Jamin Bradley

Question: Why would a good + sovereign God create humans? He saw the brokenness ahead, why proceed?

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Answer: Oddly, God has faced this question himself. Before he sent the flood, Genesis 6:6 says, “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” So yeah, even God has had to look at the brokenness of humanity and wonder why he created us.

God’s omniscience is often looked at as though all existence is a book that God has memorized, and every day we turn a page until we reach the end. But I think this is a low view of God’s omniscience. I contend that the Bible gives us a glimpse of a God who has memorized an entire library of books on how life could proceed forward, and perhaps every day, he has to pull out a different book as to where we’re at, based on the free will choices we’ve all made.

So yes, God saw the capacity for brokenness ahead, but he also saw the capacity for beauty and he still felt that making us was worth it. Sometimes life hasn’t been as dark as God knew it could have been. Sometimes life has not been as beautiful as God hoped it’d be. But the capacity for a better world always exists in our Spirit-infused bones, and God encourages us to choose books in that direction, as those are the stories he desires humans to tell.

God is a hopeful and patient God, and he doesn’t give up on humanity easily. The world was bad enough to wipe out with a flood, but then a glimmer of hope came into God’s eye when he saw Noah. Noah maybe wasn’t even that great of a person, since he was “blameless for his time” (Gen. 6:9). But being a decent person in a world full of evil was good enough for God to give us another chance. Adam and Eve may have closed the book on if humanity would bring sin into the world, but Noah had a chance to open a book about the redemption of humanity.

There’s a lot of brokenness out there, but according to Revelation, the reason Jesus hasn’t come back yet is that people are still open to the gospel. Though the world may get darker and darker, so long as people are open to the gospel, there are glimmers of hope that books of beauty might continue to be opened. He’s willing to wait until the whole earth has become entirely corrupt again like it was in Noah’s time (which, in my opinion, still seems a long way off).

In the end, only one book in that library will remain as to how history actually went down. God has seen our brokenness, and he put on human skin to come to us in his own brokenness. He loves everyone and makes it rain on both the just and the unjust. We’re worth it to him even when we choose the darker books, and the capacity to open more beautiful books is always within our grasp via the power of the Holy Spirit.