Why did God come down on earth?
Author: Yitzhak
Introduction to the Garden of Eden to set the stage of Jesus’ existence
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And out of His love, He created humans in his image; by this we mean that He created us in His likeness. The first man who was called Adam and he lived in a perfect world called Eden. In this place there was only ONE rule: not to eat from the fruit of the trees of Good and Evil. That’s it.
Adam ate the fruit of Good and Evil, and he fell from the Garden of Eden and go thrown outbecause he ate the fruit in the Garden that he shouldn’t have, and then sin came into the world. From then on, man’s nature was corrupted by sin which we are born with.The only way to break the ‘bonds of sin’ (or to break the link of sin that was passed down from Adam to every generation afterwards) was to have a perfect man, a sinless man – from start to finish – to be able to break it. This man needs to be completely whitout sin – in other words perfect from the second they are conceived to the last breath that they take. This is the key to removing Adam’s sin.
Now, since we are all born of this sinful nature (you, me and everybody else that you know), we normal human beings cannot break the bonds of this sin no matter how good we are because we are born with this nature.
So far we know that Adam had one main rule and he broke that mainrule. Adam who was made in the perect image of God made a grievous sin and although he was punished, the sin was still not wiped clean and no normal human could clear this, we needed a perfect human to break the chains of this sin.
Where God steps in
Without going in depth, Jesus was of an immaculate conception which means that the Holy Spirit impregnated a virgin, and God became Man. He is fully God and now also fully Human.This Human is Jesus. His father was not a human father, and because of this He is sinless. Jesus became the Image of an invisible God as written in St. John.
The Bible then goes on to illustrate His character, His love, His compassion. This perfect being was able to live His whole life without committing any sin. He is then falsely accused, framed by liars and is hung on a cross to die in the most painful way imaginable. By his death he wiped our sins clean. So from start to finish, the Bible shows that Jesus is a perfect human being who broke this bond that no other human being was able to do.
After his crusifiction and death, on the third day He arose from the dead and went to heaven. He can only raise Himself up from the dead because He is sinless and death cannot contain Him.
So what now?
This is important because it is the only way to get directly into heaven. Jesus is the only being that can live a perfect life, so He alone holds the keys to the heavenly gates. Jesus famously quotes “I AM the way, the truth and the Life.” (St. John 14.6). The Orthodox people don’t believe that Jesus holds a physical key, or knows where it is, but that Jesus IS the key to heaven. If this walking, talking key of heaven tells us how to get there, then we would be wise to listen to Him. Jesus didn’t waste His time to explain everything and teach everyone for His own benefit, but for all of Humanity’s benefit. He was always destined to go to Heaven, but it is us that must strive and claw our way to be with him in Heaven by following His example and following his teachings.
The Orthodox see all sin as ‘death’ – as in a ‘spiritual death’ because we separate ourselves from God. Now that according to the Bible, we have the Man who was able to beat sin, so as the Orthodox say, “death”. If this perfect person can beat death and without him we can’t beat evil, it would be a good idea to listen to what He has to say about life, death and the afterlife. He knows the way and He wants to share it with you. His love for you is so intense and so significant that He died for you, so what are you going to do with this information?
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