Why did God create people? What was he thinking? People must be an endless discouragement to God. In Genesis, right before the flood, God regretted that he ever made people, yet something about Noah touched his heart. Maybe he didn’t regret making every single person. After the flood ended, God changed his mind. It is right there in the book of Genesis. I didn’t make this up. God said exactly the same thing about people after the flood as before. He said that they were completely mixed up and always doing wrong. Yet he no longer wanted to destroy them.

 Noah and his family were just as prone to disappoint God as everybody else. Yet God did not strike them with lightning. He doesn’t strike anyone with lightning. He just goes on loving us.

 What is the problem? Satan, of course, is the agent of evil, the embodiment of pure evil, but if people had not been created with freedom to choose what they do, Satan would be powerless. God didn’t hardwire people to do the right thing every time, and that is Satan’s opportunity. A cynic might say that God got what was coming to him, because he got the consequences of our freedom.

 There are many ways in which this freedom works out in our lives. We choose to take what we want from the people who have it regardless of their wish to keep it. We lie, cheat, defraud, and hurt the people around us. We hurt people on purpose, because they have hurt us, or just because we can. However, that isn’t the only way we express our freedom.

 Every human being is born with potential to do great things. Not just morally great things. We are born with talents. Michelangelo and Picasso were born to draw and paint. They could have ignored their talent or they could have done what they did – develop their talent. George Washington was born to be a leader of men. He could have sat in peace on his estate, but he chose to be a leader. The development of Picasso’s art and Washington’s leadership must have made God very happy.

 The Jews believe that God loves it when people stand up and argue with God. I can see how that might be true, because I believe that God gave us minds to see choices, evaluate them, and then decide. When he sees us using our minds and our talents, I think God is pleased.

 What confuses us about God is the fact that he is omnipotent at the same time that we are free. We think both things cannot be true at the same time. This paradox confuses us. Because humans believe that both things cannot possibly be true, humans choose to believe that God is limited in some way. We can clearly see that we have the freedom to choose, and we say things like, “You got yourself into this mess, and you can jolly well get yourself out of it.” On the other hand, after exercising our complete freedom to choose, when we find ourselves in messes, we pray “Help me, help me, help me,” and think God is a big failure when he doesn’t jump in and fix things.

 Books have been written on this subject. I can’t best any of them. I have a single concern in bringing up this issue. I believe that God had good reasons for giving us freedom. I believe that God wants us to relate to him, and a relationship requires freedom for both parties. If we were not free to choose the relationship, then we would be slaves or robots. God rejoices in our freedom. In some ways, he relates to us the way a parent relates to a child learning to play the piano. When that child sits down at the very first recital and plays a really simple piece, the parent does not confuse that with the performance of a concerto, but the parent truly and completely rejoices in the child’s development of the gift. Years later, when the child has matured with the gift, the parent rejoices to hear a mature performance, and the parent equally rejoices that the child has found the right outlet for that talent whether it turns out to be in concert or in a classroom or in composition.

 God feels that way about each of us. He gifts us with the potential. He sets us down in the world with all sorts of choices before us. He works within us and around us to nurture our talents, our personalities, and our character. The unique person each of us becomes is a mix of all those opportunities shaped by our choices over and over. I think that God is extremely pleased when we become what he created us to be, and I think he is delighted and surprised in many ways, because of the unique outcome in each person.

 Can God be surprised? I think so. To say so, of course, throws me into another paradox. If God knows everything at all times, how can anyone surprise him? How can it even be said that we choose anything if he knows everything already? This mental exercise is tedious. Relationship with God is not tedious. I think God is truly delighted like any parent when we grow and mature using the talents and personality with which he gifted us at conception. I choose to believe that because he does not micromanage our choices, he also does not limit his delight in our growth by saying, “I knew that all the time.”

 I can’t comprehend how God is God at all. The best I can do is spend time in his presence and try to live by his guidance. I know I have made some bad choices, so I know he doesn’t prevent that. I know I have made some good choices, and I know he is pleased with them. As I grow and mature in my relationship with God, I am learning to see facets of his personality and character that I never knew before. In this growing relationship, I sense that he delights in my growth as if he didn’t know with certainty what I would do. I simply don’t worry about what he foreknows when I meet and beat a big challenge, because I am so happy. I know I don’t do it alone, and I experience God’s delight in both my choices and my growth.

 I would rather relate to God as my heavenly father, the mysterious Three in One, who loves me and blesses me than try to analyze him to death. I know people who try to analyze me, too, and I don’t much like it. I do like the experience of growing in faith and developing my talents in the loving, nurturing presence and power of the Holy Spirit. I know that I was known before I was conceived, but I love being God’s kid and surprising him every once in a while as I try to become what he always wanted me to be. It isn’t all up to me, but I really do get to choose, and he really does get to rejoice when I do it right.

I know a lot of people who spend a lot of their time worrying about which of God’s laws they have broken. They fret over the wording of the laws trying to figure out how to do the right thing. They really do their best, and then they see how they failed. These people are baptized children of God, and they still worry a lot about these things.
It isn’t because they don’t know that Christ died in order that they can be forgiven for their sins. They know. They are faithful Christians, trying to be ever more faithful. They love the Lord. They actually know that they cannot live up to the demands of the Law. They know, however, that the Law is God’s standard. He gave it to teach us how to live. The real problem they experience daily is that they constantly beat on themselves to obey the Law and they know even as they are beating on themselves that they never will be able to do it. It is killing them.

 How do I know so much about this situation? I used to be the same way. I believed that I had an obligation to be the most obedient law-abider in the world, because Jesus died to save me from all my sins, and it was time for me to quit doing that. I didn’t want to pile on more sins after he saved me. I really believed that God was very disgusted with me for never getting it right. I truly thought that He was waiting somewhere far away for me to finally learn how to follow His Laws, and I was pretty sure that He didn’t want to hear from me until I figured it out.

 I can’t possibly explain why I believed this pack of lies. Or why anyone else believes it. That is, I can’t explain it except for Satan. Some people try to explain Satan away as some “force” of evil, not a real person. There is no way to explain all the evil in the world without a real person behind it. Simple “forces” have no goals and do not rejoice in the destruction that follows them. Satan has one and only one goal: to make human beings reject God just as he did long ago. Satan is a person who rejoices every time we fail to do what God wants. Furthermore, he is so perverse that when we actually do something good, Satan manages to insinuate himself into our feeling and attitudes, turning any good work into self-worship. He motivates other people to praise us until we believe we really are as good as they say. Or he motivates us to mull over our good deed and focus on it and admire ourselves for finally getting something right. We believe the lie that we must obey all God’s Laws in order to be loved, and when we fail, we believe the lie that God doesn’t love us any more. When we do anything good, we believe the lie that we have earned God’s respect and deserve God’s blessing. When we don’t feel blessed, we believe that lie that we are not blessed because God is mad at us.

 Human beings believe Satan’s lie that God won’t love us if we don’t obey the Law perfectly, because we want to believe that we can earn God’s respect. Even more than that, we want to believe that if we try hard enough we actually can be perfect, like God. And that is the biggest lie of all. It is the first lie, and the worst lie, and the one that still entraps us even if, like the rich young ruler, we have kept the Law from our youth.
In the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, God had only one rule for Adam and Eve: Don’t try to be me. Each day God walked with them in the garden, and they talked with each other. They lived in a harmonious relationship. Everything Adam and Eve needed to know about life they were learning from God himself. In conversation with him, they were growing up, maturing, becoming what God had created them to be. In that conversation they fully understood that God was God and they were not.

 Satan took advantage of the innocence in which Adam and Eve lived. He appealed to their innocence and their recognition that God knew things they did not know. Satan used truth in order to create a lie. Satan succeeded in making Adam and Eve yearn to break the only rule God had given them. He encouraged them to believe that God was preventing them from being their own gods. The moment that Eve started to think she could be like God, knowing good and evil, the relationship she had with God ended; she started worshiping herself.
This is still Satan’s big lie. In a thousand, million, different ways, Satan turns our attentions toward ourselves and away from God. He tries to make us believe that the rules are what matter to God when it is actually the relationship that matters to God.
Think about a marriage. In marriage two individuals have a relationship that thrives on honesty and integrity. It doesn’t thrive on rules. The two may be very different in their behaviors and their likes and dislikes. The relationship will survive all those differences if the couple has a strong, loving relationship. However, if the couple has rules and lives in an environment of enforcement and punishment, the relationship will die. They may never divorce, but they will not have a happy marriage.

 Our relationship with God is like that. As long as we measure our relationship with God by our compliance with God’s rules, then we will not have a relationship. God doesn’t need to stop loving us for us to lose the joy of his love; we only have to start believing that he doesn’t love us any more because of our behavior. That is Satan’s big weapon; first he lies to us by telling us that if we try hard enough we can be as good as God, perfect, like God wants us to be, and when we fail, Satan says that it is really too bad, but God can’t love such disgusting sinners. It takes real faith in God to reject that lie.

 Our behavior does matter to God, and it matters to each of us, too. We are not happy and satisfied with ourselves when we do the sort of things condemned by God’s Law. The Law is intended to show us what hurts us. It isn’t intended to put up a barrier between us and God’s love. It truly is our teacher, but it isn’t the judge who can condemn us before God.
If we are not to worry about the rules, then how are we to live? The answer is that we are to live in a faithful relationship with God. We are to speak the truth to him and to ourselves. We are to drown all our failures daily in remembrance of the waters of baptism. We are to nourish our faith with the body and blood of Christ in Communion. We are to run to him with our failure and wrong-headed behavior just as we run to him with our attempt to serve and give and love. He greets us just like a father who praises what is good and rebukes with forgiveness what is bad.

 Our life with God isn’t about the rules. It is about our relationship with him through the salvation purchased at the price of the blood of Christ on the cross. We can quit counting our money and our good deeds and simply wash ourselves in the blood of the Savior. That is what it is all about.