According to teachings on original sin, man preferred himself to God. And hides from Him even. If we ever wonder why this world is so imperfect, why people sin, why people lack innocence, why people lie and misrepresent who they are, why we lack the full happiness we seek, why we’re often in competition and strife with each other, and within ourselves, why people can be so selfish and self-righteous with all the problems that results in, we might begin to understand that we really don’t necessarily want God/truth; we’d rather try going it on our own to see for ourselves what might make us happy or fulfilled, apart from divine moral constraints. As Augustine once said, “Lord, grant me continence (moral integrity), but not quite yet”.
Man is sort of his own god in this world, and the pride that underlies this fact is our biggest enemy, and the ultimate cause of all sin. And pride is shallow, and cowardly, craving the attention of others, more concerned with how things look on the outside at any given time than how they are on the inside, concerned with appearances more than truth. Pride is always willing to compromise or sacrifice truth, in fact, to make us look better. Or make us feel like garbage when we fail to live up to its “standards”.
Anyway, this world is a place where we can experiment with the effects of creatures playing God while also experiencing our limitations including moral weaknesses resulting in suffering caused by sin, physical weaknesses such as illness and ultimately death. We’re here to learn of the evil in the Master having gone away, to develop a hunger and thirst for righteouesness, for God, in an ultimately hopeless and dying and godless world.
"For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors," 1 Pet 1:18
We’re here to gain wisdom, if we will, with the experience of good, evil, knowledge/revelation and grace playing their parts. So that we may run back to the God we may not have thought we needed or even wanted to believe in and find He hasn’t been so far away after all. As Augustine put it, "I found you not, O Lord, because I erred in seeking without that which was within.”
And even if we can only know and “see” Him in part now, in this life (1 Cor 13), we can begin to know and see this distant yet somehow strangely familiar relative Who’s been unfairly exiled from us.
