Jesus came to earth to solve a fundamental problem with the human form of life: that it had become alienated from God, and therefore was languishing, because God is the source of all life. When life becomes alienated from the source of all life, it languishes. There is nowhere for it to go but to the grave – to slide inexorably into ruin. And the Old Testament is full of pleas to God for deliverance from the grave, from the pit, from the abyss. These pleas are really appeals for deliverance from sin – because sin is most fundamentally this turning away from God, and so an inhabitation of the serpent’s primordial lie: that we don’t need God in order to live, that we will never become who we were meant to be until we take our destiny by the horns and “self-actualize”. But the truth is – as St. Augustine famously put it – we were made for God, and our restlessness comes from our alienation from his presence. The Kingdom of God is our home.

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