VIDEO! Theosis – The Fulfillment of the Divine Plan

Let's listen to the words of Father Arsenie from Cornu, interpreting for us what the fall of Adam meant and what is the purpose for which man was created by God, in a conference held in March 2018, at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest.

„The Creator's purpose was that, through my free inclination towards Him, He would lead me to deification, that is, to union with Him, to full participation in divine life, the Creator wishing to fill my life with all the content of His divine life, we receiving, through His grace, all that the Creator has by Himself as power, as goodness, as virtue, as perfection.

My inclination towards God was meant to be shown through my loving obedience to Him, through keeping the divine commandment: 'From every tree you shall eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.' And I transgressed the Creator's commandment. And, instead of reaching the goal of deification, I ended up being cast out of Paradise into this world where I now live, and my body, destined to inherit incorruption, came to be taken by death, returning to the earth from which it was taken.

Also through faith I understand that the Creator did not overlook me, the fallen one, but granted me salvation from the wretched state into which I fell through a second birth, which is through His Only Begotten Son Himself, Whom He sent into the world, Who became incarnate, to destroy, to condemn sin in His body and to loose the pangs of death through His Resurrection.
We know God's thought now, we know that He seeks reasons to forgive the one who errs. This thought of God was fully revealed to us in Christ, Who took upon Himself the burden of the entire world, even to death on the cross. He accepted that the consequences of another's sin, Adam's sin and our sins, of all of us, should strike Him. Thus we have known that our God is a God Who repents for our sins, whereas the place of the deceiving spirit is always to seek reasons to accuse, even when these do not truly exist.”

Protos. Arsenie Muscalu