| Make our lives new as they were at the beginning |
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God
the Word of the great and good Father did not abandon human nature as
it was falling into corruption and decay. By offering his own body he
wiped out the death towards which mankind was heading. By his teaching
he healed their ignorance, and by his power and might he re-founded the
whole of human nature.
If you want confirmation of this, look to the authority of Christ’s own disciples and what they have written about God: The
love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that if one man has died
for all, then all men should be dead; and the reason he died for all was
so that living men should live no longer for themselves, but for him
who died and was raised to life for them, our Lord Jesus Christ. And again: We
see in Jesus one who was for a short while made lower than the angels
and is now crowned with glory and splendor because he submitted to
death; by God’s grace he had to experience death for all mankind. Then he gives the reason why only God the Word could become man: It
was appropriate that God, for whom everything exists and through whom
everything exists, should make perfect, through suffering, the leader
who would take them to their salvation. These words mean that the
rescue of mankind from corruption and decay was the task of none other
than God the Word, by whom they were originally created.
The Word’s purpose behind taking on a body was that he
should become a sacrifice for bodies of the same kind, as scripture
says: Since all the children share the same blood and flesh, he too
shared equally in it, so that by his death he could take away all the
power of him who had power over death, and set free all those who had
been held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. So by
offering up his own body he brought an end to the law that had been
condemning us, and by giving us the hope of resurrection he gave our
lives a new beginning.
It was through the act of man that death received
power over man, and through the act of God the Word for man that death
lost its power and the resurrection of life took its place. Thus Paul
said: Death came through one man and in the same way the resurrection
of the dead has come through one man. Just as all men die in Adam, so
all men will be brought to life in Christ... and so on. We no longer
die to be condemned, we die to be raised up and await the resurrection
of all, which God will bring about at a time of his choosing, the
creator of all things and the giver of all gifts.
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