05/29/2026
There is a book that C.S. Lewis said every Christian should read.
He wrote the introduction to it himself. He called it a masterpiece. He said reading it made him feel like he had stepped out of a stuffy room into clean, open air.
The book is On the Incarnation by Athanasius of Alexandria.
Written in the fourth century. Still detonating in the twenty-first.
And the central claim of that book will rearrange everything you thought you knew about salvation.
Athanasius looked at the Incarnation, God becoming man in the person of Jesus Christ, and he didn’t just see a means to an end. He didn’t see a transaction. He didn’t see God reluctantly putting on flesh to satisfy a legal requirement.
He saw the most aggressive, intentional, glorious act of cosmic rescue in the history of existence.
Here’s what Athanasius understood:
Humanity was not just guilty. We were unraveling.
Sin didn’t just put us in debt. It introduced corruption into the very fabric of what we were made to be. We were image-bearers of God slowly losing the image. Like a portrait left in the rain, the original still there, but fading. Distorting. Disappearing.
And the only one who could restore the image was the one whose image it was.
So the Word became flesh.
Not as a visitor. Not as a tourist passing through the human condition. He took on our nature fully, completely, permanently, so that in His person, humanity could be renewed from the inside out.
Athanasius said it like this:
“He became what we are so that we might become what He is.”
Eight words that contain the entire gospel.
The Incarnation was not just about the cross. It was about the restoration of everything the fall had corrupted. Christ didn’t just come to forgive us, He came to refashion us. To breathe the image of God back into dust that had forgotten what it was made of.
And then He rose.
And in that resurrection, He didn’t just prove there was life after death. He inaugurated a new kind of humanity. A redeemed humanity. A glorified humanity. The firstborn of a new creation, and everyone who is in Him participates in that newness right now.
This is not future tense theology.
This is present tense reality.
You are not a sinner waiting to be fully fixed in eternity. You are a new creation, bearing the restored image of God, indwelt by the Spirit of the risen Christ, already seated in heavenly places in Him.
Athanasius held that truth against emperors and councils and exile and death.
Because he knew that if you lose the full Incarnation, you lose everything. You lose the restoration of the image. You lose the defeat of corruption. You lose the new humanity. You lose the gospel itself.
We cannot afford to lose it either.
Read On the Incarnation. Let it wreck you the way it wrecked Lewis. The way it wrecked me.
And then walk through your day knowing that the Word who became flesh is alive in you, restoring, renewing, and reclaiming everything the enemy tried to corrupt.
The image is being restored. In you. Right now.
That’s worth celebrating.
Drop a 🔥 if this opened something up for you. And share this, somebody in your feed needs to meet Athanasius today. 👇
