A believer on-line in the Northwest asks, “If God made man, to what extent is the Creator liable for the creature’s behavior? Didn’t God know before making humans that they would rebel against him?”
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You ask something to which I do not find in Scripture a clear explanation. I can only affirm what I do see repeatedly taught there, namely, that humans, quite unaided, are completely free to reject the Creator who gives them existence. “Why” or “how” this is true, I simply cannot explain. Yet our universal experience confirms what we cannot logically comprehend, since every one of us rebels against God as soon as we learn how. Only God’s grace in regeneration and sanctification keeps that from being our lifelong practice.
But of this we can be quite sure. There is sin enough in all of us, Christians or otherwise, to keep any one-eyed, honest person forever humble, non-judgmental and grateful to God for his grace. Because we are totally depraved (in the proper usage of that term), neither our motives, our motions nor our memories are to be thoroughly trusted.
That universal, pervasive sin is why Jesus was betrayed by one of his closest circle, repeatedly denied by another, and forsaken by the rest. It is the only reason the only innocent man who ever lived passively received the Roman lashes on his back, the crown of thorns on his head and the iron spikes into his hands. It is the only explanation why the Son of Man and Son of God was finally rejected by both God and humankind to hang suspended on a criminal’s cross, surrounded by brigands and assaulted by mocking and curses, without a trace of sunshine in the sky until he died.
The indescribable torture and agonies which Jesus suffered in his body also tell us in some understandable human fashion how God is able to forgive us, receive us, treat us as if we had done no wrong — and, if they will receive it, how he will do the same for any others who might have wronged us.
No, we are not told “why” God allowed sin to enter the world. We do know what he has done in Jesus Christ to free us from sin’s penalty (justification), its power (sanctification) and ultimately its presence (glorification). We do know “why” God has done this — not for anything he saw or foresaw in us, but freely, gratuitously and out of his own heart — “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Eph. 1:6; Titus 3:3-7; Rom. 11:33-36). Well, indeed, should we “give thanks to the LORD for his lovingkindness, and for his wonders to the children of men” (Ps. 107:15).