The First Reason for His Coming

Now truly this great work was especially suited to God’s goodness. For if a king has founded a house or a city, and it is attacked by bandits through the carelessness of those who live in it, he by no means neglects it. He avenges it and reclaims it as his own work, looking not to the carelessness of its inhabitants but to what befits himself. Much more, then, did God the Word of the all-good Father not neglect the human race, his own work, as it went down to corruption. He blotted out the death that had followed by the offering of his own body, and he corrected their neglect by his own teaching, restoring all that belonged to man by his own power. [a]

Anyone may be assured of this from the Savior’s own inspired writers, if he comes across their writings, where they say: “For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge this: that if one died for all, then all died; and he died for all, so that we should no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died and rose again for our sake,” our Lord Jesus Christ. And again: “But we see him who has been made a little lower than the angels, Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he should taste death for every man.” Then he also points out the reason why it was necessary for no one other than God the Word himself to take flesh, as follows: “For it was fitting for him, for whom are all things and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering.” By these words he means that it belonged to no one else to bring man back from the corruption that had begun, but the Word of God, who had also made them in the beginning. And that it was for the sake of the sacrifice for bodies like his own that the Word himself also took a body, they point to this too, in these words: “Since, then, the children share in blood and flesh, he himself likewise took part in the same, so that through death he might bring to nothing him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might set free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.”

For by the sacrifice of his own body he both put an end to the law that was against us and made a new beginning of life for us, by the hope of resurrection he has given us. For since it was from man that death prevailed over men, for this reason, in turn, by the Word of God becoming man, the destruction of death and the resurrection of life have come about. As the man who bore Christ says: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive,” and so on. For now we no longer die as men under condemnation, but as men who rise from the dead we await the general resurrection of all, “which in its own times he will show,” that is, God, who has also brought it about and given it to us. This, then, is the first reason for the Savior’s becoming man. But one can see from the following reasons as well that his gracious coming among us was fitting.