Only the Image Could Renew the Image

So, with men thus become like beasts, and the deceit of demons thus clouding every place and hiding the knowledge of the true God, what was God to do? Keep silent at so great a thing, and let men be led astray by demons and not know God? And what use, then, was it for man to have been made in God’s image in the first place? It would have been better for him to have been made simply like an animal without reason than, once made rational, to live the life of the animals. Or what need was there at all for him to receive the idea of God in the beginning? For if he is not fit to receive it even now, it would have been better if it had not been given him at first. Or what profit to God who made them, or what glory to him, could there be, if men made by him do not worship him, but think that others are their makers? For then God turns out to have made them for others instead of for himself.

Again, a merely human king does not let the lands he has colonized pass to others to serve them, or go over to other men. He warns them by letters, and often sends friends to them, or, if need be, he comes in person to rebuke them by his presence as a last resort, only so that they may not serve others and his own work be wasted for nothing. Will not God much more spare his own creatures, so that they are not led astray from him to serve things of nothing? Especially since such straying proves to be the cause of their ruin and undoing, and since it was unfitting that those who had once shared in God’s image should perish.

What, then, was God to do? Or what was to be done, except the renewing of what was in God’s image, so that by it men might once more be able to know him? But how could this have come about, except by the presence of the very Image of God, our Lord Jesus Christ? It was impossible by means of men, since they are only made after an image; nor by angels either, for not even they are God’s images. So the Word of God came in his own person, so that, as he was the Image of the Father, he might be able to create afresh the man made after the image. But again, this could not have happened unless death and corruption had been done away. So he fittingly took a mortal body, so that death might be done away in it once for all, and men made after his image might be renewed once more. No one else, then, was sufficient for this need but the Image of the Father.