Why did Jesus come to earth?

I was recently watching YouTube videos to get some ideas on how to start conversations with people about Jesus.  One of the videos suggested just straight out asking people a question about God or faith and then pursuing a conversation based on that person's answer.  One video showed kids answering the question, "Why did Jesus come to earth?"  The majority of kids parroted answers they had no doubt heard in Sunday School ("To die on the cross" and "to wash away sins" were common answers).  One young girl paused for a moment and said, "To see what it was like."

Her answer is no less true than the others and perhaps more so.  Why did God Eternal clothe Himself in human flesh?  Certainly to be our atoning sacrifice was a major reason, but I don't believe that is the only thing God desired from coming in human form.  In Bethlehem, God breathed our air for the first time.  He learned what it was like to feel the wind on His face and cool water against His lips.  He learned what it was like to be admired and also rejected.  He experienced the broadest range of human emotions: friendship, loss, grief, laughter and joy.  God learned by His experiences as a man.  I believe strongly that it is because of Jesus that we receive Divine mercy.  Not just because of His sacrifice but because He knows how it feels to not receive it.  The Hebrew writer records that "...He learned obedience by the things which He suffered..."  It is not in the nature of God to be obedient for He has no one to obey.  Christ in learning obedience shows that He gave up all-encompassing power and became truly human for to be human is to be free to choose whether or not to be obedient.

I don't know why God chose to offer Himself for us in a plan that was conceived even before it was needed.  I chose to believe He did such because He knew that we would be afraid and lonely, and so He became afraid and lonely along with us.  I do not believe man could have simply imagined the God of the Bible and Jesus as some scholars suggest.  Had we invented Him, we would have made Him even more out-of-touch than He sometimes seems.  No, God is real and the reality is that He is not far from any of us.  He is in the hand we touch, the eyes we meet, the voice we hear.

Praise be to God that He "wanted to see what it was like."