2 Corinthians 5:21
2 Corinthians 5:2121God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
JWs rarely quote directly — it is one of the hardest texts for their soteriology to absorb. When it does surface, the Watchtower framing is that Jesus' ransom sacrifice covered past sins at the point of dedication/baptism, and that maintaining "a righteous standing" with Jehovah requires ongoing obedience: field service, meeting attendance, submission to the Governing Body. The "becoming the righteousness of God" clause is softened into a conditional, works-maintained status rather than a present and completed imputation.
This is the great exchange, stated in one sentence: "the one who did not know sin, he made sin for us, so that we might become God's righteousness by means of him." Two directions. Christ received what he did not earn — sin. The believer receives what he did not earn — righteousness. The righteousness is not produced from within the believer; it is located in Christ and reckoned to the believer's account.
Pair it with in the NWT — "not having my own righteousness, which results from law, but the one that is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith." Paul had the most impressive religious resume of his day: Pharisee, zealot, blameless under the law. He called all of it skubalon — dung — compared to the received righteousness of . If the greatest religious achiever in the New Testament could not earn his way to God, no Witness's field service record is going to close the gap either. The gospel is not a better treadmill. It is the cessation of the treadmill altogether — righteousness received, not earned.
NWT renders en autō ("in him") as "by means of him" — a systemic pattern that converts Pauline locative union-with-Christ imagery into merely instrumental imagery. The same en → "in union with" / "by means of" rendering appears at , , , and across the Pauline corpus. Here the effect is significant: "in him we might become the righteousness of God" becomes the instrumental "by means of him we might become God's righteousness." Grammatically defensible (dative en can carry instrumental force), but the pattern is consistent — and the cumulative effect is to soften Reformed imputation language by recasting the believer's righteousness as delivered through Christ rather than located in Christ.