If God Made Me Defective, Why Does He Blame Me?

Question: If my car has a defect or lacks some parts, isn’t that the manufacturer’s fault and not mine. Since Adam sinned for lack of wisdom wasn’t God the responsible party since He had not given to Adam the wisdom needed to avoid sin?  Why did He make a car that doesn’t work and then became angry with His own imperfect car? If God wants a perfect creation who does not sin, why doesn’t He create it perfect? If God doesn’t make the creature perfect, why does He blame the creature for the creature’s failure?

Answer: Paul makes a very interesting statement in 1 Timothy 2:14, “Adam was not deceived.”

Let’s think about what happened in the garden. The tempter tells Eve that she will not die if she eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but that God wants to keep her from it because if she eats from it, she will become like God, able to determine good and evil for herself. She won’t have to be under God’s control. She’ll be in control. The text says she ate and gave to Adam “who was with her” and he ate.

This not eating from this particular tree was the only prohibition God gave Adam and Eve. He told them that in the day they ate of it they would die. Eve was deceived by the serpent’s arguments, but, according to Paul, Adam was not. So why did Adam eat what was forbidden? He wanted independence from God. He wanted to be able to make the rules. He didn’t want to have to trust God to take care of him, he wanted to trust himself.

Was this a defect in the way God made him? I don’t believe so. How does God give someone a will, the ability to make choices, if He forbids or doesn’t make him able to make any choice? If Adam can’t choose to rebel, as Satan did, then Adam doesn’t really have the ability to choose. So God made the car able to do whatever a car should do, not defective in any way. If the car had lacked a function of cars that cars should have, then it would not have been a true car. If Adam lacked the ability to choose wrong, he would not be a human made in God’s image. He would be something else, more along the lines of the animals that populated the earth.

But given that Adam was a responsible being with a will to make choices of any kind, his choice to reject God’s rule over him was reprehensible. God could not simply say, “Oh, well, no big deal.” As with Satan, there had to be justice. Adam knew how good God had been to him and to Eve. He saw all that God had provided for him in abundance. He saw how God made him a co-ruler by giving him dominion over the earth, naming animals, working the garden. God gave the test of the tree because He needed to see if Adam would freely choose to love and trust Him. All the evidence Adam had said he could trust and love God.

But Adam wanted to be God. Of course, choosing what is right and wrong on your own doesn’t confer deity or godhead on you. Satan lied about that. Adam found that out immediately. He felt shame at his own decision and at his nakedness. He only possessed divine traits in a non-infinite way, in a finite way, and could not really control life as he thought he could. But despite all the evidence we have that this is true, that we don’t really have the power to control life, we persist in trying to.

Adam’s heart is our heart. We fear entrusting our lives to God, worrying that we are doomed in some way if we do. In our hearts we know that is the expectation (Romans 1:18-26) but we prefer to keep things in our own tight little hands. We think we can do a better job ourselves of running our own lives. All the evidence is against that conclusion.

 

Comment by Reader: Don’t you think that having free will is way too much of a risk when hell is a possibility?
And I have another question.

Response: What is the alternative…robots? No real choice? God has not considered it too great a risk but the very necessity of things. He hasn’t explained why or how this works and probably cannot explain it to our limited minds.

Comment by another Reader: So now God is blaming the car for doing exactly what it was supposed to do? That’s just as well, but now why has God made me inherit Adam’s sin and made all of his posterity sinners by nature? If I chose a sinful nature for myself as a human before my birth, I’d like to see my signature on the receipt from 6000 years ago. If I was given a sinful nature from birth because of genetics, I’d like to see the gene sequence or the natural law God wrote and why He would do that. If I chose a sinful nature upon first stinging my conscience when I was 3 or something, I’d like to know why God made sin so easy and made it so angering to him that 100% of all humanity was given a test that cannot be passed, and it prompts him to give us eternal life in abject torture as judgment for it.

Response: God is not blaming the car, the human, for being a human, for making choices, but for making the wrong choice. And unlike cars, we humans have a corporate relationship to one another, and to Adam specifically. What choices are you making, my friend? Do you find in yourself, at times, horrible, selfish, destructive impulses. How would you explain the atrocities humans have committed against other humans? Where do you think they come from?