2 Corinthians 5 - Being Reconciled to God
 16So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Up until this point, Paul has used this chapter to distinguish our existence as a member of the world, to our existence as a member of Heaven. We are not to view the world through our eyes, and judging truth by what we see. For scientifically-minded people, this is particularly difficult, because we see an awful lot, and yearn to understand all that comes into our senses. And because these senses are from God, what we sense is from God, and our ability to analyze it is from God, our viewing of the world we see is a gift from God, truly. However, that is not the focus of our relationship with Him; it is secondary. Our primary relationship is based on that which we know through faith, through that which we do not see.  There is something to reconcile here, an inconsistency of sorts, that requires us to act contrary to our physical nature… but then acting by our physical nature already required acting contrary to our spiritual… we just got used to it!
And so God wants us to act more according to the spiritual, and less according to the physical, as far as our relationship with Him is concerned. When we focus on the world, and on science, as our primary focus, we only distance ourselves. Now, it is obvious that we can only act physically, from a certain perspective, but we can do it for spiritual reasons, and focus our physical activities using our spiritual radar… our faith. This will reconcile our dual natures. Notice however, that we can only reconcile ourselves in this manner to, because He did that reconciliation for us, through Christ!
Now, how do we view Christ? He is without sin? Well, what is sin, but distance from God? We view it as bad actions, but those are only one type of distance from God. There are other types, like when we focus on the worldly over God… it isn’t a sinful action per se, but does distance us from Him, and so is sin to us. And so we must view Christ in terms of His distance from God… He has none, because He is God. View Him that way, and we can see that by inviting Christ into our hearts, the distance between us and God is bridged! If you view it as distance between us and God the Father, then Christ is our connection to Him, and that connection spans from Hell to Heaven, and our hearts to God’s heart. Until our salvation, the distance between us and God was sin; our distance now is Christ! A gap has been replaced by a connection! When our sin was replaced, that is all God did. It is quite simple if you think about it. Disobedience/obedience, sinful acts of the past, those are all just distractions from understanding Christ’s actual work, and a result of looking at the world through our eyes, rather than our faith.
In some respect, if sin be our distance from God, and Christ now be that sin, Christ is in effect our sin… not such a bad thing anymore huh? That is why we’re washed clean! Not because we’re suddenly perfect, but because our “sin” our “distance from God” is Christ, and Christ is literally our “sin”! So now consider how this impacts our study on righteousness…
21God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
In other words:
God made Jesus who had no distance from God to be our distance from God, so that in Jesus we might become the righteousness of God… or rather, justice, because God’s righteousness is in effect justice.
Jesus has become our sin, and we have become God’s justice. When the Old Testament talks of God condemning previously good-acting people, and saving previously bad-acting people, God says, “Well of course! Am I not just?” A person views such a comment and sees scales, just like the world, and becomes speechless, because God they thought justice meant weighing the good and the bad… well, now we see it doesn’t and never did! It is a matter of measuring our distance from God! Someone who turns from goodness has severed any connection with God… they have distance from God, sin. Someone who turns from evil to goodness had connected to God! They have connected to Christ! They have no distance from God anymore. God’s justice isn’t an act of judgement based on acts, but on connection! Think about it…
If God is connected to you how can He condemn you? If He is not, and you are the one who disconnected, then how are saved? Simple. That is the Gospel… and it’s how it’s always been.