ok so, if i understand correctly, original sin is the loss of holiness and justice associated with the fall of man. and baptism gives us the first grace. but if we have the initial grace, why aren’t we restored to how adam and eve were? we still sin and there is still physical death and disease in the world for humans. our souls can get to heaven but they could before baptism was instituted as well, even though heaven wasn’t open.
can anyone help explain it? thanks
We’re here not only to be sort of magically restored back to the heights from which man fell, but to learn, the hard way, what Adam & Eve apparently didn’t know:
why we must obey God,
why His will is perfect and superior to our own once we depart company from Him. We must learn for ourselves of our absolute need for God, ultimately coming to love Him with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. We must learn to favor the Fruit of the Tree of Life over that of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam was given
everything but his will was more or less neutral in terms of his desire for God and obedience of Him. God won’t force us to choose rightly but our wills are the
prize, so to speak. Our justice is greater the more our wills are freely aligned with God’s. This is a
process, of God drawing us, working in us, a gift of grace that we must cooperate with. This is from the Catechism:
**2520 Baptism confers on its recipient the grace of purification from all sins. But the baptized must continue to struggle against concupiscence of the flesh and disordered desires. With God’s grace he will prevail
- by the virtue and gift of chastity, for chastity lets us love with upright and undivided heart;
- by purity of intention which consists in seeking the true end of man: with simplicity of vision, the baptized person seeks to find and to fulfill God’s will in everything;
- by purity of vision, external and internal; by discipline of feelings and imagination; by refusing all complicity in impure thoughts that incline us to turn aside from the path of God’s commandments: “Appearance arouses yearning in fools”;
978 "When we made our first profession of faith while receiving the holy Baptism that cleansed us, the forgiveness we received then was so full and complete that there remained in us absolutely nothing left to efface, neither original sin nor offenses committed by our own will, nor was there left any penalty to suffer in order to expiate them. . . . Yet the grace of Baptism delivers no one from all the weakness of nature. On the contrary, we must still combat the movements of concupiscence that never cease leading us into evil "**
