Exactly why did a caring God create human beings with the capability to sin?

I was a short time ago taking part in a dialogue concerning why God created man and why He formed individuals with the potential to sin. I said that God created man (better: mankind) due to the fact He desired somebody to love and somebody to love Him in turn. I additionally speculated that the ability to love entails the ability to "not love" or to do whatever is the opposite of loving. Someone responded, "Couldn't God have created us with the capability to love him without giving people the capability to 'not love' Him?" In reply, here are some points we be familiar with:

• "...God is love." (1 John 4:7-13, 16) The substance of God is love. There is nothing at all relating to God that is not loving. Whatever God does is an expression of love.
• We understand that God is creative because He does create. Given that He is also loving we understand that His creation is an act of love.
• God is whole in Himself and does not require something. For that reason we know God did not create us because he was lonely, needed to be worshiped, or needed power over somebody.
• God loves humans. (John 3:16)
• Human beings have invariably disobeyed God, even if they plainly realized just what He required them to do. (Genesis 2:15-3:19, Romans 3:9-12)

In view of these things that we know, let us reconsider the questions:Why did God create people? As far as I am aware there is no direct answer to this question in the Scriptures. However, we do know that it was an act of love. We know that God's love doesn't originate from His needs, because He has no needs.This doesn't imply that God is indifferent concerning us. Revelation 4:11 tells us that God created us for His pleasure. Again, this is not the form of pleasure that a desperate man or women obtains from belongings, relationships or power. This is a totally good type of pleasure containing no admixture of evil or self-serving. It is the rare type of pleasure that people glimpse when they share their lives with a person who unconditionally values, cares for and trusts them.To state that God does not need someone to share His love isn't to state that He can't want to share His love with somebody. In fact, sharing love with no needs is to share ideal, unadulterated love. People can never totally comprehend this love if we are living in a world and in bodies that are preoccupied with our human needs. Nonetheless, sharing perfect love is so vital to God that it's the whole motivation of His creative nature. As a result, I conclude that God created man because He has love to share, and He is conscious of the extraordinary pleasure that arises from sharing it. Actually I believe that He could do nothing else, given His loving and creative nature.Why, then, did God create human beings such that they are able to turn down His love? Before we can arrive at the answer to this question we have to understand a basic logical proposition:

• God recognized that if human beings were given the potential to disobey Him, they might possibly do so.
• God recognized that the outcomes of disobeying Him were of extreme seriousness (Genesis 2:16-17).
• God does not wish for any human being to experience those penalties. (II Peter 3:9) Thus, He wouldn't wish any person to disobey Him.

However, God did, in fact, create people with the potential to disobey Him.These observations lead me to conclude that God had some loving aim linked to humanity that kept Him from creating these individuals with the precondition of obedience. To state it in a more straightforward way; God could not have created humankind to be absolutely obedient without violating His own nature or the nature that He wants people to have.What might that nature be? I believe that it is love. We came to the conclusion earlier that one of God's major goals in the creation of humankind was to have the ability to relate to someone in love. God understood that, in order to be able to love, we must have the ability to refuse to love.Can we force another person to love us? I think not. A strong individual may have the ability to force people to act like they love him, or to express that they love him. These acts and phrases might possibly appear to be love, and might possibly even be viewed as love but... could a logical person really feel loved if the acts and words were coerced? Maybe God could have created us so that we consistently obeyed Him, invariably stated we loved Him and invariably behaved reliably in keeping with with the words. Maybe He could even have created people such that they always felt loving toward Him. Could a God honorable enough to be known as "God" honestly think that their words, actions and feelings were really love?In the event you believe that the reply to that question might be "yes," consider an example that I paraphrase from another Christian author: Suppose you could implant a computer chip in your wife or husband, without that person's awareness, that would make him to feel, act and speak to you in a loving manner, based on your own understanding of just what loving is like. He would even feel that he had decided to love you, although, in truth, he could not do otherwise.Would you consider this fulfilling, or would you at some point understand that the loving words are really your own words, the words you have programmed into the computer chip? Moreover the actions and feelings would really have originated within your mind, not in the mind of your spouse. You would be living with a sophisticated puppet and no level of sophistication can substitute for love freely offered. In order to understand love as genuine, we need to be aware that we're dealing with a free agent, one who gives love by choice. Likewise, God made us truly free to ensure that we could actually love Him. The capacity to deny His love is a necessary counterpart of the ability to love Him.For more information on this and other topics of interest to senior citizens, see our website Going Strong Seniors!For more articles about the rocky road of the Christian life see The Renewal Journal.Want to know more about aging and brain health?