Made Sin

Track three is an elegy. There was a preacher down in Albany the winter of 2005 who read 2 Corinthians and said the Father made the sinless Son to be our very sin - and then said it harder, he said a sinner, said it plain. This song is for that man, who is dead now and cannot answer for himself. I gave it the starkest arrangement on the record - one guitar, a mournful cello - because some griefs should not be dressed up.

The doctrine has to be handled carefully, and the song does. Made sin is more than a debt set down in a book. He bore it in the body, in the flesh, and in the blood. Christ bore the shame His people earned, their grief, the wrath of God Almighty in His body on the tree. But there is one thing He never bore - the rebellion He would never bear. His will stayed bowed to the Father to the end. He bore what sin produces, never what the sinner is. Consequence, not rebellion - that is the whole careful distinction, and it is the one they would not hear.

What was done to that preacher is what the song grieves. They cut one sentence from the hour and they sent that sentence out - a knife with no handle, passed hand to hand for twenty years, while he went to the grave with the lie still on his name. The bridge is the vindication: the old Puritans wrote a sinner, not in himself, but by imputation in the margin of the Geneva Bible they carried (2 Cor 5:21). The dead man said what the dead men said. I stood too near his memory and the door closed on me too. But I will hear him through.