Wednesday, January 8, 2014

God Became Man to Procure Our Salvation, Not the Other Way Around

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.  (Heb 1:3)

Having thus discoursed about the divine nature, he moves to human matters to bring out the mystery of the divine plan….  He is the Son of the Father, who is one with the begetter, the creator and governor of all things, who reveals in himself the Father, and who by becoming man procured our salvation.  Though most high he humbled himself, and though God, he became man.  It was not that being humble he exalted himself, or being man he was made God.  Rather on the one hand, as God he was always Lord of all, and on the other, as man he took to himself glory he had as God.  He actually said as much in the sacred Gospels, “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”*  He asked not to receive what he did not have, but for what he had to be revealed.

Theodoret of Cyrus, “The Epistle to the Hebrews”


*  John 17:5

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