Christ's Death to Sin.
When we ask what is meant by affirming of Christ, "The death that He died, He died unto sin," two questions emerge.
(1) What connection had Jesus with sin before His death?
(2) How came His dying to sever that connection?
I. As to the former. The connection of the Lord Jesus with sin so long as He lived an earthly life was the most complete which it is possible for a sinless person to have. Who will venture to say that St. Paul's terrible phrase "made a curse" is too strong to express the hold which sin's penalty laid upon our victim, or that the whole of our Lord's stainless humanity was not wrapt around and penetrated through and through by the tremendous retributive force of sin? Connection with sin! He was all sin's own; its prey, surrendered for some Divine necessity to the devourer; the choicest portion ever seized upon to be borne down to the keeping of sin's child, death, within sin's home, the grave.
II. The whole of this connection with sin is said to have terminated at death. It has not been so with any other man. Other men spend their earthly existence under the same penal conditions as I have described in His case; but what room have we to suppose that the act of dying has proved to be in any other case the end of sin, unless it were through their connection with Him? The death of Jesus closed His connection with sin, for the simple reason that in His case alone that connection had been outward, not inward; a guiltless submission to sin's penalty, not a guilty surrender to sin's power. From first to last the sin which is in our race remained to Him a foreign foe, that could gain no entrance into the citadel of His will to corrupt or master His spiritual nature; and the connection which He sustained with it was merely that of a sufferer who owes a death to justice for imputed sins of other men. Once that death was paid, and all the suffering endured which filled up the cup put into His hand to be drunk, His connection with imputed sin was of necessity dissolved. "The death which He died was a death unto sin once for all."
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul,p. 164.