 Throughout my life, I've increasingly found that reading scripture in public isn't just about feeding our own spirits and minds. It's about rehearsing the mighty acts of God for God's glory. So let's think together about 2 Corinthians 5, 21, and first, we're going to need some tea. The Messiah did not know sin, but God made him to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might embody God's faithfulness to the covenant. If you're used to reading or hearing the Bible read, you may well be surprised at that translation of 2 Corinthians 5, 21, because the more normal translation would be something like, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And generations of Christian interpreters have seen that in terms of us lacking righteousness, how can we stand before God unless we are righteous, but somehow God giving us His righteousness in terms of moral goodness. I understand the truth that is underneath that interpretation, but it is not what Paul has in mind here. Paul as so often has Isaiah and the Psalms in mind when he's talking about righteousness and particularly God's righteousness. And in Isaiah and the Psalms, the righteousness of God is God's faithfulness to the covenant. God has promised that he will do certain things. His righteousness is that he keeps those promises, so that Israel appeals to God's righteousness when they're in trouble in the Psalms and says, because you are righteous, you have promised to look after us and rescue us. So please now get on and do it. So why would Paul say here that in Christ, in the Messiah, we, we apostles, we who are preaching the gospel might embody God's faithfulness to the covenant? Well, in 2 Corinthians, from chapter 3 all the way through to chapter 6, Paul is explaining the meaning of a apostleship. What he says here does become true of all believers, but he is very specifically explaining to the Corinthians who were rather critical of his style of apostleship that this is what it looks like actually to be part of God's ongoing covenant purposes. The verses immediately before this are all about Paul's own ministry. God has reconciled us to himself through the Messiah and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That's verse 18. And then in verse 19, God was reconciling the world to himself through the Messiah and entrusting that message to us. So he's constantly saying, this is what God did in the Messiah, this is what God is now doing in us and through us. And therefore, he says, verse 20, we are entreating people on behalf of the Messiah to be reconciled to God. What does that look like when Paul is at work? Well, he describes it in chapter 4 and in chapter 6 and then again vividly in chapter 11. It looks like being thrown into jail. It looks like being beaten up. It looks like being vilified and spat upon. It looks like being shipwrecked. It looks like being the kind of apostle that Paul found he was called to be. How did he explain that? I reference constantly to Jesus himself, that Jesus was faithful to God's covenant by obeying the will of God, even when in Gethsemane he said, surely there is some other way, nevertheless not my will but yours. And Jesus went the way of suffering. He went the way of the cross. And Paul says in chapter 4 and then again in chapter 6 that it is this Jesus-shaped ministry which is given to him as an apostle. As a result, he is not only modeling who Jesus was and what Jesus did. He is embodying in himself the fact that God is faithful to the covenant. How can we be sure that that's the implication that he wants us to hear? Because just a couple of verses later, he quotes from Isaiah 49 when he says, now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. And as often in Paul, when you have one verse quoted from the Old Testament, you have to pan back and see the larger picture. And Isaiah goes on immediately, I have given you as a covenant to the peoples, a light to those who sit in darkness. That's the vocation to which Paul was obedient. And so he says, I urge you therefore not to accept the grace of God in vain. Recognize that God has given us apostles to embody his covenant faithfulness and live within that apostolic message, live within that covenant faithfulness. How has that been worked out? Well, the first half of verse 21 says it all. Every time Paul mentions the death of Jesus, he says something slightly different about it. But this time it's the Messiah did not know sin, but God made him to be sin on our behalf. This is the worldwide promise of God that the sinless Jesus, the sinless Messiah, was the one upon whom the sins of the world were laid. So that the covenant faithfulness promises of Isaiah 49 and similar passages all lead the eye forward to the death of the servant in Isaiah 53, which Paul is here alluding to. It is that work that then fans out again in Isaiah 54 with the renewal of the covenant and the renewal of the creation in Isaiah 55. That's the whole sequence of isianic thought to which Paul is referring, which he sees as having come true in Jesus and is now being worked out through his own apostleship. This verse therefore is not, as is often thought, a detached statement of a doctrine of salvation. It belongs where it is within the sweep of Second Corinthians as a whole, as a way of saying this is what apostolic ministry looks like. This is what it looks like to embody the covenant faithfulness of God. So may God give you grace and strength to embody in yourselves the promises which he has made to you and through you, to be yourselves faithful to his calling and to bring his joy and purposes to birth in his world. Amen.