To Encourage You

2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.”

2 Corinthians 5:19 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Do you realize that when God created this world, He called it and everything in it, including man, “good” (Genesis 1:31)?  It was all the way He wanted it to be. It was perfect, just like He is perfect.  Another way to think about this is that everything was “right.”  Everything worked correctly. Everyone acted correctly, i.e., everything was as it should be – harmonious, good, wonderful in every physical, moral, and spiritual sense. But then sin entered in. Suddenly, as a result of sin, nothing was “right.”  People, all of them, were afflicted by flaws, sins, sickness, and death. They made bad decisions. They didn’t treat each other right. They didn’t think rightly. Everything was “off” in one way or another.  The same for the creation.  Once it was perfect in every way. Now it groaned (Romans 8:22), subject to decay and death.  There’s a word for all of this: “unrighteousness,” just as the word “righteousness” describes the opposite condition. 

So now as we contrast God and everything about Him and man and everything about him, we see the contrast of a righteous condition with an unrighteous one.  And so often even what we think is “right” is not right, for God has described our righteousness as nothing more than “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), and He describes those who are “right in their own eyes” as fools (Proverbs 12:15).  Oh, that this could all be changed!  Oh, that the unrighteousness which plagues us and everything else tainted by sin could be made new! Oh, that it could all start over, fresh and new and righteous again!

And that’s exactly the message of the gospel! That’s the wonder of the cross. There, Jesus took on His pure and righteous person the sin of the world. There He bore the curse of sin on a cursed tree with a crown of cursed thorns.  But it was there, wonderfully, that He made everything new.  As the verses above tell us, now there is a new creation. That’s what describes the person who by faith receives the payment for their sins that Jesus took for them. Incredibly, every believer receives the very righteousness of Christ forevermore in the new birth. Now God no longer sees them as unrighteous but perfectly righteous.  And although a person, while they remain in this sin-cursed world with their sin-cursed flesh, continues to struggle against the unrighteousness that is intrinsic to it, they are placed on a course of newness that will reach it’s culmination in the perfect righteousness of heaven with the perfection of a new body that is no longer subject to the curse of sin.  Likewise, we know that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). 

So, are you in a state of unrighteousness or of righteousness?  Are your prospects nothing more than the decay and death that plagues the world we live in, or the everlasting newness and eternal life of the age to come?  May God open our eyes to the glorious truth that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” And may any who don’t know this reality realize right now that “For our sake he (i.e., God the Father) made him (i.e., God the Son), to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The unrighteous made righteous, the curse turned to blessing: that’s exactly what is in store for those who embrace the gospel that has so wonderfully reversed the curse for all those who believe.