From the very beginning, God has desired for the human race to come together in a loving relationship with each other and with Him. God created mankind with this truth inscribed into the human body, as male and female. He ordered the universe in such a way as to be a place for the covenant between humanity and God to be lived, a Temple of creation. And in this Temple, man was to be its priest and king. We were to be prophets who speak for God as His beloved children. And, made as male and female, we were to give and receive the very love that is God..

Unfortunately, sin distorted this idyllic picture. While God’s plan has never changed, our ability to play our role in it was severely damaged by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, which is transmitted to all human beings. It became necessary for us to be saved from the destructiveness of sin. And so, God enacted His plan of salvation in human history, by which He gradually, in stages and in words and deeds, revealed Himself to us in order to redeem us from sin. In Jesus Christ, God fully revealed Himself and accomplished the work of salvation on the Cross and by the Resurrection, defeating sin and death. In the Church, established by Christ, we receive the salvation of Christ in this age through the Sacraments.

In the Beginning…

Scripture tells us that God created all that is, the “heavens and the earth,” in six days, and rested on the seventh. While we are free to read the story of creation according to the plain meaning of the words on the page, such a reading is unlikely. Rather, the story of creation communicates to us important truths about God, ourselves, and our relationship to God and each other. We learn that God is all-powerful since He created all that exists. We learn that He is all-knowing, because if all things came from Him, there is nothing that He does not know. We learn that He transcends or goes beyond His creation, and yet is intimately involved in His creation. We learn that we are made in God’s image and likeness, which means that out of all of creation, we are unique and possess the breath of God within us, which makes us capable of freely giving and receiving love. We were made as male and female, in God’s image, with these very realities written into our very bodies, and we were brought together as one flesh to make the love of God a reality on earth.

Our Original Parents

Adam and Eve were created into and enjoyed Original Justice: there was no suffering or death, and there was peace and harmony between them and all creation. When they fell into the temptation of the devil and ate the forbidden fruit, their disobedience and rejection of God constituted the Original Sin. Suffering and death entered the world, and the unity between Heaven and earth was broken. Humanity’s likeness to God became distorted. God punished Adam and Eve with the natural consequences of their actions, and He placed enmity between the serpent and the woman for all time, while at the same time promising that He would send His son, the “offspring of the woman,” to “strike at the head” of the serpent, and defeat sin and death once and for all (Genesis 3:15).

Sin and Death

Sin infected the entire human race, as evidenced in the next generation of human beings. Cain killed Abel out of envy and spite. Abel offered God the best of his work while Cain offered his leftovers as an afterthought. God accepted Abel’s offering, but Cain’s he did not, encouraging him to do better. Instead, Cain murdered his own brother. This first murder led to diverging lines in the human race: those who sought to follow God, and those who followed their own wicked desires and sinfulness. Eventually, the two lines merged into one, and sin engulfed the entire human family.

A New Beginning

God sought to destroy the wickedness of the human race by sending the Great Flood to wash away sin on the earth. Noah alone remained faithful to God. And so, God told Noah to build an ark, to be a microcosm of all of creation, to be saved from the destruction of the Flood in order to build a new creation, to begin again. God entered into a new covenant with Noah, much the same as the first with Adam and Eve. The Flood in essence “baptized” the earth, so that it could begin anew through Noah and his family. In this way, much like we all begin our walk along the path of salvation with the sacrament of Baptism, God began to enact His plan of salvation in Salvation History.