Question: God is omniscient and He knew, before He created man, that many would choose to reject Christ and therefore seal their own fate of eternal damnation. Knowing this, God still chose to create man. Why? Isn’t this a selfish, unloving act? | thebereancall.org

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Question: God is omniscient and He knew, before He created man, that many would choose to reject Christ and therefore seal their own fate of eternal damnation. Knowing this, God still chose to create man. Why? Isn’t this a selfish, unloving act? Let me give an analogy. A childless woman...knew if she got pregnant she would have twins...one would be perfectly healthy...the other with a disease that would cause perpetual pain. Should she bear these twins? I’ve been asking this question for over twenty years. No one...has given a satisfactory answer. If God had not created mankind, no one would be condemned to hell, ever! Did God have a choice to create or not to create man? Since God knew all in advance, how can we accept the creation of man as an act of love and goodness?

Response: I answered a question very similar to yours in the May Berean Call Q&A. You might go back and read it. Your question ought to be addressed to Calvinists. Theirs is the God who not only created billions whom He knew would go to hell, He actually predestined them to eternal torment, giving them no choice in the matter, and did so for His “good pleasure.” According to many Calvinists (and John Calvin himself) God is responsible for every thought, word and deed that ever happens. Thus He actually causes sinners to sin, yet condemns those who commit the sins that He causes them to commit!

R. C. Sproul, Jr. writes, “God wills all things that come to pass. God desired for man to fall into sin....God created sin.” [Almighty Over All (Baker, 1999), p. 54.] This is not the God of the Bible. And that is why your analogy of the mother who will have twins, one of whom will have a disease that will cause continual pain 24 hours each day, doesn’t hold. Whether to bring these two into the world would surely confront a potential mother with an unanswerable choice—but that is not the situation with God’s creation of mankind. Sinners are not helpless victims, but willful rebels whom He loves and for whom He has provided a salvation that they have rejected.

Those who will go to hell are not hopelessly suffering from an incurable disease that holds them in its grip. On the contrary, they could choose heaven, but instead send themselves to hell. For your analogy to fit, a doctor must have offered to cure the twin suffering from the disease and the twin rejected the cure. That changes the analogy.

Now the question becomes should God refrain from creating beings who will spend eternity in infinite bliss in His presence because some of their relatives (without whose creation the others could not exist) will stubbornly refuse the salvation God will provide? I don’t believe that those who will reject Christ should, because of the hell they will bring upon themselves, be able to prevent the creation of those who will receive Christ and spend eternity in the joy of His presence and bring joy to His heart as well.

Of course, God had a choice whether to create man; of course He knows the future and all that creation would bring to each creature; and, yes, I believe God is above reproach of any kind in creating man, for it was not His will that any perish or even that any suffer what sin has brought into the world.