Since it is not the source of its own life, creation has no means of sustaining itself. It came from nothing and remains liable to dissolve back into it. All created things, left to themselves, tend to break apart and drift towards isolation, dissolution and eventual death. Aware of his vulnerability, man is fearful, and fear makes him a misery to himself and a terror to his fellow creatures. He needs to be liberated both from the confines of nature and from the fear which drives him to devour his fellow men.
If the world is to live, death must be overcome. But only a relationship of love, freely willed on both sides, can overcome the constraints on our life, including the ultimate limit that is death. Created beings are safe from death as long as they are in communion with the life that, being uncreated, has no limit. Man is made for relationship with God, who always intended to be with man, and intended that man should know this and be glad of it. From the first, God meant to be incarnate for man: had he not fallen, man would have been transformed incrementally into Christ, that is, man-with-God.
John D. Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H. Knight (London: T&T Clark, 2008), xvi.