If you were God, how would you create mankind so that they would be able to love you freely, by choice?
Could I truly be myself, could I be fully human if I couldn’t think for myself? Imagine if you were told what to do and think all of the time.
God is love, and He will not force us to love Him against our will. He wants us to have the choice to voluntarily love Him. Because God is a relational God, I believe He wants us to know who He is personally and that it is important for us to understand why we would choose to worship Him alone with all of our heart as He desires.
Being designed in the image of God with having a moral conscience, He enabled us to have a free- will. What purpose is there in having free-will if we don’t have any options? He gave us the opportunity to fully un-
derstand our free-will by giving a prohibition. In the Garden of Eden He gave Adam and Eve the option to trust and obey or to disobey Him by giving them the command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Being designed with a moral conscience would mean that we are capable of being good and evil, even before Adam and Eve found out what evil was. This would mean there is evidently a part of our human make-up that has the potential to exercise the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is characteristic of being evil, anti-God. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were experiencing their goodness because that’s all they knew. In all fairness, God would have to provide the alternative opportunity to be evil if they so desired. As the story goes, they chose to disobey God, even though He gave them a fair warning they would die as a consequence, (It wasn’t like they had the desire to be evil, Satan had to disguise it with flowery talk that appealed to their self-potential which is the desire to live independent of God (anti-God) and therefore, evil). God gave them the opportunity to experience the dark side first-hand by exercising their free-will, otherwise, they wouldn’t be free, it couldn’t have been any other way.
After disobeying God’s command, sin entered the world and man was capable of discerning between good and their new awareness of evil.
By His merciful grace, God has offered forgiveness and reconciliation, so that now we can use our free-will to choose if we want to be influenced by good or evil; the good which represents God and requires submission to His loving authority, and leads to being restored to everlasting life; or evil, which requires subjection to Satan, and results in death, eternal separation from God.
Here are two quotes from other websites that elaborate more on this subject:
“Instead of creating machines or robots, God created people. And He gave us free will—the ability to think, reason and make our own choices.He gives us commands and instructions that show us how He wants us to live, but He allows us to decide whether we will obey. He created us with free will for a simple reason: To fulfill His purpose of creating an eternal, spiritual family, He wants His children to choose to be like Him.” 1
“Paradise without the ability to leave is just a pretty prison. God didn’t want prisoners or slaves. He wanted people. Foolish enough to walk away, but loved enough to rescue (John 3:16).” 2
Notes
1. What Is Free Will? By Don Henson – https://lifehopeandtruth.com/life/what-is-the-meaning-of-life/predestination/free-will/
2. What is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? – compellingtruth.org/tree-knowledge-good-evil.html