It was God’s good will to have close around reasonable and free beings to enjoy His good gift of blessedness and to participate in His life – to “be partakers of His divine nature.” (2 Pet. 1:4) To this end, He first created the angelic world and then man. Some angels misused their freedom, desired not to be one with God, counter-posed themselves to God, became arrogant and, unable to participate in the Divine life, were thrown down from the heaven and cursed to “go down on their belly, rotting in their passions and eating dust all the days of their life” without God.
Man also fell, but not in the same way as the angels. Before creating man, God had foreseen that man would not be able to stay faithful to Him forever and properly appreciate His gifts – the blissful life in the paradise and his own original dignity and qualities. To appreciate these gifts accordingly; to love God with all his heart, mind and being; and to understand that away from God, he will always suffer; that his real joy comes from the communion with God and from his heartfelt love for God, man has to take a special path in life, along which he may experience evil, all kinds of hardships and meet his death.
Further, man has to come – through his own experience – to understanding that he is unable to restore the communion with God all by himself. This communion is possible only after cleaning his body and soul of the accumulated filth, which, according to a thousand-year experience, is impossible for anyone to do alone, by oneself. Man, who relies in his life only on his own forces, exists without God in his earthly life and so also after death, will have to be where there is no God – go down to the hell.
When humanity comprehended this truth, the Lord did something to make the heaven (angelic world) and earth (the Universe) shudder. The Lord Himself “came down from Heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man,” voluntarily submitted Himself to persecution, spitting, and the Crucifixion in order to save man by making him one whole with Himself and by having endured on his behalf everything, what every man would have had to endure to restore his communion with God. The love of God that revealed itself in this Sacrifice is so great that it cannot but win over and draw to itself even the most hardened heart.
To be saved, man must during his earthly life to achieve the following: to come to belief in God; to comprehend his own fallen nature; to turn to God; to reciprocate His love with his own love by proving it with his life according to His word; to become unable to use his free will against God – not under pressure or by force of external circumstances, but because of his devotion, love and gratitude to God.
There might be some other ways to man’s salvation, as some Holy Fathers thought possible on grounds that God is All-Powerful and can save by different ways, but, proceeding from the Divine properties, it seems to be right and proper to conclude that the way chosen by God is the best and shortest.
Man’s “ego,” the “personality” claim to have an independent existence, positioning Man as the center of all the things around him – as the “subject” in relation to all and everything around him as the “objects.” Among the objects, there is not only the entire Universe, but God as well. Hence the incessant temptation of exalting himself and of submitting to his will all objects, including – O, horror! God – and seeing in all these “objects” a reflection, or sort of extension of his “ego.” And the more talents man claims to have, the easier it is for him to slide down into this temptation. There is also the devil, whose position to God and world is finally determined as unwaveringly hostile, ready to assist man in this.
That is why God had to choose the “special path” for man so that he should not exalt himself in the other world, following the example of the devil, but consciously and sincerely loved Him and submitted to Him once and forever without the slightest possibility of departing from Him. The characteristic feature that is opposite in the meaning to “pride” is “humbleness.” The latter is appreciated and welcomed by the Gospel, the Mother of God and by the Holy Fathers. No deed alone, without humbleness, is able to protect man from falling into the temptation of the sin of pride and depart from God. It is love that unites man with God, but without humbleness there is no love either.
In conclusion:
1. The attempts by man to find a rational answer to the perplexing question why God has chosen the Incarnation of Lord Jesus Christ as the means for the salvation of humanity, do not remove his perplexity, and man assumes that there might be other ways for God to save people or just to forgive the sinners and let them enter the paradise. First of all, the response could be formulated by the words of St. Paul: “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.” So, man should accept with faith and humbleness the Incarnation of the Son of God and acknowledge this way of salvation as the best.
2. If the Lord had not become Man and had not suffered for our sake, we would not be able to perceive the power of God’s love for man. Confronted by the sufferings of our relatives, by harsh expressions of evil, falsehood and cruelty of the world, man is able to overcome all this and reconcile himself to the outcome and not “return the ticket to the world,” using the expression of Ivan Karamazov, remembering that the Creator of the World Himself suffered to destroy evil and to draw people without any pressure on their will into the Kingdom of goodness and love.
3. When man is able to see the depth of the humankind’s and his own fall and comprehend his nonentity, the ugliness of his soul and his absolute unworthiness to inhabit the Kingdom of God, and also the impossibility for him to improve the situation by his own effort, even if he were able to start his life anew; when, because of that, man falls deeply into despair and is overwhelmed by hopelessness, which used to lead ancient pagans and leads present-day atheists to suicide or to defiling God, he will see that the only outcome is to believe in God, Who came to the world to sacrifice Himself for our sins, Who has become the Lamb to take upon Himself the sins of vileness and abomination and the wickedness of the world. This is a belief, that whoever has it and appeals to God sincerely opening his weeping heart, God does not reject him, but despite his dirtiness, cleanses, restores and covers all his iniquities by His love, making him close to Himself. He raises downright sinners to the dignity of His sons.
If there had been no Incarnation and Savior’s sufferings, would we have believed in the great love of God for people? No, we would not and would have perished of despair; we might have enter into a venomous condition and, like Satan, become the enemies of good and adversaries of God. Only the Incarnation and the Cross of the Son of God are in power to save people. There are no other means or instruments. To fully assess God’s Sacrifice and acknowledge its necessity for man’s salvation one must come to cognition of the power of evil in oneself and in the world.
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