On Thursday, December 8, 2022, the United States government completed a prisoner swap with Russia to secure the release of one of our nation’s premiere female athletes. Brittney Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist with the U.S. Women’s basketball team as well as an eight-time WNBA All-star and one-time WNBA champion with the Phoenix Mercury, had been in Russian custody since February 17, 2022, and was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug possession. She was exchanged for Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer nicknamed the “Merchant of Death,” who was apprehended on March 6, 2008, in Thailand through a sting operation orchestrated by the United States and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for conspiring to sell weapons to a terrorist group and kill Americans.
From the vantage point of many Americans, this prisoner exchange seems incredibly lopsided. Griner was arrested for possessing less than a gram of cannabis oil which, according to a doctor’s letter, she used to treat pain. Assuming she obtained this substance legally, she would have likely not faced prosecution for its possession in the United States. Meanwhile, the United Nations accused Bout of arms trafficking as early as 2000, and he has been accused of providing weapons to organizations such as “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and rebels in Rwanda.”1 The point is that for some people, this prisoner swap has the appearance of one incredibly evil individual who contributed to the taking of human life and the disruption of peace around the world being exchanged for another individual whose poor judgment and celebrity profile made her a pawn in a political chess game.
Whether or not that is a fair assessment of this situation is not the objective of this article. Neither is it the goal of this article to ascertain the legality or morality of either individual’s actions. Nor is this article intended to show support or opposition for the arrangement made by our government. The objective of this article is to use this current event as a catalyst to consider an even more lopsided exchange that has far greater consequences.
In 2 Corinthians 5:21, Paul wrote,
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
This verse communicates the basic premise of what Martin Luther once called “the Great Exchange.” While I don’t agree with everything that Martin Luther said or taught, I do agree that what happened at Calvary is the greatest exchange ever completed. That’s because sin, of which all of us are guilty according to Romans 3:23, has condemned us as prisoners deserving a death sentence (Romans 6:23). But, according to 2 Corinthians 5:21, God the Father made an incredible exchange. He exchanged His Son’s righteousness for mankind’s sinfulness. Jesus, who never sinned (Hebrews 4:14), accepted the consequences of our sins so that His righteousness could be imparted to us, and we could thereby be in the presence of God, who hides His face from sin (Isaiah 59:2), for all eternity.
But a word of caution is in order here because although this exchange was initiated at Calvary, it cannot be inherited until you “put on Christ.” Paul wrote about this in his Galatian letter. Paul wrote these words in Galatians 3:27-29,
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
Paul contends that we are “justified by faith” (Galatians 3:24) and we are “in Christ Jesus…through faith (Galatians 3:26). But then he says that one “puts on Christ” through baptism. His point is not that baptism is what saves us. He made it clear in Ephesians 2:8 that we are saved “by grace …through faith.” His point is that baptism is when our faith brings us into contact with the grace of God that forgives our sins and thereby saves us (Acts 2:37-38; Romans 6:3-7; Colossians 2:11-14; 1 Peter 3:21). So baptism is not the answer to the question, “What saves us?” But it is the answer to the question, “When do we receive salvation?” In other words, when you are baptized into Christ, the great exchange is applied to your life.
So, while a culturally and politically significant event involving the exchange of prisoners between two sovereign nations made headlines over the past few days, the greatest exchange in history occurred nearly two thousand years ago when Jesus Christ exchanged his righteousness for our sins. Without that exchange, you and I would still be imprisoned by our sins and condemned to an eternity of torment “in that place [where] there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30). And the only question left to ponder is whether or not you’ve taken the necessary steps to inherit the benefits of that exchange?
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/world/europe/viktor-bout-brittney-griner.html