14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16 yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
17 But if, in our endeavour to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18 For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. 19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
The second picture the New Testament presents is of another Man, one who was all that man the sinner had failed to be. The testimony of God and man alike concerning Him was that He was sinless. For thirty years He lived in quiet obscurity, and at the end of those years divine attestation of the worth of those years came in the words, 'This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' - i.e. 'acceptable to Me'. For three years He walked among men in public ministry, and at the end, once more the divine imprimatur came upon His life, on the Mount of Transfiguration: 'This is My beloved Son...'. All that man as sinner has failed to be, He was, in His perfect life on earth. He was accepted, and acceptable, to God, as we, in our sin, are not. But if what He was could somehow be transferred to us, and reckoned to our account - this would be the answer to our need, and we would then be acceptable to God through Him. But this is just what the gospel is about. Christ came to do this very thing, to effect this very 'transfer'. All He did, in His life on earth, and supremely in His death and resurrection, was for us. It was all accomplished in order that it might be made over, or imputed to us; indeed, it was in the accomplishing of it that it was made over to us. As one of the early Fathers put it, He took upon Himself what was ours, in order that He might bestow on us what was His. His 'acceptableness' to God was made over to man, and man's 'non-acceptableness' to God was laid on Him. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:21, 'God hath made Him to be sin for us...that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him'. And the Cross was the place where this divine exchange was consummated, for the Cross was involved inevitably in His taking 'what was ours' - our condemnation, our separation, our alienation, our pollution. It was a real transfer, indeed a double one, that was effected on the Cross.