It says that one died for all therefore all died. It also says that we were crucified with Him. When He died, we died. When He was crucified, we were crucified. It is also apparent that all not “in” Jesus are dead under the law. Whichever way you look at it, we are spoken of as being dead and not alive in any form, whether physical or spiritual.
Therefore it is no surprise that what Jesus is doing is to reveal to us this state of death of the natural born man of flesh and blood. And “sin” is blamed, and all but Jesus are accounted as sinners who are “dead” under the “law of sin and death”.
It remains then for the grace of God to be revealed in providing some way out of death and into life, since our natural state is that only of death.
The death of Jesus did nothing to change anything in itself. Jesus was a man just like us, so that His death could represent our death also, and make us one like Him and Him one like us. EXCEPT that His death was temporary because He contained the nature of God within Himself, so that once His body was dead, His spirit could by the power of God having given birth to newness of bodily life by that righteous spirit, rise to resurrection life in new bodily form.
So where does that leave us? Having already been declared dead in ourselves, God reaches out to us to say that if we recognise our own death state, and are prepared to leave it behind, that death being righteous because there being nothing of life worthy in us; then our death is forgiven by His mercy towards us and overlooked if we cleave to Him in recognition of His love as now provided through His Son, who in the new form of the Spirit is made available to us through His love being desirous of us to captivate us through our empathy with His empathy for us in revelation of the love that He is.
This above statement of account operates in reality by our spontaneous heart recognition of the pain and suffering we ourselves encounter in life and are concerned about, and then see in Him on the cross as being that which we deserve but which has been taken by Him on our account, for us. The revealing of sin having been dealt with in this way shows that we also must be sensitive to the pain of sin and especially our own sin.
This is why it can say that “those who are His have crucified the (our) flesh [with its passions and desires]”. Our empathy performs this crucifixion of self along with Him, as we “own our sin” which we now can do because He has paid for it for us. Truth demands we then operate outside of this former death which loses its power over us to conform us to itself and instead, we are released from the power of it and the structure of laws within our minds that confined us only to logical and defensive mechanisms: and now leaves us to follow His Spirit by way of its (His) immediate presence without regard for legalistic processes of rationalisation.
We gain a new ‘mindset’ unlike the former one which was forced to accommodate compromise and servitude to the sinful mindset, but which now places us in ‘servitude’ to Jesus the Prince of righteousness instead. His cross defined His and God’s love. We now allow love to control us in its outworking towards others, without regard for ourselves other than that we follow Him above all else.
So our sins fell on Him only in the broader picture of His love for us and our sinful condition falling on His conscience in conjunction with His own fleshly deficiencies which He ‘repaired’ by His own righteousness in the lead up to His death.
It is our recognition of and conformity to this truth that allows life enduing change to occur in us.
One web article on this subject is (https://credomag.com/article/what-really-happened-on-the-cross-part-1/#SnippetTab)
[Just as Paul in Romans 7 revealed the fallen state of man, so too on the cross does Jesus reveal the identification with, and the healing of, this condition] [The cross was forgiveness for all but it has to be received to be effective] [We must be participant by our compliance as inherent in our belief].
CROSSROMAN 