Athanasius says that God saw humanity falling from existence into nothingness, that God could not bear to lose the creatures he loved to non-existence—the ones in all creation that alone were made in the image of his eternity—and so the Son takes on the one human nature shared by all humans in order to rescue humanity from death.

I love the beauty of that.

Our human predicament finds one of its simplest biblical expressions in Wisdom 1:13-15,2:23-24 (which happens to be one way the lectionary preacher can go this coming Sunday if she chooses to preach on the Old Testament).

Here’s what those passages say:

“God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.

“For righteousness is immortal. God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.”

The origin of human death is not God but “the devil’s envy” and humanity’s subsequent fall from the incorruptible life of God God intended for humanity.

Human death has its origin in demonic and human evil, in a privation of the good; death is here described (long before Paul) as opposed to God’s desire for humanity.