Salvation... What a beautiful word! If one were to ask you What has Christ done in order to save you?, most people would answer that He died on the cross for me. But in truth, everything that Christ did was for our salvation, beginning with the incarnation, where His divinity and His humanity were united in the Virgin Birth. His baptism was completely for our healing and for our salvation. His complete annihilation of death through the cross and His resurrection, and yes, even His Ascension, these were all salvific works of Christ, these were all ways in which He was saving us and is saving us. And in fact, it is our entering into these salvific works and participating in them that we can experience this salvation.
What are we being saved from? Well, first and foremost, it's important to understand what happened in the fall actually. You see, God had created humanity out of love, out of perfect love, and He wanted to share this with those whom He created in His own image. The Lord God was their source of life. He was everything to Adam and Eve. It was in Him that they lived and breathed and had their being. He was their source of life and He was their everything. And so, humans Adam and Eve were created to live in a state of thanksgiving, growing more and more into the image of God. He was their absolute morality. He was the one that decided what was good and evil and what was right to do and what not to do. He was their source of life and He was the reason for which they lived.
And then one day, they... they decided that they wanted independence. You see, when one requires or desires independence from Life, they find themselves isolated, disconnected from Life himself. They became their own or they made themselves wise in their own eyes and made themselves the new standard of morality. They were the ones who had decided what was good and what was bad. She saw the fruit and she saw that it was good for food. She decided. Eve decided for herself that this would be good for food and, and though the Lord has warned them and told them not to, she decided to eat and she gave to her husband as well, and he ate and they both discovered their nakedness.
And in discovering their nakedness, this language speaks of when one rejects or pushes away Life and everything that is in this union of love that... in which they were created for. Instead of being thankful for it, when they put it away and push it away, they push Life himself away. They find themselves bereft, naked, exiled. And so, this is exactly the work that Christ came to fix, to heal. It's to heal us from this disconnect, exile from God, this breaking away from Him. And so, because of that, Christ decides to save us completely.
The first thing that we're gonna to speak about today is about the work of His healing us through the Virgin Birth. The fact is that Christ was born of a virgin is not haphazard. It's more
a declaration of uniqueness. The Virgin Birth has real mystical meaning that it's directly related to our salvation. According to St. Cyril, he says:
''...the Son came or rather was made man, in order to reconstitute our condition within Himself, first of all in his own holy, wonderful, and truly amazing birth and life. This [is] why he himself became [first,] the first one to be born of the Holy Spirit (I mean of course [that] after the flesh) so that he could trace a path for grace to come to us. He wanted us to have this intellectual regeneration and spiritual assimilation to himself, who is the true and natural Son, so that we too might be able to call God our Father, and so remain free of corruption as no longer owning our first father, that is Adam, in whom we were corrupted.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ)
This is On the Unity of Christ.
This deep mystery of the Virgin Birth disconnects humanity from their first forefather Adam, who brought about death and corruption to his children. I mean, that's why Christ is not born of a human father who would be a descendant of Adam. A natural birth through union, in the Old Testament, prior to the incarnation of Christ, led to the propagation of death and corruption as this was the state of humans who were born as children of Adam and his descendants that death and corruption was propagated all around the world.
Through the Virgin Birth, Christ has set us on a path of being born of the Holy Spirit like He was. He has given us the potential for holiness and life, rather than being born as slaves to sin through the first Adam. Adam is no longer our father, but God has become our Father.
''For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ''Abba, Father.'' '' (Romans 8:15)
This was found in Romans 8:15.
And so when we think of salvation, we must first think of the incarnation. We must think of how everything the Lord did, starting with the Virgin Birth, was for our ultimate healing and our reuniting us to the Father whom we had rejected through Adam and Eve.
Glory be to God forever. Amen.