a final substitute, a final substitute.
Well, the Father sent one and He didn’t come reluctantly. Not at all. He said, “No man takes My life from Me,” – in John 10 – “I lay it down of Myself, I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again.” He willingly did not hold on to what He had a right to grasp, but let go of it and condescended to die. So if there was to be reconciliation, the plan had to come from God, He had to initiate it. He had to design it. He had to execute it.
Second thing you see in this text – first the benefactor who is God, second the substitute. And the substitute is identified. “He made Him who knew no sin.” That’s the identification of the substitute. Who is it? Him who knew no sin. Let me tell you something, folks. That narrows the field to one. Him who knew no sin, who is that? It’s not a human being for there is “none of them who is righteous, no not one. They’ve all sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. There’s no human being who qualifies. Who is the one who knew no sin? Who is this one? Who is the one who can bear the full wrath of God against sin for somebody else because He doesn’t have to bear it for Himself?
See, no sinful person could be a substitute, no sinner could die for another sinner because he would have to pay the penalty for his own sin. There had to be a sinless offering. And it had to be a human being because it had to be man who dies for man. But he couldn’t be a sinful human being or he would have to die for his own sin and couldn’t provide atonement for somebody else’s. So it had to be a sinless man. Well, the only way to have a sinless man was to have a man who was God because God alone is sinless. So if you’re going to have a sinless man you have a man – a man who is God.
And that’s exactly what God designed. That the second member of the trinity, sinless and perfect, equally holy with the other two members of the trinity would come into the world in the form of a man. He was not to have a human father. Joseph was not the father of Jesus and Joseph knew it. Joseph had never known his wife in a conjugal way. He found out that she was with child. He couldn’t believe it. And then the angel said, “That which was conceived in her was of the Holy Spirit.” so that Jesus had a human mother that He might be a human, but God was His Father so that He was the God/Man, the sinless human being.
“20 Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. 21 For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” 2 Corinthians 5:20-21.
You see, He had to punish sin but if He punished the sinner the sinner would be destroyed in hell eternally. So He had to take the substitute and put Him in the place of the sinner and punish the substitute instead. He had to be sin. That phrase is very important and I want you to grasp it. What does it mean that He was made sin? That’s an astounding statement. What does it mean?
Well, first of all, let me tell you what it doesn’t mean and you need to understand this clearly. It does not mean that Christ became a sinner. It does not mean that He committed a sin. It does not mean that He broke God’s law. He did not do that. The Scriptures indicate that He had no capacity to sin. He had no possibility to sin. He could not sin. He was sinless God while fully man. And certainly it is unthinkable that God would turn Him into a sinner. The idea of God making anybody a sinner is unthinkable, to say nothing of making His holy Son into a sinner.
Well you say, “Well what does it mean then that He was made sin?” Isaiah 53 introduces it to us. “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, our sorrows He carried.” Verse 5, “He was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. And the chastening that fell on Him was because of us.” Verse 6, “All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.” He didn’t die for His own sins, He died for our sins   ( The Elect ). What it means is the Lord took all of the iniquity of all of the saved elect and it fell on Christ.
What do you mean? It wasn’t His sin? No, it was our sin. What is it saying? Simply this. God treated Christ as if He were a sinner. How? By making Him pay the penalty for sin though He was innocent. He paid the penalty. God treated Him as if He was the sinner. More than that, God treated Him as if He sinned all the sins of all who would ever believe. Is that incredible? Sin, not His at all, was credited to Him as if He had committed it and paid the price. And Christ was completely without any sin ever! But it was credited to Him as if He did. That is the only sense in which Christ was made sin, and the word is He was made sin by imputation. Sin was imputed to Him, it wasn’t His, He never sinned. But God put it to His account, charged it to Him and making Him pay the penalty.
It would be like all the sinners in all the world charging all their sin to your credit card and you having to pay the bill. Imputation.The guilt of the sins of all who would ever believe God, all who would ever be saved was imputed to Jesus Christ, credited to Him as if He were guilty of all of it. And then just as soon as God had credited it to Him, God poured out the full fury of all His wrath against all that sin and all those sinners and Jesus experienced all of that.
All right, you want to try to earn your way to heaven? You want to try to reconcile yourself? You want to keep certain works? Do certain religious duties? Ascribe to some moral law or ceremonial law? You want to achieve your own righteousness? You’ve got a problem. All of you who try to reconcile to God through works, through what you do are cursed. Why? Because it says in Deuteronomy, “Cursed is everyone who doesn’t abide by all things written in the book of the law to perform them.” You know why that curses you? Because the first time you violate one law, one commandment, one moral law of God, you’re damned. It just takes one. If you ever told  even one lie, your cursed and under the judgement. Cursed is everyone who doesn’t keep all that is written in the book of the law.
So if you’re going to try to reconcile yourself to God through human effort, every time you try to do that you put yourself under a curse because it only takes one violation. So the whole human race is cursed. And everybody in every religion on the face of the earth trying to achieve reconciliation by their own efforts is cursed. All this curse of iniquity has to be paid for. There has to be a penalty for this curse. So Galatians 3:13 says, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us….”.
That’s the point. He became a curse for us. He took the full fury of God’s wrath on our behalf. God placed Christ in the path of the curse and trampled Him with exhausted judgment. And again, I remind you, that it is imputation that is crucial to understanding reconciliation. He became sin by imputation. Our sin was imputed to Him just as believers become holy by imputation , being given His righteousness. Let me say it another way. Christ dying on the cross did not become evil like we are, nor do we by virtue of the cross become as holy as He is.
You say, “Well what happens?” It’s imputation. God puts sin to Christ’s credit, our sin, and puts Christ’s righteousness to our credit. It’s not that we are so righteous God is satisfied. It’s that because the penalty is paid and the guilt has been met that God can credit to us the righteousness of Christ. That’s the gospel. The only sense in which you are made righteous through justification is by imputation. And that’s the same sense in which Christ was made sin. He is made sin because God credits our sin to Him. We’re made righteous because God credits His righteousness to us.
Listen. If we are Christians, We are not so righteous that as we are ,we  can stand before a holy God. Are you? I’ve got a lot of sin in my life. And I would say if I got anywhere near God what Peter said, “Depart from Me, O Lord, for I am still a sinner, still sinful.” But God looks at me and does not consider me on the virtue of my human morality. He considers me on the virtue of the imputed righteousness of Christ which covers me. This is the point. Well, the benefactor is God, the substitute is Christ and by imputation receives our sins and dies for them, taking our place.
There is a transformation. There is a new creation at salvation. There is. We are transformed. We are changed. But even with that change, we wouldn’t have sufficient righteousness to satisfy a holy God. And so He has to cover us in the righteousness of Christ to make us acceptable until He can get us to glory and we’ll be made righteous. And it is for us, us who are in Christ then, us who have been reconciled that He died. He died in our place. The actual substitution in its efficacy was for believers, those who would believe. He died for our sins. He died for us. He died in our place.
The final point, the benefit. And what did He provide us? “In order that,we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” See, there’s that imputation. What is the benefit? We become righteous before God. This is what justification does. And the righteousness that we are given is the very righteousness of Christ.
Listen to what Paul said in Philippians 3:9. “We are now found in Christ not having a righteousness of my own,” he says. Not some righteousness derived from keeping the law, “but a righteousness through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God.” Wow! It’s imputed to us. He’s holy, God imputed sin to Him. We’re sinful, God imputes holiness to us. The very righteousness which God requires to accept the sinner is the very righteousness which God provides. When God looks at you He sees you covered by the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That’s why all your sin is automatically forgiven in the eternal sense because Jesus already paid the penalty. God can’t hold you responsible for your sin, Jesus paid the full penalty for it, took the full fury for it.
You say, “Well what about the sins I commit after I’m a Christian?” Well He paid – died for those too because you weren’t even born when He died. They were all future. In fact, He is the lamb slain from before what? The foundation of the world, before even the creation. The plan was for Him to die for all the sins of all who will ever believe. This is the righteousness that Romans 3 talks about. “It’s the righteousness of God” verse 21, “apart from the law.” Verse 22, “It’s the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” – for all those who believe.
And that’s the key. How do you get in on this? Believe. Believe what? Believe that you’re a sinner, believe you’re in a desperate situation, you’re desperately alienated from God. Believe that you have no hope of reconciliation and you will in this life live godlessly and in the next life you will suffer eternal torment. And believe all of that. And then believe that God sent His Son into the world in the form of a man to die as your substitute and take your place and that He took the full fury of the wrath of God upon Him.
And believe that the affirmation that God’s justice was satisfied was the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead. And when God raised Him from the dead He was saying, “I am satisfied.” And then God exalted Jesus to His right hand where He sits at the right hand of God on the throne and God says when that was done, when He offered Himself and satisfied My justice, I gave Him – Philippians 2 “a name which is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee in the universe must bow and every tongue must confess that Jesus is Lord.” That’s what you believe. That’s the gospel.
And when you believe that by faith, simply believing that, God in His mercy takes the righteousness of Jesus Christ and imputes it to you because your sins were imputed to Christ when He died on the cross. The Father knew you were there when the Son died. Your name was written in the Lamb’s Book of Life before the foundation of the world and the atonement that Christ made was for you. And you come to believe and you receive the imputed righteousness. And then you live in this life with God in your life and in eternity in the presence of God in absolute perfection. That’s the gospel. That’s Christianity. That’s it.
The evidence of that saving faith will be a transformation of the inner person with a new birth, showing a zeal and passion to obey the word of Christ and feed on the word of God, the Holy Bible.“17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead 18 But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. 26 For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” James 2:17,18,26.

Any one who thinks they are - or - can be reconciled to God without Christ, that they have or can come in by a different door, be saved by thier own works, be saved  by any other way outside of what is explained in this study from the word of God,  is not true saving faith and is in fact a work of the devil and a one way ticket to Hell, the Lake of Fire.
Remember, Christianity was never meant to be a religion. Christianity is the dynamic empowering spiritual life of the risen Lord Jesus Christ, indwelling the spirit of man so as to create functional behavior to the glory of God. That is the evidence that will manifest from the fruit of the spirit, by the inward spiritual transformation ( justification, regeneration, and progressive sanctification ) witnessed by a renewed outward expression of the person.
That is a genuine saving faith by the imputed righteousness (grace) of Jesus Christ.

The Father planned redemption, the Son provided the means of redemption in His death and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit produces the work of redemption in us. He (the Holy Spirit) is the agent that brings about the actuality of the plan that God initiated and that the Son validated; He is the one who activates it. It is the Holy Spirit who regenerates us. John 3: "We are born of the Spirit." It is the Holy Spirit who convicts us of sin and righteousness and judgment, John 16. The Holy Spirit participates in our justification and sanctification. Our Salvation is the Trinity working together in this whole process from beginning to end ; the planning, the provision, and the development.