Martin Luther: He Took Our Sins

“Christ is inno­cent so far as His own Per­son is con­cerned; there­fore He should not have been hanged from the tree. But because, accord­ing to the Law, every thief should have been hanged, there­fore, accord­ing to the Law of Moses, Christ Him­self should have been hanged; for He bore the per­son of a sin­ner and a thief—and not of one but of all sin­ners and thieves. For we are sin­ners and thieves, and there­fore we are wor­thy of death and eter­nal damna­tion. But Christ took all our sins upon Him­self, and for them He died on the cross. There­fore it was appro­pri­ate for Him to become a thief and, as Isa­iah says (53:12), to be ‘num­bered among the thieves.’

And all the prophets saw this, that Christ was to become the great­est thief, mur­dered, adul­terer, rob­ber, des­e­cra­tor, blas­phe­mer, etc., there has ever been any­where in the world. He is not act­ing in His own Per­son now. Now He is not the Son of God, born of the Vir­gin. But He is a sin­ner, who has and bears the sins of Paul, the former blasphemer, per­se­cu­tor, and assaulter; of Peter, who denied Christ, of David, who was an adul­terer and a mur­derer, and who causes the Gen­tiles to blas­pheme the name of the Lord (Rom. 2:24). In short, He has and bears all the sins of all men in His body—not in the sense that He has com­mit­ted them but in the sense that He took these sins, com­mit­ted by us, upon His own body, in order to make sat­is­fac­tion for them with His own blood…" [source]