When our first parent, Adam, fell by repudiating his covenantal obligations to God, the guilt of his sin was imputed to, or in the reckoning of God placed to the account of, all those who would descend from him by ordinary generation.65 That imputation was an immediate imputation. The word “immediate” in that statement of doctrine does not refer to immediacy in time; though the imputation did, of course, occur at the point in time immediately on Adam’s sin. But “immediate” in our present context refers to the fact that there was no mediating cause or entity on the grounds of which the imputation in the accounting of God took place. The imputation of sin, that is, was immediate and not mediate.66 The imputation was grounded only in the eternal will of God, entirely apart from any intra-mundane or temporal cause.
At the death of Christ, there occurred similarly what we may refer to as a reciprocal immediate imputation. The guilt of the sin of the people for whom Christ died was imputed to Christ, and the righteousness of Christ was imputed to them. When we refer to the righteousness of Christ in that context we do not have in view his essential righteousness that inheres in him by reason of his identity as the Second Person of the Godhead; or, that is, his righteousness as God by which we mean that all the actions, designs, purposes, and decrees of God are consistent with the essential and inherent holiness that he possesses in his eternal being. When we say that it is not Christ’s essential righteousness that is imputed to the repentant sinner, it is meant that the individual does not, for that reason, partake of the essence of the Godhead. There is no such thing, that is, as the divinization of man. The righteousness of Christ that is placed to the sinner’s account is a forensic righteousness; that is, the righteousness that comes from the perfect fulfillment of the demands of God’s law and commandments. The term “forensic” has to do with the situation that exists in relation to, and because of, law. Christ impeccably fulfilled the demands of the law of God. In that, he was forensically righteous. By reason that the forensic righteousness of Christ is thus imputed to the sinner who comes to Christ in faith and repentance, God looks on that individual as though he had himself fulfilled the demands of the law, and as though he himself had paid the penalty for his having broken the law. Such is the immeasurable extent of God’s grace and mercy that he has set forth in his Son.
By that reciprocal imputation the individual who has thus come to Christ has entered a state of justification before God. He was once ungodly, in that he had broken the law of God; “Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom 5:6); now he is regarded in the counsels of heaven as godly, for all the demands of the law have been met on his behalf. In that great exchange, God’s declarative, forensic statement of justification has set the individual free from the law of sin, condemnation, and death, and has transferred him to the state of righteousness, justification and life.67 A definitive transference has taken place. But the ground of the sinner’s status that has thus been so remarkably changed is that Christ, by the imputation of the sinner’s guilt to him, has been constituted guilty. And by reason of that constitution, God the Father could truthfully declare his Son guilty and lay upon him the punishment of sin. And similarly, by the corresponding act of imputation the sinner has been constituted righteous, so that God could truthfully declare him righteous. Such are the remarkable terms in which justification before God has been established.
In God the Father’s act of constituting his Son guilty, Christ was thereby “made sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). The Son of God was made sin, in that he was made guilty, not guilty of his own sin, but of the sin of those for whom he died. And being thus constituted guilty, the death that Christ died was his final act of active obedience to the law of God. For the law said that the guilty one must die. What a remarkable exchange the grace and mercy of God accomplished in that eternally meaningful act. But it is to be carefully observed also that in that divine act of imputation, while Christ was made to be sin, while our sin was laid upon him, he was not made or constituted a sinner.68 If he were held in that sacred moment to have been constituted a sinner, the meaning of the entire redemptive act on the cross would be vacated. For the substitution that was involved in Christ’s act of redemption was meaningful only because our sin was laid on him who was completely without sin. It was the sinless Son of God, the Second Person of the eternal Godhead who made the atonement for sin. But further, it was in his human nature in which he died for us that he was sinless.
The possibility of misunderstanding, at this important point, of the imputation involved in the substitutionary death of Christ has been addressed in particularly clear terms in a classic commentary that is worthy of extended statement: “God, declares Paul, made the Sinless One sin for us. It is important to notice that he does not say that God made Him a sinner; for to conceive of Christ as sinful, or made a sinner, would be to overthrow the very foundation of redemption, which demands the death of an altogether Sinless One in the place of sinful mankind. But God made him sin; that is to say that God the Father made His innocent incarnate Son the object of His wrath and judgment, for our sakes, with the result that in Christ on the cross the sin of the world is judged and taken away. In this truth resides the whole logic of reconciliation.”69
The meaning in its full extent is ineffable, in that any words that we can command by reason of the language capacity we have in our human finitude cannot possibly compass the meaning of what was involved. Christ died in his human nature. He could not die in divine nature. Indeed, his death in human nature was precisely necessary to accomplish eternal salvation for those who had sinned in human nature. But it was “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8) who was crucified, and ineffable though it is, it was the Person of our Lord who died for us in his human nature. And the Person of our Lord was, throughout his life and in his death, impeccably sinless.
In the transaction between the Father and the Son when Christ bore our sin on the cross, when he was made to be sin for us, the Father did not look on him as being in his own person a sinner. Mystery though it is, and ineffable the meaning in its ultimate divine relation, the eternal love between the Father and the Son was not, and could not, be broken, not even in the cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). The Father loved the Son even as he poured out his wrath against him, against the guilt of sin that he bore. The very godness of the Godhead, the eternal indwelling of the Son, with the Holy Spirit, in the Father, speaks its witness. Oh eternal love! That God himself, in the Person of his Son, should die for us who rebelled against him and his covenantal faithfulness. In the very death of the cross, God the Father looked upon the Son whom he loved and was satisfied that in his impeccable innocence the Son, in the perfect righteousness that he had sustained in his human nature, allowed the guilt of his people’s sin to be laid upon him. Therein he bore the Father’s wrath and saved the host that God, in his eternal jealousy and design, has elected to share his glory with him. The smile of the Father would soon return, and in his temporal death Christ the redeemer would give his human soul again to the Father. He would soon return to the heavens as the victorious high priest and intercessor for his people, glorified again, as he had prayed: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory that I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5).
Let us observe the meaning of the substitutionary death of Christ in summary terms. When he paid the penalty for sin on the cross, was Christ guilty? Yes he was guilty, not of his own sin, for he was sinless, but of the sin of those for whom he died. He was guilty because our sin was placed to his account. Our guilt was laid upon him. “The LORD hath laid on him