Peter SmytheA Different Kind of Word Preacher

He Made Him Sin - The Apostle Paul

In Acts 13 and 14, Paul and Barnabas travel to Galatia, now the southern region of Turkey, and proclaim the Gospel to those in Iconium, Derbe, and Lystra. After establishing local churches there, they leave the cities to plant more churches in their missionary journey. Not long after they leave, Judaizers with long-lettered credentials swoop in on the Galatians and mock Paul’s Gospel. They eventually steel the Galatians into deserting the Lord to follow the Law (Gal. 1.6). When Paul catches wind of this, to say he’s livid is gross understatement. He sits down (we assume he sits down), and dishes out the book of Galatians “in his own hand.” In his scathing letter, he lashes out at the Judaizers saying that he hopes they castrate themselves over their circumcisions (Gal. 5.12), and lays out that “if any man or angel preaches to you a different gospel, may he be cursed of God!”

In the early 1990’s, several men, some with their own high-flying Judaizer credentials, started a firestorm in the Body of Christ by publicly invoking Paul’s “may they be cursed of God” against those who didn’t hold to the evolving atonement doctrines of their ivory tower seminary training. As a result of this irresponsible cat-calling, the faith of many a Christian has been brought low and the back alley mongering continues even to this day:

Jesus did not literally become sin, or a sinner. He was sacrificed for our sins (Is 53:10) and bore the penalties for our sins and transgressions (Is 53:4-6). But He Himself was without sin, being God, in Whom no sin can dwell. It is not possible for God (even the incarnate God) to “be a sinner,” and it is heresy and blasphemy to make such an outrageous claim. (John Henry Cardinal Newman)

… when Paul said that God made Christ “who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf” (2 Cor. 5:21), he clearly did not mean literal sin, but rather that Christ became identified with our sins in order to pay the penalty for them (cf. Rom. 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:15). To illustrate this, suppose that you were arrested and convicted for speeding on the freeway. If your father agreed to pay the penalty (the price of your speeding ticket), this would not mean that He was actually guilty of speeding as you were. It simply means that He paid the penalty for your transgression. This is analogous to what Christ did for us on the cross.

[Consequently], it is utter blasphemy to say that Christ took upon himself the nature of Satan and had to be born again in hell. Christ’s nature — His eternal nature — is deity (Col. 2:9; Phil. 2:6-8; Heb. 1:3). The only thing born in hell was this pernicious doctrine of the “faith teachers” — for Christ never died spiritually, never took upon Himself Satan’s nature (or a sin nature), and never had to be born again since he never sinned. (Craig Hawkins, Ron Rhodes, and Robert M. Bowman, Christian Research Institute, Questions and Answers on the Bible, the Cults, the Occult, and Aberrant Christian Teachings, vol. 3, issue 3).

This is truly blasphemous on teaching Jesus became the nature of Satan, and that Jesus had to go to hell to pay the price for sin, and that is [sic] was not finished through His death and shed blood on the Cross. (Jim L. Smith, The False Teachings of the Word of Faith Movement, chapter 3, available at Battlefield Church of Faith, Ringgold, Georgia).

To have died spiritually, Jesus would have taken our sins into His very Being and become a sinner. He never was a sinner and never had the nature of Satan as they teach… . Regarding 2 Corinthians 5:21, perhaps we should consult the NEB that translates it, “Christ was innocent of sin, and yet for our sake God made him one with the sinfulness of men” and “so that through union with Him, we might become the Righteousness of God” (or right standing or justification). To say that Jesus took on the nature of Satan or took on the nature of sin is indeed blasphemy. (Rev. Dr. Irene Faulkes, D.D., Was Jesus Born-Again?, at http://www.revirene.com/WasJesusBornAgain.htm.

And the beat goes on.

The glaring irony of this blasphemer call is the reviling of literalness. Far from being the Galatian Judaizers who bewitched the Galatians by exchanging Paul’s gospel for the Law, the now-cursed-of-God preachers preach that the God-breathed words of Paul should be taken at their face value. The mendacity of how a literal reading of God’s Word can be deemed blasphemous has not been lost on us. (While we may have our differences with Appalachian snake-handlers, we certainly haven’t called down God’s curses upon them.)

Enemies of the Cross?

In doing the research necessary for these essays, we ran across tirade after tirade howling that those who read 2 Corinthians 5:21 as written by Paul’s hand are, of all things, “enemies of the cross!” If we read 2 Corinthians 5.21 without the theological gloss, pretentious credentials, or doctrinaire tomfoolery of professional theologians, but as white-knuckled as “you must be born-again,” can we really be enemies of the cross? In a word, no. In our prior essays, Trouble in Paradise, The Resurrection and the Blood, and It is Finished: Precursor to Hell, we demonstrated that Paul’s New Testament cross looks quite different from the cross doctrine(s) painted by modern evangelicalism. While the Word amply demonstrates that there is no redemption without blood, its blood-shedding is far away a different animal from the Hollywood-derived action movie bleeding that the tower-dwellers have used to bludgeon the literalists today. Paul’s cross is scripturally dead-on with “He made Him sin.”

[Note: While the critics argue that “made sin” and “sinner” are synonymous terms, we do not (cf. The Words of God: Precision’s the Thing).