Why Didn’t God Make Us to Always Choose Right?
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God made people free to choose between right and wrong, and suffering is the consequence of wrong (sinful) choices (Genesis 3:14-19). “Why couldn’t God have made the world in such a way so that people could be free to choose between right and wrong without any negative consequences?” The answer: Without negative consequences, we would live in a rubber room, a place where one is entirely safe because no one can harm another, and one cannot be harmed. What kind of life would that be? It would be prison, and that’s not freedom. Let’s break the answer down further.
There are only two possibilities to eliminate all wrong choices. First, God could intervene and stop the person who chooses to create suffering. This would mean that any time a person was about to do something wrong, God would simply take control of the person’s body and stop them, preventing the bad consequences from happening. Is that freedom? No. Who wants to be a puppet? This may prevent sin, but it eliminates freedom.
Second, God could eliminate the consequences. In other words, God allows the murderer to pull the trigger, but the bullet transforms into a bouquet of flowers. The person who jumped off a building would find gravity suspended until he safely reached the ground. God would only allow “safe” things to happen. There would be no risk in the world. All outcomes would be guaranteed “good.” This is just another version of the “rubber room,” but without any consistent laws of nature, which would mean that it would be impossible to do just about anything that involves risk, and what kind of life would that be?
“Why did God make us free to choose anyway? And why should there be negative consequences to bad choices to begin with?” God made humans free because freedom is necessary to proclaim love. Could this be done without freedom? Not without sacrificing love. “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). For example, I could program my computer to tell me that it loves me regularly. Initially, it might give me an ego boost, but after a while, it would get dull. Why? Because it is just the computer telling me what I told it to do with no will of its own. The computer does not choose to love me; I choose for the computer to love me, and that’s not real love. Would it be any more impressive if God did it with us? No. It is just another “rubber room.”
For a proclamation of love to have any meaning, a free choice is required. A free-will being that sincerely says, “I love you,” to another is a meaningful expression because it is not just a preprogrammed response. It stems from an independent agent who is not under the absolute control of the one desiring to be loved. But to say, “I love you,” to another involves the risk of being rejected, and this answers our second question: why must there be negative consequences to bad choices?
Among all the pain that a person may experience, emotional pain is perhaps the greatest. A stubbed toe stops hurting in a few moments, a small cut, a few days, a broken bone, several weeks, but emotional pain can last for years, decades, and even an entire lifetime. When we risk sincerely loving another person, we risk the consequences of a lifetime of emotional pain, but we also risk gaining great joy as well. True love produces both possibilities. “If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having” (C.S. Lewis).
Why must there be negative consequences to bad choices? So that love can be shown to be genuinely love, and not just an insincere expression. Is love worth the risk? Rejecting the possibility of having love in our life is just another “rubber room,” a place where we will be protected from emotional pain, but at the loss of real relationships, which everyone desires most in this world. When we refuse to love others, we also fall into a profound self-absorption, a selfishness from which we will never recover. But to learn to love, we must risk suffering, and to risk suffering, we need a world that is not safe, sanitized, and preventative of all harm.
Is it worth it to love anyway? Yes. As the poet says, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.” A world with no risk, is a world with no love, and who wants to live in that world? Love brings people together instead of separating them. Love causes us to draw nearer to God and to one another. Love gives us that which we long for most in this world, meaningful relationships with other people, and most of all, with God Himself. Love “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3:14 ESV).