If God Knew We Would Sin, Why Did He Create Us?

I have to admit this was something that I struggled with for a long time, I get questions about it quite a bit, and I will do my best to give a complete answer here to the best of my ability, but I cannot guarantee that my answer will satisfy you.  I can only tell you what I know the Bible has to say on this matter.

First, God acts in accordance with His nature and character, and we know His attributes through His actions.  So, we know He is God the Creator because He is the Creator of all things.  That may sound like circular reasoning to you, but it's not.  We don't know that God has particular attributes until He acts on those attributes and then those attributes are memorialized in a name.  The same goes for names like Redeemer and Savior that we most closely connect with Jesus in the New Testament, but they belonged to the LORD long before Jesus' birth in the Old Testament.  As best as I can tell, God desired to create angels and people that could see His attributes and worship Him for who He is and what He does because that is what pleased Him and glorified Him.  He came up with a plan before the creation of the world to redeem a people to Himself (because it is part of His nature and character to be our Redeemer) which assumes that He knew before He created us that we would fall and be in need of redemption.

So, why create us, why create us with the ability to choose to sin, and why create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and give us the opportunity to sin? All of these questions are based off of our opinion that it would have been better for us and God if Adam and Eve had never sinned and Jesus never had to die on the cross.  But then, how would God display His divine love to us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us?  How would we know Him as Savior and Redeemer?  Remember that God wants us to understand who He is by His actions and worship Him for who He is and what He does.  Adam and Eve worshiped the LORD with the limited knowledge they had of Him as Creator, but if they had never sinned and the LORD would never have to save them from anything, how would they ever know Him as the one who saves His people?

Hopefully that makes sense.  Also, there's the idea that God always had something better than the first creation in mind and while the first creation was always good, the second creation was always going to be better.  It's going to be all those things that everyone is asking for--there will be no ability to sin and no opportunity to sin and no memory of sin.  We will live in perfect communion with the Father and the Son forever and ever, but it will be better because the Father will be able to give the Kingdom to His Son and there will be more people that God has loved there to enjoy it with Him.  Sharing Himself and everything He created with Adam and Eve was wonderful, but the book of Revelation tells us there will be an uncountable multitude of people from every tribe, tongue and nation that will worship Him for all eternity.  He will remember what He has done to redeem them, but they will only remember the New Creation.  In many ways our question we have asked above is "Why could we have the New Creation" as the "Old Creation" and just skip all the hard and messy stuff in the middle with blood sacrifices and atonement and crucifixion and resurrection?  Because it is by all those things that are offensive to use that God chose to be the means for which people to be born again and sanctified and made ready for the New Creation.  That's how He wants it to work.  I can't tell you why other than it is what pleases Him and brings Him the most glory.  That's what I was referring to when I was saying that I don't pretend to see every facet of this, but what I can see is lovely and beautiful.  One day, maybe we will know and understand more, but for now, I am content with knowing what I can know and seeing what I can see.  This was God's plan from the very beginning, and yet, that didn't make it any easier for God the Father or God the Son to go through any of it.

Another question that's often built into this question is one that's a little more personal.  If God is Sovreign and elects those that He is going to redeem, then why would He not choose everyone and why would He choose people that would continue to sin against Him and continue to hurt Him and His reputation?  That's a question that's just as hard, if not harder than the first, but they are connected thoughts.  After Adam and Eve fell, there were no perfect people to save--everyone that was left was one of the "sick" people that need the Great Physician.  I can't explain how it is that God goes about making the decision to elect us, but I know that His election is not some illusion like that of a mentalist where we think we are making a choice, but that choice has been made for us.  It's also not a trick where we already made the choice, and God in His omniscience looks through history and sees the choice that we were going to make and then writes our names down before we make the choice.  Instead, Jesus says that it is like God the Father is throwing a wedding banquet for His Son.  Many invitations are sent out, but there is the choice for people to respond to that invitation.  Some understand that you don't refuse an invitation to the wedding of the crown prince, but yet that's exactly what some of us do!  All the excuses that people made were lame in the parable--as are the lame excuses some of us make.  That is not to say though that everyone invited refused, just in the parable we see three people who were invited who made three lame excuses, because that is what was going on in front of Jesus at that moment and He wanted the religious people to be able to find themselves in the parable.  There were people however that the Pharisees had imagined would never be invited to such an event--they were "beyond grace" in the eyes of the Pharisees.  however, those are exactly the people that end up taking the place of the people that refused the invitation.  The Father says that the banquet table will be filled, and He orders His servants to go out into the highways and byways (where the disreputable people would be) and that He compelled them to come in.

So, we see there's a mixture of people who responded to an invitation and others who were compelled to come.  In both cases, the choice to invite them to compel them was the choice of the banquet host--the Father--and they are all given the same wedding clothes to wear to show that they were invited.  We see in the parable that someone shows up without the wedding clothes that act as proof of invitation, and he is challenged on how he got in and is thrown out to the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  So it is that there is only One Way to get into heaven and that is by Jesus.

So back to the question at hand, why choose us?  Because God wants His banquet table to be filled with people who didn't deserve to be chosen when His Son comes into His Kingdom.  It is for His good pleasure and to the praise of His glory to do this thing this way.  I can't explain it, but I am glad that it is all about His Son and not about me.  If it were about me, I never would have been chosen.

So then, why not save everyone?  I think that goes back to the idea of the invitations to the wedding that love requires a choice.  God loved us enough to invite us and we should love Him enough to immediately RSVP, "Yes!" as if there is no other option.  It's not really an invitation if there is no choice to say, "No," however anyone who says "No" to the king in such a situation knows they will incur his wrath--you don't dishonor the king by dishonoring his son by saying you have something more important than the son's wedding.  In this situation where the Father and the Son are both Persons of the Godhead, the offense is infinitely more and it would be absolutely right for the Father and the Son to say that anyone who refused the invitation expressed that they did not want to be a part of the Son's Kingdom and they will be put out of the Kingdom of God and their end will be the same as the devil and his rebellious angels.

So, the sum of all this is that we may not fully understand the mind of God in all this, but we don't need to understand it to love the result of it--"We love Him because He first loved us."  It brings Him pleasure and more glory and there are more people to worship Him for who He is and what He has done.  I can see nothing wrong with that.  The very fact that we are not worthy speaks to the goodness and greatness of God.  When the world sees people like us invited or chosen, they know that they too can be included in God's plan to redeem a people to Himself.  Will they accept the invitation, or will they be part of the group of alternates that God compels to come to the wedding banquet?  We don't know--the choice is not ours.  That's what the Doctrine of Election is all about, and I am thankful that the choice of who is saved is not up to me (though there are times I want to choose some of my friends and family members, but all I can do is pray for them and share the gospel with them).