2 Corinthians 5:14

2 Corinthians 5:14. For the love of Christ not our love to Christ, but (as the following words shew, and other places confirm) Christ's love to men (see Romans 8:35; Romans 8:37; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 3:19), constraineth us so shuts us up that we cannot choose but act as we do, because we have thus judged. The aorist is used to express a fixed principle of action, which was laid down once for all and at the outset of his Christian life: that one died for [1] all, therefore all died the all in the One; realized in each on his believing (Romans 6:8-12), and he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live onto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again: ‘Until this new principle of action took possession of us, we all lived to ourselves; some of us for one thing, some for another, but all for self: now, the love of Christ has dissolved every old principle of action, and become the all-absorbing passion of our life: “we are crucified with Christ, nevertheless we live; yet not we, but Christ liveth in us; and the life that we now live in the flesh we live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us.”'

[1] The preposition “for,” here used, means in Greek ‘on behalf of;' but in what sense, the context and the nature of each case must determine, Here, and in all such case, the sense of substitution is clearly meant

Note. Had the apostle held that Christ was a mere creature, and that the supreme duty of every creature is to live to the glory of God, such a principle of action as that here expressed must have amounted to a deliberate withdrawal of his allegiance from God, and making it over to a creature. But since it is certain that he did not consider that his allegiance to God was thereby in the least compromised, it is for those who deny the supreme divinity of Christ in the one Godhead to solve this difficulty.