For the Destruction of Sin, Christ, the New Adam, Had to Come into the World
The World: I say you have not read Holy Scripture. Does the Gospel not say that „God the Father so loved the world (that is, me) that He gave His only-begotten Son” (John 3:16)? So, madman, how, in what way, and why should you hate me?
The Coming of the Lord and the Destruction of Sin Were Foretold by the Prophets. Then, Coming, He Promises Us His Kingdom
The Wise Man: I have read it, but if the Heavenly Father gave you His Son, He did not give Him to you so that you might unite Him to yourself, but precisely so that He might separate His own from you, and set apart His chosen ones — lest, walking in your light, they inherit everlasting darkness; but rather, judging your light to be darkness, that they might obtain the light of the sun that never sets. For every conscious man considers your light darkness, your beauty ugliness, your goodness wickedness, your peace noise and disorder — so that he shuns you and hates you. In this way the Evangelist John testifies: „The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
The World builds her defense on a single verse, but reads only half of it. It is true that John writes: „God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son” (John 3:16) — but the same Evangelist, in the same writing, uses the word „world” (κόσμος) in more than one sense. Sometimes „the world” is God’s good creation (John 1:10); sometimes it is fallen humanity, whom God wills to save (John 3:16-17); and sometimes it is the order ruled by „the prince of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11) — the order of the passions and of the lie, the very one Saint John forbids us to love in his epistle: „Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). The World of the Divan deliberately blurs these meanings, hiding inside the verse that names her beloved of God, to escape the one who exposes her as His enemy.
But God’s love for the fallen world is not an approval of its state — it is precisely the will to draw it out of that state. A physician who loves the sick man does not love the sickness; on the contrary, it is because he loves the man that he fights the sickness holding him captive. So Christ came — not to unite Himself with the world’s sin, but to destroy it at the root, „that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death” (Heb. 2:14). And for this He had to come as the New Adam. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon calls Christ’s work „recapitulation” (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις): everything the first Adam ruined through disobedience, the second Adam set right through obedience — tree for tree, through the wood of the cross in place of the tree of knowledge; obedience for disobedience, through the Virgin’s „yes” in place of Eve’s fall. „As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22), and „the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45).
Here the Wise Man’s answer becomes clear. The Son was not given to the world so that she might receive Him and absorb Him into her order, but so that He might draw out from her midst those who belong to God. This is why He does not come to reconcile two like natures, but to separate light from darkness — exactly as the same John testifies: „The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). Whoever still lives under the order of the first Adam sees everything inverted: he calls light darkness, because any true light shows him his own nakedness. It is not by chance that Scripture cries out: „Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Is. 5:20). God’s love for the world (as fallen creation He wills to heal) is precisely the ground on which His Son separates His own from the world (as the order of sin) — not its opposite.
So the World is not wrong to read that she is loved — she is wrong to believe that being loved by God means being justified as she is. Christ, the New Adam, did not come to crown her, but to heal her through the death of her passions; and whoever remains faithful to the old state has, in the same Evangelist John, a witness to the separation that follows.
