Why Didn’t God Just Make Us Unable to Sin?
Genesis 6:6 sounds strange in English.
“And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”
Genesis 6:6, ESV
Regretted. Like God ran an experiment, watched it go bad, and wished He hadn’t started it. Read that way you get a God who discovers something He didn’t know, and that’s a problem, because an omniscient being can’t discover anything. Scripture says so directly: “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23:19, ESV).
So either this verse contradicts the rest of the Bible’s picture of God, or “regretted” is doing something more interesting than it looks like it’s doing.
I think it’s the second one, and following that thread all the way down lands somewhere I didn’t expect: Gethsemane, and the question of whether God could have simply made us the kind of creatures who never rebel in the first place.
I don’t think He could, and not for lack of power. I think the thing being asked for might not be a coherent thing at all.
The Hebrew is worth a look before anything else:
וַיִּנָּחֶם יְהוָה כִּי‐עָשָׂה אֶת‐הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וַיִּתְעַצֵּב אֶל‐לִּבּוֹ
Wayyinnāḥem YHWH kî-ʿāśâ ʾet-hāʾādām bāʾāreṣ wayyitʿaṣṣēb ʾel-libbô.
The key word, wayyinnāḥem, comes from the root nḥm, and it covers a lot of ground: regret, sorrow, consolation, relenting, a change in disposition toward something already done. It doesn’t force “realized a mistake.” The second phrase pins down the feeling anyway: wayyitʿaṣṣēb ʾel-libbô, grieved to His heart.
Look at where the verse sits. Verse 5 says what God sees: “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and... every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Verse 6 is His response. Verse 7 is judgment. Rebellion, then grief, then justice. No decision, then surprise, then correction, anywhere in that sequence. Just people doing something terrible, God grieving over it, God judging it.
Scripture keeps confirming that exact posture. Through Ezekiel: “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?” (18:23). Again, flatly: “As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (33:11). Peter says the same about the judgment still coming: God is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
God’s determination to judge and God’s delight in destroying are two different things. He’s holy, His justice is real, judgment happens. He’s also patient, grieved by evil, calling people to turn around, taking no pleasure in their death. Both are true at once. Genesis 6:6 doesn’t have to be God discovering His own mistake. It can be God grieving over what He now has to do to creatures He made and loves.
Fine. That just pushes the question back a step. Why was a world like this necessary at all?
The objection is the obvious one. If God knew we’d sin, why make us this way? Why not just make people who always freely choose the good?
Fair question. It only stops sounding simple once you look at what it’s actually asking for.
Say God wants a real personal agent, genuinely distinct from Himself, with its own agency. Not God’s will wearing a costume. Its choices have to actually belong to it. Now add the rest of the request: this creature has real agency, and God guarantees, by causal determination, that it can never use that agency against Him.
Put those two side by side and I think they cancel out. If God determines every possible choice in advance so that acting against Him was never actually on the table, you’ve quietly redefined what “free” means until the word stops doing any work.
What’s baked into making a second kind of will at all is the possibility of rebellion, not the necessity of evil. God can make rocks, and rocks don’t rebel. He can make machines that execute their function exactly as designed. He can make creatures whose behavior is fully determined start to finish. But make another person, someone whose choices actually belong to them, and the possibility of “no” travels with the possibility of “yes.” You don’t get to keep one and delete the other.
That’s also where love gets its weight. Obedience, trust, faithfulness, all of it means something specific because it’s given by someone who could have withheld it. The possibility of rebellion doesn’t cause rebellion. The creature does, which is exactly why the blame lands on us and not on the architecture.
Someone always says at this point: but God can do anything.
Sure, and Christian theology has never claimed omnipotence includes doing logical contradictions. God can’t stop being God. He can’t lie (Titus 1:2). He can’t deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). None of that is a gap in His power, because a contradiction isn’t a hard task. It isn’t a task at all. There’s no square circle out there waiting for someone strong enough to build it.
The real question was never whether God is powerful enough to make free creatures who can’t possibly choose against Him. It’s whether that description points at a coherent object in the first place. I don’t think it does. And if it doesn’t, God’s inability to make it tells you nothing about His power, same as His inability to make a married bachelor would tell you nothing about His power.
Which is where Gethsemane comes in.
The night before the cross, Jesus prays: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). Then again: “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (26:42).
If it be possible.
That’s the incarnate Son standing directly in front of what redemption actually costs, not a man discovering the plan was flawed. The cup, all through the Old Testament, means judgment and wrath (Psalm 75:8, Isaiah 51:17, Jeremiah 25:15). Christ is about to drink it. The God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked walks into human history and takes the judgment onto Himself.
Line it up against the Flood and the pattern matches exactly. Human evil, divine sorrow, judgment, and someone righteous carrying the rest through it. At the Flood, that’s Noah. At Calvary, the righteous one is the judgment bearer. The judge steps into the dock.
Gethsemane asks our question out loud. Is there another way? If it be possible. History gives the answer. He drinks it.
Here’s the strongest version of the objection, and it deserves a real answer.
Christians believe the redeemed will exist forever without sinning. So if people can be genuinely personal and simply never sin in the new creation, why didn’t God just start Adam and Eve there and skip the whole story?
I think this trades on treating two very different states as the same thing seen from a distance. Adam’s innocence and a glorified saint’s righteousness aren’t the same thing in different clothes. Adam starts innocent, meaning untested. The glorified saint has been through something: sinned, been forgiven, been changed, come to actually hate what sin is, suffered, persevered, and only then been glorified. “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). Completion, not replacement.
Glorification is agency arriving somewhere, not agency getting switched off. The glorified person isn’t straining against an invisible leash, wanting to rebel while being mechanically prevented. They’ve become someone who wants God completely and freely. Sinlessness is what they want by then, not what’s imposed on them, and that’s a different thing entirely from building an agent on day one with a manufactured backstory of having freely rejected something it never actually met.
Here’s the part I think actually settles it. Can God make a mature person with knowledge of evil already loaded in? Sure. Give them dispositions? Sure. Implant memories of things that never happened? Presumably. But none of that is the same as this being true: this person freely lived through real encounters with evil, received grace, and freely came to want God. If that history never happened, God can’t make it have happened, not because His power runs out, because “freely chose X” and “never chose X” can’t both be true of the same person at once. There’s no object there for omnipotence to produce, same as before.
If part of what God is after is creatures who have actually, freely come to love Him after meeting the alternative, some of that has to really happen. It can’t be pasted in as a finished product. The history is part of what makes the person who eventually exists.
Which gives sanctification a bigger job than “get a little better every year.” It’s God rebuilding what you actually want. Sin looks appealing to a fallen person, and slowly, through the real process, it gets recognized for what it is: rebellion against the one thing everything else depends on. “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being” (Romans 7:22). That’s the trajectory.
So when sin finally gets removed at glorification, it feels like getting free, not like losing something precious. The person can welcome eternal sinlessness because by then they actually understand what sin was.
Run the whole thing in order: innocence, rebellion, judgment, redemption, sanctification, glorification, freely embraced righteousness. The person at the end has something Adam didn’t have on day one. A history.
Which brings us back to a God grieving in Genesis 6.
Why grieve? Because it’s real. None of this is theater, God isn’t pretending to be moved by characters doing exactly what He mechanically forced them to do. We took the gift of real agency and turned it on the one who gave it to us. God sees that, grieves over it, judges it, and even mid-judgment saves Noah.
Then does something bigger. Steps directly into the middle of it Himself. The Son takes on human nature, lives the righteousness we didn’t, and in a garden looks straight at the cup.
If it be possible.
There’s no cheaper version hiding somewhere in omnipotence. No secret move where God stays holy, treats evil as nothing much, keeps real moral agency intact, satisfies justice, and gets everyone home, all without the cross. So the Son says your will be done, and drinks it.
The story ends with something bigger than an untouched Eden restored. Revelation says it plainly: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (21:3). The people there are redeemed, not innocent creatures who never met rebellion. They know exactly what separation from God costs, what grace is, what the cross paid for. They’ve been remade by all of it, and now, glorified, they get to want what they were always meant to want: God, forever, with nothing left in the way.
The possibility of “no” finally resolves into an eternal, freely chosen “yes,” because the creature actually walked through the world where “no” was real and terrible and true.
Genesis 6:6 is God knowing exactly what making real persons would cost Him, and grieving over it long before He ever had to pay it Himself.