Man Is Free To Choose

Why didn't God change His mind and repent
Making man, when Adam doomed us to hell?
"Enough!" He could have cried. "Christ won't be sent
To die in shame for this empty shell!
See. those maggots in my hand stay alive;
I'll just turn it, dropping them into flame,
Then make a better, who won't with Me strive!
The new ones will obey, avoiding shame!"
Yes, but if He had, how could He be sure
They truly loved Him of their own free choice?
He wants real love, not bought by planted lure,
Or a built-in deafness to Satan's voice!
God gave us all complete freedom of will,
Even if we choose Satan's hell to fill!

Had God wanted created men who were forced to be obedient to Him, He would have made us that way. Instead, He wanted evil to come into the world as a test for us, that our choice to be 'good' and follow His commands is made voluntarily, without bribe or coercion. Only by doing that could He be absolutely sure to admit to heaven eternally only persons who can be absolutely worthy of His trust.

Do you suppose that He allowed the angel Lucifer to commit the sin of disloyalty and attempt to overthrow his own Creator so that he might be cast down to earth with full power to tempt man's allegiance away from God in order that men would have to resist the attempted blandishments and choose God by his free will? What a complex sentence, and what a complex question! Even so, there is a lot of truth in that question that we need to consider.

"Yet to all who received him [Jesus], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God." (John 1:12) [brackets added]

It is very difficult for us to understand the phrase to become the children of God. Yet it means exactly what it says. God will absolutely adopt you as half-brother or half-sister to Jesus Christ, making you a member of His own family, if you believe in Jesus, feel very sorrow for your negligence in obeying His commands found in the Bible, ask His forgiveness, and change your life to live by His directions. Knowing how great is the trust God puts in you to adopt you, it is easy to understand why He is anxious that you choose to do this freely.

And a lot of people believe that the God that offers this invitation to join His immediate family is the same person as the 'Allah' of Islam! Allah gives no free choice: His followers do so because of fear of being killed if they do not swear for Allah; they keep on being followers because of their fear of being killed if they leave the ranks of Islam---if you do so, you become a renegade with a death sentence upon your head.