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Christ’s Death and New Creation
Knowing the fear of the Lord, Paul persuades others and seeks to live transparently before God. Christ’s love constrains him because one died for all; therefore all came under the significance of that death. Christ died and rose so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for the one who died and rose for them.
Because Christ’s death and resurrection have changed the age in which believers live, Paul no longer evaluates people merely according to the flesh. Anyone in Christ belongs to new creation: the old has passed and the new has come. The wording resonates with Isaiah’s promises of God doing a new thing and creating a renewed world, now inaugurated in Christ.
Reconciliation begins with God, who reconciles people to himself through Christ and entrusts a ministry and message of reconciliation to Christ’s ambassadors. God was in Christ reconciling the world, not counting trespasses against people. The climactic statement says that the sinless Christ was made sin for us so that in him we might become God’s righteousness; Isaiah 53 provides an important canonical background, while the exact force of 'made sin' should not be flattened into a claim that Christ became morally sinful.
Both passages describe a Christ-centered transfer of identity in which Christ’s death reshapes the believer’s life and standing before God.
Second Corinthians 5:17 and Galatians 6:15 share Paul’s distinctive “new creation/new creature” language as the result of being in Christ.
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