Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. (18) Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, (19) that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. (20) Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. (21) For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

The second letter to the Corinthians was written by the apostle Paul. As was typical in the early church, false teachers followed Paul; teaching error, corrupting the gospel and impugning Paul’s authority as an apostle. Our verses today countering distortion of the truth, were addressed to the baby Christians in Corinth telling them they have become new people in Christ; reborn in Christ. Their old value systems and priorities, beliefs, loves and plans are gone. Evil and sin are still present but believers see them differently. The converted have a new spiritual perception – there is an emphatic note of change. The world loses its power to allure , terrify and control. Old things have gone by – we are at peace with God through the atoning death of Christ.

We could not reconcile ourselves to God – man did not seek it and had no way to effect it. All of salvation is the eternal plan of God. The faithful are made righteous through the work of Christ; sinless man who became sin and died in our stead, delivering us from our position as sinners. His death was the price for our forgiveness. In Christ the faithful undergo such a change in feelings and actions to say they are new creatures; Paul is telling his audience that it is NOT that they(we) ought to be new creatures but that we WILL in fact live that way – new purposes and new lives for new ends and all is accomplished by the power of God. ALL is new.

A word of caution for our new state by C.S. Lewis: “Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self conceit and self will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact it needs a good man to repent. And here’s the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent; only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it. “