Why Did You Make Me This Way?

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalms 139:13-14

More than once, I have been frustrated with God for the way he made me. Why did you give me these appetites if they lead to destruction? You set me up for failure. Why give me a desire for something and then tell me it’s sinful? It doesn’t seem fair that God would create a system in which I am wrong when I follow my own nature.

Does God make mistakes? Did God mean for us to be created with shortcomings, destructive appetites and needs? The writer of today’s passage insisted that God was intimately involved in our formation and that we were each carefully created by him. If this is so, why are we so flawed?

Even in the garden, prior to the fall of man, God made the forbidden fruit attractive and gave Adam and Eve an appetite for something not-God. Why? If God loves us, why would he create us with the desire to choose something other than him?

It is precisely because of his love that he made us this way. God loves us and longs for us to love him back, but for love to be real, we must have a choice. We must be able to desire God and something not-God.

God knows the number of hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30) and he knows our entire genetic sequence with all of its consequential destructive appetites. God allowed us to be created with selfishness, pride and lust, so that we may truly make a choice and so that we would find him in our need.

Paul’s thorn in his side (2 Corinthians 12:7) was given to him to keep him dependent on God. If Paul – or if we – had been made perfect, we simply would never have needed or loved God. The loving Father, in all his wisdom, allows us to be made exactly who we are so that we may know his love, love him in return and so that we will always remain dependent on him.