God made human beings to love Him and to love each other. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, rejected God’s love and sinned. All humanity after them has inherited Original Sin and is need of salvation. God promised salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ, who sacrificed Himself for us on the Cross and freed us from sin and death. Because of His sacrifice, we can hope to live eternally in Heaven with God. We receive the gift of salvation in and through the Catholic Church when we are baptized. Then, when we receive the gift of grace and work together with the Holy Spirit, we can answer God’s call to be saints.

The Fall of Man

God created all things, both visible and invisible, material and spiritual. He made all of the angels and the animals. But alone out of all of creation God made human beings in His image and likeness. He loves us in a special way and calls us to love Him and to love each other as a reflection of His image. He also gave human beings the task of being the stewards of all of creation. That means that we have the responsibility to care for everything that God made. Unfortunately, our first parents, Adam and Eve, fell to the temptation of the devil and sinned. God had given Adam and Eve one command: they were free to eat from the fruit of any tree in the Garden of Eden, the paradise in which God had placed them, except for the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If they ate its fruit, God told them, they would die. However, the devil, in the form of a serpent, lied to Adam and Eve and planted the seeds of doubt in their hearts. They disobeyed God and ate the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Original Sin and the Reality of Sin

Adam and Eve’s disobedience and rejection of God constituted the Original Sin, which destroyed the Original Justice that Adam and Eve enjoyed: no suffering or death, and peace and harmony between each other and with creation. Now suffering and death entered the world, and man’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. God, however, did not leave humanity alone. He immediately promised to save them from sin. He promised that He would send His Son, the “offspring of the woman” to “crush the head” of the serpent, and defeat sin and death once and for all. Although our world today may deny it, sin is a reality. Because of the sin of Adam and Eve, all human beings inherit Original Sin and its consequences. We all experience suffering and death, and we will all deal with the disharmony sin created between human beings and the rest of creation and among ourselves. And we all possess a tendency to sin. When we sin, we disobey God and reject His love. Ultimately, sin destroys God’s life within our souls, grace, and it destroys our relationship with Him. In fact, Scripture tells us that the penalty for sin is death — just as God had warned Adam and Eve.

God’s Promise of Salvation

Rather than condemn us to death, God enacted a plan of salvation throughout Salvation History that culminated in the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross freed us from sin and death and made it possible for us to receive the free and undeserved gift of God’s life, or grace. When we cooperate with God’s grace and the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we can resist temptation and avoid sin so that we can hope to be in Heaven with God after we die.

The Sacrament of Baptism and God’s Call to Be Saints

We receive the gift of salvation today in and through the Catholic Church. In His divine wisdom, Jesus gave us the Seven Sacraments, as a visible, material means of receiving the invisible grace of God. The Sacrament of Baptism is the first Sacrament we receive, which is necessary for salvation from sin. The water of Baptism washes away all sin, even Original Sin. Because we have been forgiven by God, we are given new life in Christ and made children of God and members of His Church. An indelible spiritual mark is imprinted on our souls, marking us as belonging to God, and we are made temples of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in our hearts. The saints are those souls who have gone before us and lived holy lives. They are models of holiness for us to follow, of how to love God and love our neighbor. God calls each of us to be saints. That is, God calls us to live holy lives, imitate Jesus, and cooperate with His grace, and one day to live eternally with Him in Heaven.