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• 2 Corinthians 5:21
• All people are sinners by nature and by action, and are thus born alienated from God, who is holy.
• The result of sin in time is God-lessness; the result of sin in eternity is hell.
• Illustration: The most deadly virus in the world is not HIV; it is the SIN virus, which kills everyone it affects and affects everyone.
• God has made it possible for sinners to be cured so thoroughly and completely that they can be reconciled to God and have eternal fellowship in his presence.

• How can God be just and a justifier of sinners?
• Fifteen Greek words carefully define the mystery of reconciliation; they show us the essence of the atonement.
• The requirement for a holy God to be reconciled to sinners is death.
• If there was to be reconciliation between God and man, God had to design and execute the plan.

• The substitute had to be without sin in order to bear the full wrath of God against sin for somebody else.
• The only way to have a sinless man was to have a man who was God, because God alone is sinless.
• Jesus Christ is the One who knew no sin—"him who knew no sin"—and the testimony of many in history affirms that.
• Perhaps the greatest testimony to Jesus' sinlessness was the unbroken fellowship he had with God the Father.
• God had to take the Substitute, put him in the place of the sinner, and punish the Substitute instead.
• That Christ was made sin does not mean that he became a sinner or committed a sin; it simply means that God treated Christ as if he were a sinner.
• The guilt of the sins of all who would ever be saved was credited to Christ as if he were guilty of all of it.
• Jesus experienced the full extent of God's wrath against sin while he was on the cross.
• The only sense in which we are made righteous is by imputation, and that's the same sense in which Christ was made sin.

• Those who are in Christ have been made new creations.
• God has to cover us in the righteousness of Christ to make us acceptable until he can get us to glory, where we'll be made righteous.
• It is for those who have been reconciled to God that Christ died.

• Philippians 3:9
• The very righteousness which God requires to accept the sinner is the very righteousness which God provides.
• Our sin is automatically forgiven in the eternal sense; before even creation the plan was for Christ to die for all the sins of all who will ever believe.

• All that is required of us to receive this righteousness is faith: we must believe that we are sinners, that Christ died as our substitute, and that God's justice was satisfied as proven by the resurrection.
• When we believe, God takes the righteousness of Jesus Christ and imputes it to us, because our sins were imputed to Christ when he died on the cross.