God’s Response to Original Sin: Mercy

“In this way, then, did God from the very beginning constantly show kindness to the human race. For as soon as He created the first man, He straightway and from the first settled him in Paradise, granted him that gift of a carefree life, and offered him the enjoyment of everything in Paradise except one tree. Because he wished to indulge his taste, and because his wife misled him, he trampled underfoot the command which God imposed on him and committed an outrage against the great honor which God had bestowed upon him. But see even here the magnitude of God’s kindness. For God no longer had to judge worthy of any forgiveness one who had proved so ungrateful for unearned benefactions, but He should have put him beyond the pale of his providence. But He did not do so.

Not only that but, like a loving father who is moved by his natural affection for his unruly child, He does not measure His rebuke to the sin nor, again, does He forgive him altogether, but He punishes him with moderation, so that the child, like a ship, may not thereafter run aground on a reef of greater evil. This is the way in which God works.

Since man had shown great disobedience, God cast him forth from his life in Paradise. God curbed man’s spirit for the future, so that he might not leap any farther away, and He condemned him to a life of toil and labor, speaking to him in some such fashion as this: ‘The ease and security which were yours in abundance have led you to this great disobedience. They made you forget my commandments. You had nothing to do; that led you to think thoughts too haughty for your own nature, for idleness hath taught all evil. Therefore, I condemn you to toil and labor, so that while tilling the earth, you may never forget your disobedience and the vileness of your nature.

Since you exalted yours to great heights and refused to remain within your proper bounds, on this account do I command you to return again to the dust from which you were taken, for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.’ To increase man’s pain and to make him feel his fall to the full, God did not settle man at any great distance from Paradise, but nearby. However, He blocked off the entrance to it, so that man might see each hour the joys of which he had deprived himself by his failure to obey; thus might man profit from this constant admonition and in the future be more careful to keep the commandments God had given to him. When we enjoy blessings without perceiving the manner of the benefaction as we should, and then are deprived of them, we get a fuller perception of these blessings, and we also endure a greater pain of loss. This is what happened in the case of the first man.” (St. John Chrysostom, Ancient Christian Writers: Baptismal Instructions, pgs. 44-45)