FOR US

AELW 9:215-216

Deuternomy 21:22-23

"And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is accursed by God; you shall not defile your land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance."

"But what shall we say about Paul? In Gal. 3:13, he applies this passage to Christ, saying: “Christ became a curse for us. For it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree.’” Jerome is strangely confused by the same passage when he argues that Moses speaks of a hanged evildoer, but that Christ never committed a sin. But he does not see that Paul speaks most simply and that Paul understands Moses to be enunciating a general rule that applies to Christ directly and according to the literal sense, without any allegory. For if every hanged person is cursed by God, as Moses teaches, then Christ, too, is cursed of God. And if every hanged one is an evildoer, then Christ, too, is an evildoer. Therefore the issue was not in what sense Christ was without sin but in what sense He had sin. Nor was this the issue, how He was blessed and therefore not subject to this hanging, but how He was or could be subjected.

Here Paul solves the whole difficulty with one word, saying (Gal. 3:13): “He became a curse FOR US.” For Us, I say, not for Himself. With this word he plainly teaches that someone has twofold sin, and that a hanged person will be a curse of God: once for Himself and for His own sin, like all others; at another time for others and for the sin of another. That applies only to Christ, who says in Ps. 69:9: “The insults of those who insult Thee have fallen on Me”; and Is. 53:4: “He carried our sins”; and again (Is. 53:8, 10): “For the sins of My people I struck Him, and the Lord wished to bruise Him because of Our sins.” Whether, therefore, one is hanged for himself or for another, the simple sense of the Law remains: everyone hanged for sin is a curse before God. Therefore in bearing our sin for us Christ was indeed made a curse, just as the text literally states. As He was also circumcised and put under the whole Law because of us, while on His part He was free from all Law. So He who knew no sin was made sin, that we should be the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21). So He was made a curse, who knew no curse, that we should be a blessing of God in Him.

To remove this curse of God from the wood, lest the land be defiled, means to preach and believe the Gospel of the cross, namely, that the cross is glory, death is life, sin is righteousness, curse is blessing, destruction is salvation; or, as Paul says (Gal. 6:14), “to glory in the cross of our Lord, that the world be crucified to us, and we to the world,” according to the saying (Matt. 5:10): “Blessed are they who endure persecution, etc.” Otherwise, unless this is preached and believed, there is nothing more evil, nothing more abominable, than the cross and death. By this false assumption and scandal of the cross the whole world is defiled, since to the unclean nothing is clean, to the clean all things are clean (Titus 1:15). The one effect occurs through the Word; the other, without the Word."