Something from ... St. Athanasius on the Incarnation of our Lord

St. Athanasius (c. 293 - May 2, 373) was the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt.  He was a staunch defender of the two natures of Jesus and of the Trinity.  He suffered exile five times for his firm defense of the Christian faith.  He also wrote several defenses of these crucial doctrines of the Christian faith.  Below is a quote regarding the incarnation of our Lord, that God became a man.

Athanasius reflected that God's love for his creation compelled him to redeem it.  He was not content to let sinners go merrily into their own condemnation.  But in order to redeem us, the Lord had to become one of us.  Therefore, to rescue us from sin, evil, and death, the Lord took upon himself our very human nature.  He does this to fulfill God's Law so that it will not condemn us, to give himself into death so that death gets its fill, and to rise from the dead so that death is powerless.  This is the love of God for sinners--he becomes one of us to redeem all of us.  From Athanasius:

"But now he comes, condescending towards us in his love for human beings and his manifestation.  For seeing the rational race perishing, and death reigning over them through corruption, and seeing also the threat of the transgression giving firm hold to the corruption which was upon us, and that it was absurd for the law to be dissolved before being fulfilled, and seeing the impropriety in what had happened, that the very things of which he himself was the Creator were disappearing, and seeing the excessive wickedness of human beings, that they gradually increased it to an intolerable pitch against themselves, and seeing the liability of all human beings to death--having mercy upon our race, and having pity upon our weakness, and condescending to our corruption, and not enduring the dominion of death, lest what had been created should perish and the word of the Father himself for human beings should be in vain, he takes for himself a body and that not foreign to our own." -- On the Incarnation, paragraph 8 (taken from "On the Incarnation" in the Popular Patristics Series, translation by John Behr.  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press: Yonkers, NY.  (c) 2011.)