For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are.
He saw the rational race perishing and death reigning over them through corruption. He saw that the threat attached to the transgression held corruption firmly against us, and that it would have been unreasonable for the law to be set aside before it was fulfilled. He also saw how unfitting the situation was, since the things of which He Himself was Maker were disappearing. He saw the surpassing wickedness of human beings and how, little by little, they had increased it against themselves until it became unbearable. He also saw that all human beings were liable to death. Therefore, taking pity on our race, having compassion on our weakness, condescending to our corruption, and unable to endure the dominion of death—lest what had been made should perish and His Father’s work in humanity should come to nothing—He took a body for Himself, and one not foreign to our own.
Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way. No, He took our body, and not only so, but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without the agency of human father—a pure body, untainted by intercourse with man. He, the Mighty One, the Maker of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt.
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 by this be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was afterward 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.