29. Jesus became an incarnate human being to answer the question of how God is involved in Death.
Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die. {Hebrews 2:14}
Before God removed human beings from the garden so they could no longer eat from the Tree of Life, there was no such thing as Sleep in the universe. There was no interval of unconscious pause in the dust. There was only Life and Death, existence or extinction.
So once Lucifer and the angels who sided with him had chosen the path of separating themselves from the Source of Life, the only result would be Death—eternal extinction—for a created being cannot live outside of being connected to the Source.
But, in God's perfect universe, nobody had ever witnessed Death. There had only been peace and harmony and love and unity, and even when Lucifer began raising doubts and inciting rebellion against God, all the angels knew was that there were now some of God’s creatures who were no longer going to do what He said.
Once Lucifer had set himself up as a rival, an enemy of God’s, how would it look if he were suddenly to Die? Would the other angels even know what that meant? Would they be prepared to witness something so horrible and awful? Would they assume God was a merciless dictator, simply executing someone who had dared to cross Him? How could they know what God’s involvement was with either Life or Death? How could God make sure that, if and when Death was first observed in His universe, nobody would misunderstand what was happening?
Because Lucifer had followed a course that would cut him off from Life, he had unwittingly raised all these questions about the issue of Death—a concept nobody had ever even thought about before. And Paul simply says that’s why Jesus took on flesh and blood. He became a human being so He could die. The Creator literally took on human material, became created, so He could die, thereby demonstrating the Death that occurs when a created being separates from the Source of Life, and also proving that it is not an execution at the hands of God. He not only has no pleasure in the death of the wicked; He has no part in it. It was primarily for this reason that Jesus became an incarnate human being.
If you want to dig deeper—
Matthew 26:52-54
John 10:17-18
Philippians 2:5-8
Revelation 12:10-11