For these reasons, as death gained greater power and corruption remained upon human beings, the human race was perishing. The rational human being, made according to God’s image, was disappearing, and the work made by God was being destroyed.
For death, as I said above, now held legal authority over us, and it was impossible to escape that law, since God had established it because of the transgression. What was happening was therefore both grievously unreasonable and unfitting.
First, it would have been unreasonable for God, after speaking, to prove false. Once He had decreed that the human being would surely die if he transgressed the commandment, it could not be that after the transgression the human being would not die and God’s word would be annulled. For God would not be true if, after He had said that we would die, the human being did not die.
Again, it was unfitting that beings once made rational and given a share in His Word should be destroyed and return through corruption to non-existence.
For it was not worthy of God’s goodness that the things He had made should be corrupted because of the deception the devil had practiced upon human beings.
Moreover, it was supremely unfitting for God’s workmanship in humanity to disappear, whether through human negligence or through the deception of demons.
Since rational creatures were being corrupted and works such as these were being destroyed, what was God, being good, to do? Was He to allow corruption to prevail against them and death to rule over them? Then what purpose would there have been in making them at the beginning? It would have been better for them not to have been made than, after being made, to be neglected and perish.
For if God, after making His own work, simply looked on while it was corrupted, such neglect would reveal weakness rather than goodness in Him—and more so than if He had never made the human being at the beginning.
Had He not made them, no one could have attributed weakness to Him. But once He had made them and created them into being, it would have been utterly unreasonable for His works to perish, especially before the eyes of their Maker.
Therefore human beings could not be left to be carried away by corruption, for this would have been unfitting and unworthy of God’s goodness.