I think that the whole Adam and Eve story was the introduction to the human race of free will. It is the mechanism by which we are given free will and the reason that we have it. We are different from the angels; we have been tasked with accepting Him.
To me, it is incredibly simple. God wants us to accept Him. That is an overriding message that I get from the Bible. I cannot accept that God wants robot slaves or that He has created large numbers of people that He wants to ship to everlasting Hell. It is not supported by my reading of Scripture. But in the final analysis, it is up to each individual human being.
If 5 people are racing and 1 is predestined to win it, what’s the point of actually racing? If God’s purpose in creating us is for us to love Him, then if we don’t do it ourselves, what is the purpose? It would be the equivalent of blow up dolls. Or robots programmed to do what their Creator wants them to do. Pointless.
Start with the presupposition that God is in control of His creation, every last speck of it, and life makes a lot more sense.
I say that it is more accurate to say that we will not admit that we are controlled. For we are controlled, whether we admit it or not. To imagine that we are not controlled is to imagine that there is no God. For when we say God, we say control. If a single creature which God has made has escaped beyond his control, at the moment that he has done so he has abolished God. A God who could or would make a creature whom he could not or would not control, is no God. The moment he should make such a creature he would, of course, abdicate his throne. The universe he had created would have ceased to be his universe; or rather it would cease to exist-for the universe is held together only by the control of God. Even worse would have happened, indeed, than the destruction of the universe. God would have ceased to be God in a deeper sense than that he would have ceased to be the Lord and Ruler of the world. He would have ceased to be a moral being. It is an immoral act to make a thing that we cannot or will not control. The only justification for making anything is that we both can and will control it. If a man should manufacture a quantity of an unstable high-explosive in the corridors of an orphan asylum, and when the stuff went off should seek to excuse himself by saying that he could not control it, no one would count his excuse valid. What right had he to manufacture it, we should say, unless he could control it? He relieves himself of none of the responsibility for the havoc wrought, by pleading inability to control his creation. To suppose that God has made a universe-or even a single being-the control of which he renounces, is to accuse him of similar immorality. What right has he to make it, if he cannot or will not control it? It is not a moral act to perpetrate chaos. We have not only dethroned God; we have demoralized him...""...Our difficulties with Predestination arise from a, no doubt not unnatural, unwillingness to acknowledge ourselves to be wholly at the disposal of another. We wish to be at our own disposal. We wish "to belong to ourselves," and we resent belonging, especially belonging absolutely, to anybody else, even if that anybody else be God. We are in the mood of the singer of the hymn beginning, "I was a wandering sheep," when he declares of himself, "I would not be controlled." We will not be controlled. Or, rather, to speak more accurately, we will not admit that we are controlled.
It's the temporal world that denounces the truth of God's predestination because then men can control other men. "You have the power, so give that power to me."
In truth, it's God's universe, and for those who have been graced with faith in Jesus Christ, it is a glorious reality. As God wills.
Did God know Adam and Eve would sin? If so, why did He make them?