Lately I've been reading a lot about the Incarnation of the Son of God, and realizing that the reconciliation of God and Man does not only take place through Jesus (e.g., on the Cross), but actually takes place *in* Jesus first and foremost, has been a paradigm-shifting insight.

Christ's identity as God and Man (aka. the Hypostatic Union) is the mechanism that allows all other humans who believe in Him to receive and share in the Divine life of the Father, what Peter calls, becoming "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4).

Though Christ is unique in his divinity, being fully God, and we can never be exactly as he is, as the Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45) he is yet a prototype for a new type of humanity that is characterized by union with the Godhead that far surpasses even what the First Adam experienced in the Garden of Eden, and certainly surpasses what we now experience since the First Adam's fall —death, pain, and bondage to sin.

This is what I mean that the Incarnation itself is our reconciliation with God. It is God and Man joined, inseparable, and fully intertwined in Christ as a signal that God no longer wishes to be separated from humanity, and in that, our humanity too is given this offer of elevation to the plain of God.    

The eternal Son of God enters into the human experience so that humans can enter into the reality of God in a way that was never before possible, and through his righteous life, death, and resurrection, he secures our acceptance with God, achieves victory over our primary foe, and imparts the eternal life of God to us, which is tasted in part now through the Spirit and will be fully realized at the future Resurrection and in the Age to Come.

As God and Man he brings God to us and us to God. As Lord of Life and Perfect Adam he exhausts the power of death and overcomes it through his sinless perfection. He presses into the deepest realms of the human experience and brings God there and in so doing he brings whoever will press into him into the deepest realms of God.

More and more I'm getting to the point where if someone asks me what it is that saves us, my first answer will be: the Incarnation. - Travis M Snow