Originally Posted by George Knighton

Many non-Christians will no longer be acquainted with the concept of what made it possible.

The God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the thundering God of the mountaintop, to be what he says he is, must exist at the same time in all time.

He therefore always knew what was going to happen. He always knew that he would have to save mankind the hardest way possible, and it's possible that he is continuing to have to do it, if not on this world, perhaps on others.

The beginning of the Gospels, EIN APXH EIN O LOGOS KAI O LOGOS EIC TON THEOU, tells us that from the very beginning the idea of the Son of God and Man existed as a part of God's makeup.

Christ was incarnated fully God and fully Man.

Christ had to be born as a man and born with sin in order to make sure that he could die and go to Hell.

Christ had to be fully God in order to make sure that when he got to Hell, he could and would defeat it.

The idea of what Christ did when he was dead is lost to many western Christians, but it lives in powerful imagery in the eastern churches. Some of the most powerful iconography I've ever seen depicts a Christ alive but in Hell, the Gates of Brass under his feet. With one hand he is raising Adam out of the grave, and with the other he is raising Eve.

It is a powerful image, unforgettable, that God would endure what Man had condemned themselves to, for his love's sake.