I posted the following on Lammchen's thread explaining a little of Christ's Salvation for man: Justification has its place in this context of man's Salvation in Christ...
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In a way, Christ is the re-set button for us, and not all of us want to be reset...
But more to the OP...
Adam failed and we are all, including Christ, born in Adam... Adam turned from God and ate of the tree and died to the Life he had enjoyed in Paradise, and 900+ years later himself died... The Plan of God is to make Adam after he matured to become united with Christ, and for this Christ would incarnate after a certain period of time, and unite Adam to Himself...
And this is exactly what He did, on schedule, without wavering...
The problem with Adam - We are all Adam here - is that Death entered creation through his sin, and we are all born into that death, and Christ is the Giver of Life, as is God the Father and the Holy Spirit God... In God is no darkness at all, and Death is darkness...
Had Adam not sinned, there would be no death on earth, and Christ's coming to earth would have Him Divinizing Adam and His descendants without suffering the Cross for us... But as Scripture records, Christ is our SECOND Adam... So in His wanton Love for mankind, He incarnated into Adam's death-laden flesh, and was Crucified, that He should enter into Hades and overcome the Power of Death in His Own fallen yet sinless flesh... He entered into Death to defeat the Enemy of mankind, which is death, and in this He utterly succeeded, and this because though He entered Hades as a corpse, He was not only without sin, but was also God, and Hades had no power to resist Him there, and he plundered the Gates of Hades... And when He then took up His Life again and arose on the third day, He transformed Human Nature in His Own Flesh - And ONLY in His Own flesh - And this is why we are baptized INTO Christ, that we should overcome sin in our own flesh, having been reborn into Christ and having received the Seal of the Holy Spirit in our Annointing at Baptism, and thereby having become a New Creation... And this is why we who are now members of the Ekklesial Body of our Lord on earth are indeed ABLE to be perfected in our Walk in the Way, Who is Christ...
But that walk presumes our being united with and in Christ and our having the Holy Spirit descend and abide in us as a new Hypostasis conjoined with God... And this is Salvation... the conjoining of God and man, which IS a new creation in Christ... This entry into Christ IS our entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, and it can ONLY be given to us BY Christ, which He gives through the hands of His Servants who as members of this Theanthropic Body actually do baptize those who have been repenting into Christ...
What did Christ's Death on the Cross give man? It gave him union with God at his core, even the very hypostatic center of his very person...
And this is what the OT Saints, who were more Holy than most of us, did NOT have... They became saturated in the Holy Spirit and could bring forth water out of rocks, but they themselves did not have the hypostatic union with God that Baptism gives in the rebirth of the penitent into Christ's Holy Body, Whose Head He is, and Whose Kingdom Christ Himself is...
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Justification is the making righteous of man by God IN Christ...
Arsenios
