This section and the first two verses of chapter 6 constitute the crux of Paul's exposition of the apostolic office (2:14-7:4) and of the entire letter.189
5:18-19 The basis of this total change (new attitudes, v. 16, and new creation, v. 17) is God's gracious provision of reconciliation in sending His Son to die for us. He has brought people to Himself by dealing with our sins in Christ. God is the reconciler, and He has reconciled everyone to Himself, the elect and the non-elect alike (cf. Rom. 5:10-11; Col. 1:20-22). He has brought everyone into a savable relation to Himself by sending His Son who paid the penalty for sin that separates people from God. The fact that God has reconciled everyone does not mean that everyone is justified. People still need to respond to the offer of salvation by believing the gospel to receive justification (v. 20). Reconciliation removes a barrier to our salvation, but it does not by itself accomplish our salvation.
God has committed the message of this provision to those who have experienced reconciliation, and our ministry is to present it to all people (Matt. 28:19-20). Paul was perhaps speaking primarily of his own ministry of bringing people back to God as well as the ministry of his fellow apostles. However all believers clearly share this ministry since God has reconciled us all. The word of reconciliation is the gospel message.
5:20 This makes us God's ambassadors, one of the most exalted titles the Christian can claim. Ambassadors authoritatively announce messages for others and request, not demand, acceptance. The Christian ambassador, moreover, announces and appeals for God.
". . . when Christ's ambassador entreats it is equivalent to the voice of God entreating through him."190
However the stakes involved require an urgent appeal. We should never present the gospel to the lost with a "take it or leave it"attitude. Our presentation should communicate the urgency of their believing the message. Full reconciliation only takes place when a person trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ as his or her Savior (John 3:16). Consequently it may be helpful to think of reconciliation as objectively provided by God in the past but needing subjective appropriation by the unsaved in the present.
We could understand the word "you"in "we beg (or implore) you"as a specific reference to the Corinthians or as a general reference to all people. Paul was probably not appealing to his Corinthian readers to be reconciled to God. They had already been reconciled (v. 18) and had trusted in Christ.191He was explaining his ministry to the unsaved generally (v. 19).
5:21 Verse 21 condenses the ground of Paul's appeal and expresses it in another paradox. This verse explains the "how"of full reconciliation and takes us to the very heart of the atonement.
"In these few direct words the Apostle sets forth the gospel of reconciliation in all its mystery and all its wonder. There is no sentence more profound in the whole of Scripture; for this verse embraces the whole ground of the sinner's reconciliation to God and declares the incontestable reason why he should respond to the ambassadorial entreaty. Indeed, it completes the message with which the Christian ambassador has been entrusted."192
Paul probably intended that we understand what he wrote about Jesus Christ becoming sin in three ways. First, God treated Jesus as if He were a sinner when He poured out His wrath on Jesus who bore the guilt and penalty for all people's sins.193Second, Jesus Christ became a sin offering (Lev. 4:24; 5:12), the perfect and final one.194Third, He became the locus of sin under the judgment of God.
"So complete was the identification of the sinless Christ with the sin of the sinner, including its dire guilt and its dread consequence of separation from God, that Paul could say profoundly, God made him . . . to be sin for us.'"195
Jesus Christ was the target of God's punishment of sinners God having imputed the sin of all humankind to Him (cf. Rom. 8:3; 1 Cor. 15:3). Now God makes us the targets of His righteousness and imputes that to us (1 Cor. 1:30; Phil. 3:9). The effect of God imputing righteousness to believers is that now God sees us as He sees His righteous Son, namely fully acceptable to Him.
"Paul has chosen this exceptional wording ["made sin for us"] in order to emphasize the sweet exchange' whereby sinners are given a righteous status before God through the righteous one who absorbed their sin (and its judgment) in himself."196
"Here, then is the focal point to which the long argument has been building up. Paul, having himself been reconciled to God by the death of Christ, has now been entrusted by God with the task of ministering to others that which he has himself received, in other words, reconciliation. Verse 20 then follows from this as a dramatic double statement of his conception of the task . . . That is to say, when Paul preaches, his hearers ought to hear a voice from God, a voice which speaks on behalf of the Christ in whom God was reconciling the world. Astonishingly, the voice of the suffering apostle is to be regarded as the voice of God himself, the God who in Christ has established the new covenant, and who now desires to extend its reconciling work into all the world. The second half of the verse should not, I think, be taken as an address to the Corinthians specifically, but as a short and pithy statement of Paul's whole vocation: On behalf of Christ, we make this appeal: "Be reconciled to God!"
"What the whole passage involves, then, is the idea of the covenant ambassador, who represents the one for whom he speaks in such a full and thorough way that he actually becomesthe living embodiment of his sovereign--or perhaps, in the light of 4:7-18 and 6:1-10, we should equally say the dyingembodiment."197
