Why did God Create Mankind Knowing the Majority Would be Condemned?
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Why did God create mankind knowing the vast majority would be condemned to eternal punishment?
Why do parents have children knowing that they are going to be born into a world of suffering? Does their ignorance of what will happen to those children excuse them from having them? Perhaps the parents are acting selfishly in having children. Perhaps children are a blessing to the parents who then get to demonstrate their love to another, one who is helpless and completely dependent upon them. There is a difference between parents and God, of course.
One of the key differences is that a lot of what God does, He does for His own sake, that is, out of His own internal motivations founded by Who He is as a Being. For example in Isaiah 43:25, we read, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; And I will not remember your sins.” Notice why God does what He does—for His own sake. That is, God acts based upon the goodness of His own character. He doesn’t do these things to receive a reward from anyone. He doesn’t do it out of some kind of external need that He has to be attached to others. God is motivated by His own holy character.
This is basically what the apostle Paul states in Romans 3:23-26:
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Romans 5:6-8 says: For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
The only reason that I know that God created mankind was because He wanted to demonstrate His love and goodness toward all even those who would reject Him, and He must have thought that this was worth demonstrating for His own character’s sake and because some of mankind would be saved.
Could God have created mankind both with free-will and without the possibility of being eternally lost? It wouldn’t have been possible because with free-will comes the ability to choose either right or wrong. With the ability to choose right or wrong comes the possibility that a person will consistently choose wrong. What makes choosing wrong possible—free-will—also makes choose what is right possible. This means that free-will enables us to legitimately love other people, and love God as well. A world in which there was no possibility to choose wrong would also be a world in which there was no possibility to choose love—a world with no love. That would certainly not be a world worth creating. It would be a world of mindless robots that always mechanically did what they were programmed to do, not what they had a legitimate choice to do. So even though many are going to be lost, the alternative, a world in which there was real legitimate love, and in which some would be saved, was worth creating so that God could demonstrate His love and goodness for His own sake.