For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world, though He had not been far from us before. No part of creation is empty of Him; He fills all things while remaining with His own Father. Yet He came, stooping to us in His love for humanity and appearing among us.
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 He took pity on our race and had compassion on our weakness. He stooped to our corruption and could not endure the dominion of death, lest what had been made should perish and His Father’s work in humanity should come to nothing. So He took a body for Himself, one not foreign to our own.
He did not merely will to become embodied or merely to appear. If He had wished only to appear, He could have made His divine appearance in some other and better way. No, He took our body, and not just any body, but one from a spotless and stainless virgin who had known no man—a pure body, truly untouched by intercourse with a 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 in which He was made known and in which He dwelt.
Thus, taking a body like our own, because all were liable to the corruption of death, He gave His body over to death on behalf of all and offered it to the Father. He did this out of love for humanity, so that, as all died in Him, the law concerning the corruption of human beings might be abolished. Its power had been fulfilled in the Lord’s body and therefore no longer had any hold over human beings like Him. He also did this so that He might turn human beings back from corruption to incorruption and bring them to life from death, through His making the body His own and through the grace of the resurrection. Thus He would make death disappear from them as utterly as straw in fire.