Before answering the question, why did God create us if He knew we would sin? Let’s look at why He created us in the first place.
We are told that ‘God is love’, 1 John 4:8, which means God can never act lovelessly. Psalm 136 tells us repeatedly that God created because His ‘love endures forever’. The creation, humans included, is the loving expression of God’s almighty power. God made us because He loved us!
We can see from reading Genesis 1 that God provided for man’s physical needs, even before He made man. But humans need more than food and shelter. Man can’t LIVE by bread alone! Matthew 4:4, He must have love, and he must have companions!
As far as God is concerned, there is no life without love, 1 John 3:14. And love is experienced within relationships. When someone asked Christ what God wanted above all, he answered, ‘Above all, he wants you to love Him and to love your neighbours as you love yourselves,’ Mark 12:30-31.
To love God is to do what God wants, and God wants to be loved by us! We were made in His image, Genesis 5:1-2, so we could live with Him. And we were created a pair, a twosome, so we could live with one another, Genesis 2:18-23.
According to Psalm 8:5-6, David found it amazing that God could care for man in this way.
G. K. Chesterton, looking at modern man, muttered the following.
‘Whatever else is true about man, he isn’t what he was intended to be!’
Man, male and female, was made ‘in the image of God,’ Genesis 1:26-27. There are several truths involved in this. We’re honoured to be in God’s image, but we’re not God! What we see in the mirror is our image, it isn’t us. There’s a truth we need to fully recognise: we aren’t God, and we shouldn’t think or act as though we were!
Man, male and female, was given authority to rule over the earth, Genesis 1:28. The pair were never to think they earned this power; it was given to them. Just the same, they were God’s representatives and were to rule for Him.
As an ambassador reflects the honour and dignity of the country he represents, so man was made to reflect the honour and glory of the God he represents. The glory and honour of God are seen in His power, Psalm 19:1. We are made to mirror the glory of God as we exercise influence and power.
Man was made in God’s image, and that meant he had the capacity for fellowship with His creator. God walked with man in the garden, Genesis 3:8, and wanted people to live in his presence, Genesis 4:16.
And He stressed the difference between man and the animals, which were not made in His image, Genesis 2:18-20. In making us in His image, God made us capable of appreciating spiritual realities like truth, honour, obedience and loyalty to God and others.
God didn’t make us to torture, cripple, or curse us. He finds no pleasure in the pain we endure, Lamentations 3:33. His unchanging purpose is to bless man, Genesis 1:28 / John 3:17, and to offer him life which comes in intimately knowing God and being His friend, Deuteronomy 30:15 / Deuteronomy 30:20 / John 17:3.
So, we humans didn’t arrive on Earth by accident. There is Someone ‘out there’ who cares about us! Life is not purposeless. We were created to enjoy love-filled lives with God and one another!
We are not just complex scum, and we aren’t simply sophisticated animals. We’ve been made in the image of God to enjoy fellowship with him. Isn’t that another truth we should be pleased to understand and cherish?
Now that we’ve established why God created us, let’s go ahead and try and answer the question, why did God create us if He knew we would sin? Maybe a couple of illustrations from a human perspective might help.
We have an artist friend named Amy, and we asked her if she would continue to be an artist even if she knew that people would negatively criticise her work and no one would ever buy one of her drawings.
Amy answered ‘yes’, she will continue to be an artist, even though she is aware that there is a possibility that people will criticise her work and no one will buy her art. Her love for art wasn’t dependent upon what other people thought of her work or their buying them. In other words, her love relationship with art isn’t dependent upon the outcome.
Most people, before they decide to have a child, will often talk about their hopes, dreams, and expectations for the child. But the reality is that things don’t always work out the way the parents dreamed of. They know that their child will make some bad decisions in their life and may even end up breaking their parents’ hearts.
But despite knowing these things, does that stop them from having a child together? No, they have a child, despite knowing that their child will let them down at some point in their life, irrespective of how well the parents raise them and provide the best for them.
Parents know that their child will have the free will to choose to do what is right or wrong. They decide to have a child despite knowing they will disobey them at some point in their lives. In other words, their desire to have and love a child isn’t dependent upon the outcome. In the same way, God’s love for creating us isn’t dependent upon the outcome.
We must remember when God created man, He gave them a choice, Genesis 2:16-17 / Genesis 4:7, even though He knew they would disobey Him. But why would He create us in the first place if He knew we would mess up?
I guess He could have chosen not to create mankind in the first place to save Him and us all the heartache. I guess He could have created us without any choice, kind of like robots. If He did that, then we would never experience things like love, joy, and the meaning of life.
The truth is, He did create us with the ability to choose; this is part of what makes us human. Yes, we experience pain, sorrow, and suffering, but we also can experience love, hope and joy; we experience the meaning of life, Ecclesiastes 12:13-14. The reason there’s so much pain and suffering in the world today is because of our bad choices, and God allows us to experience it all, along with love and joy.
Why did God create us if he knew we would sin? The answer is simple: we don’t know because He hasn’t revealed the answer to that question in His Word. The truth is, this is possibly one of those questions we simply don’t need to know the answer to; maybe we should just trust God and trust that we don’t fully understand His ways, Isaiah 55:8-9 / Romans 11:33-34.
It would be great to have an answer to this question, but some things we simply don’t know because He hasn’t told us. Maybe we don’t need to know; maybe this is one of those questions we can ask Him when we get to heaven.
Maybe we should simply trust that God has a purpose and a plan, a purpose and a plan which, from eternity past, is to demonstrate and amplify His great mercy by forgiving man’s sin and His amazing grace by sending Jesus to restore fallen man’s relationship with Him. Maybe we should simply trust that God knows what He’s doing.