Why the Word Became Flesh

Christians confess one God in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the source of all. The Son is the eternal Word of the Father, “begotten, not made,” through whom all things were created. The Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and is sent into the world by the Son.

When the New Testament calls Jesus "the Word," it is naming this eternal Son of God, the One who was "with God" and who "was God" before all things came to be (John 1:1–3). This same Word, St John tells us, "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

St Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, presses the question: Why did the eternal Word have to come this way? Why not simply send another prophet, another message, another set of commands?

The answer reaches to the heart of the gospel.

Our Condition: Corruption leads to loss of Likeness

In the beginning, God made humanity “in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). The image speaks to our basic dignity: reason, freedom, the capacity to know and love God. The likeness points to our calling: to grow to resemble God in holiness, love, and obedience.

We still bear the image, but by turning from God we have ruined the likeness. We did not just break rules. We broke ourselves.

The likeness means our capacity to grow in holiness, to reflect God's character, and to live in unbroken communion with Him. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were created with the potential for immortality, not as something they possessed by nature, but as a gift sustained by their communion with God, the source of all life. When we chose sin, missing the mark of God's design and separating ourselves from His life, we lost that communion and, with it, our participation in God's immortality. Separation from God is death: not merely physical dying, but the spiritual corruption that leads to it.

In Athanasius’ language, we fell into corruption: a slow undoing, a slide toward nonbeing. Our thoughts, desires, and societies bent inward and downward. Left to ourselves, we were not climbing toward God. We were drifting toward self-destruction.

God did not remain silent. The Word spoke through the Law, the prophets, and the history of Israel. The Word gave us words: warnings, promises, commandments, prophecies. But while the message was from God, the sickness in us remained. We needed more than instruction. We needed the ruined likeness to be restored.

The Word Crosses the Gap and Restores the Likeness

Here Athanasius is very clear: the distance between God and fallen humanity could not be crossed from our side. We did not have the strength or purity to build our own bridge back to the One we had abandoned.

So God Himself crossed the gap.

The very Word who called creation out of nothing took a true human nature from the Virgin. The bridge between God and humanity is not a thing, or a method, or a philosophy. The bridge is a Person.

In Jesus Christ, the eternal Son and a real human being are united without confusion and without separation. He is fully God and fully man. In Him, the two sides that had been torn apart, God and fallen humanity, are brought together again.

By uniting our humanity to Himself, Christ not only preserves the image. He restores the likeness. In His life we finally see what a human being in full communion with God looks like. He did not merely tell us the way back to the Father. He became the Way.

He did not simply hand us new ideas about God. He handed us His own life.

He Leads Us Through Death and Guards Us in the World

Our greatest enemy, and the final fruit of our corruption, is death. To heal us completely, Christ did not stay on the safe side of that line. He passed through it.

By entering into death in a real human body, He went down into the deepest consequence of our rebellion. But because He is the living Word, death could not hold Him. His resurrection is not only proof of who He is. It is a preview of what union with Him will mean for us.

Even now, before the final resurrection, we live in a world that still pulls us back toward the old patterns of corruption. The grace of Christ is a sheer gift, but it is not magic that leaves us passive. We need the Word (the living Christ and His written word) and we need the Holy Spirit, who applies that word to our hearts, to shield us from the world’s lies and to keep us from repeating the same destructive cycle.

• Without the Word and the Spirit, the world catechizes us back into self-destruction.

• With the Word and the Spirit, our minds are renewed and our lives are retrained toward God.

If we are joined to Christ and continually formed by His word in the power of the Spirit, then His story becomes our story. His obedience answers our disobedience. His death breaks the power of our death. His risen life becomes the pattern and promise of our own future, body and soul made whole, capable again of bearing not only the image but the likeness of God.

In the End

• We were made in God’s image and likeness, but by turning away we damaged the likeness and fell into corruption and death.

• The Word spoke through prophets, but our nature remained wounded and wandering.

• So the eternal Son, the Word of the Father, became flesh.

• In Jesus Christ, true God and true man, God and humanity meet. He is the bridge we could never build.

• By His life, death, and resurrection, He restores in us what we ruined and opens the way for us to be reconciled to the Father.

• By His grace, and by clinging to His Word in the midst of this world, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we are kept from returning to the same old cycle of self-destruction and are led instead into true life with God.

So if the Word has gone this far to give Himself to us, it makes sense that we would go to the place where His voice is heard most clearly. Pick up the Scriptures. Read the Gospels. Let the living Word meet you in His written word, and let Him heal the image, restore the likeness, and lead you back to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

The Word gave us His words. Then, in mercy, the Word gave us Himself, so that in Him the image might be healed, the likeness restored, and we might at last be rejoined to the Father in the Holy Spirit.