Food for Thought #3 What God Desires of Us

There is only one God. There is no other god.  Wanting other beings to share in his glory, God created heaven and earth. In heaven he created angels; on earth, amidst many other creations, God created man, male and female.

In heaven, God created Angels, pure spirits with free will, and desired that each of the Angels freely choose to love Him and serve Him only. This was the mission given to the Angels. Scripture reveals in The Revelations given to St. John, the apostle, in Revelations 12:7, that there was a great battle between the Angels led by the Archangel Lucifer, who, through pride, fancied himself to be equal or greater than God and St. Michael, the Archangel, who led the Angels who, in obedience to the desire of God, chose to love, adore and serve God alone.  Lucifer (Satan) and his angels (devils) were defeated and banished from Heaven.

On Earth God created a man and a woman with many gifts including free will. As with the Angels in heaven God desired that both these human beings love and serve God only.  In order to display this love for God, as written in Scripture in the book of Genesis, they need only avoid eating a certain fruit in a wonderful paradise given to them on earth. They unfortunately succumbed to the wiles of Satan disguised as a serpent, and ate of this fruit.

The point of this story in Genesis is not that this is actually how God required Adam and Eve to prove their love for God (not eating a forbidden fruit); the point is that our original parents were given some relatively easy task to accomplish and could not do so because their love of God was not strong enough. Having thus failed to demonstrate the love for God he desired of them, they were banished from paradise. In addition to this banishment they lost many of the personal gifts given them by God, not the least of which was the perfect control of their senses and appetites.

Their banishment from paradise meant they no longer had everything supplied to them in terms of food and the necessities required for the maintenance of their bodies. They now had to make clothing for themselves as well as find and cook food and build accommodations. They had to work to get the essential needs that were originally, in paradise, freely provided them.  And worst of all, whereas before the fall they were not subject to death, now they must suffer death.

These deprivations resulting from their freely choosing not to do what was pleasing to God are called the results of original sin. Since the rest of us are descendants of these, our original parents, we share in this loss of gifts and the need to work to provide our needs; we also must suffer death.  We cannot inherit from our ancestors what has been taken away from them.

But even though Adam and Eve and the rest of us, as their descendants, are in an imperfect state of being, God did not abandon us and still wants us to demonstrate our love for him and our willingness to serve him as the only God; this is our mission and God wants to give us another chance.  But how?  We do not have the status to accomplish this in light of our imperfect state.

It is now that God shows us how much he loves us, even though we are in this state that does not allow us to adequately demonstrate on our own how much we love God.   God promises to send us someone who has the proper status and will buy back our lost status. God promises us a Redeemer. Throughout Scripture we see references to this promised Redeemer. But how will this person actually redeem us and bring us back to our lost status needed to demonstrate our love for God?

This will be explained in: Food for Thought #4 Redemption