On the Incarnation Burkholder Media Classics

It was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in a human body. God had not only made us out of nothing, but had also graciously bestowed on us His own life by the grace of the Word. Then, turning from eternal things to things corruptible, by counsel of the devil, we had become the cause of our own corruption in death. When this happened, men began to die, and corruption ran riot among us and held sway over us to an even more than natural degree, because it was the penalty of which God had forewarned us for transgressing the commandment. Indeed, we had in our sinning surpassed all limits; for, having invented wickedness in the beginning and so involved ourselves in death and corruption, we had gone on gradually from bad to worse, not stopping at any one kind of evil, but continually, as with insatiable appetite, devising new kinds of sins. For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.