"God created man in his own image; in the image of God He created him" (Gen. 1:27). Thus He showed concern for His own statue, desiring for it to remain forever and not be easily destroyed or corrupted.
Something similar takes place with artists who create statues. Such craftsmen not only pay close attention to ensure that they create statues that are beautiful, appealing, exquisite, and impressive,
but they also, as much as they possibly can, seek to transmit immortality to their works of art, and desire to preserve them unchanged throughout time.
This is what Phideas did with the idol of Zeus at Olympia.As soon as he completed the figure
(which he sculpted from ivory),he ordered that oil be poured around both legs of the statue, in order to preserve it ageless in perpetuity, as much as possible.
If artists and sculptors desire for the works they produce to endure forever, wouldn't God, Who creates magnificent works of art, Who is capable of all things and Who creates things out of nothing, wouldn't He want much more for man, His rational statue, to remain indestructible and
immortal? Would He have allowed man, whom He created with His own hands and shaped in His own image and likeness, who is the adornment of
the world and for whom the world was created, to decompose in such a lamentable manner and be handed over to demise and corruption? Not at
all!
God created man to be incorrupt and rendered
Him an image of His own eternal character.
For as the Wisdom of Solomon attests, “God did
not make death; neither hath He pleasure in the destruction of the living” (WSol. 1:13).
Rather, “Through the envy of the devil came
death into the world” (WSol. 2:24).
Death was then found as a means of correction and rectification. Man became utterly defiled and marred when he rejected God’s commandment, and he developed many evil blemishes, which the devil and father of deception conceived in order to have man ceaselessly think of and be inclined toward unrighteousness. Seeing that an eternal evil had arisen through the ploy of the deceiver, God
cloaked man with death, so that, through the decomposition of the body, all the evil that had
taken root within it could die and disappear.
For death is nothing other than the separation of the soul from the body.
St. Epifanios, Bishop of Cyprus
