Dead Human Walking
Those who enter into Christ participate in His death and resurrection. We die to sin; we will live to God.
Since we have died, from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view (5:16) or more woodenly, “we know no one from now on according to the flesh.” We have died, as Christ died. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer (5:16). Paul does not mean that he knew Christ personally while he was on earth. He is merely reiterating in a new way what he said before. Christ was alive on earth once, but now Christ has died for all—we no longer see Christ on earth. Since we have died with him, we no longer know the world from the point of view we had while we were “alive.”
So we no longer live for ourselves. We are new people: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (5:17). We now walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:4). Our “old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin” (Rom. 6:6). We must no longer “let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” (Rom. 6:12). You have “taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:9–10).
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation (5:18). When you consider the awesomeness of this task, the lunacy of preaching for personal gain or selfish ambition comes into focus. After all, cosmic goals and forces are at play here. While some preachers might play games with the gospel, Paul was at work in the reconciling of the world to God. He was part of a process of remaking the entire universe.
Paul now gives us perhaps the clearest expression of his calling and mission in all his writings. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore God’s ambassadors, as though God was making his appeal through us (5:19–20). Although God walked the earth as Jesus Christ, He and Christ are currently in heaven. And while the Holy Spirit is with us, God has chosen the “foolishness” of a preached message to save those who come to have faith (1 Cor. 1:21).
Furthermore, Paul could boldly say to the Corinthians, Be reconciled to God (5:20). All the side issues of the Corinthians paled beside this ultimate concern. How could they respond with anything but wholehearted repentance and commitment?
Reconciliation to God is the very essence of Christianity. Christ is the one through whom God reconciles the world, the one “through whom are all things, and through whom we live” (1 Cor. 8:6, NKJV).
God’s eagerness to reconcile, even when we are uninterested, demonstrates God’s “righteousness” as shown in 2 Cor. 5:21: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. The fact that Paul elsewhere emphasizes how God declares us righteous because of our faith leads me to wonder if Paul also had a second meaning in mind when he said that we become the righteousness of God.
LIFE CHANGE
Reconciliation to God is the very essence of Christianity and a welcome message to a world filled with alienation.