Please help me explain something to my son. He says God is partly to blame for our sin because He created us. I told him that God didn’t create people to sin but that Adam chose to sin. I know that God was not surprised and had a plan already in place. What can I tell him so that he does not blame God for his sin. He says he does not feel guilty because it is not his fault that he sins, he was born that way.
Your son is partially correct. Being born with a sin nature makes it impossible for us not to sin (Romans 7:14-20). But that doesn’t mean we can blame God, because God did not create man that way. He created man in His own image, perfect. The first man and woman disobeyed God and let Satan persuade them to sin. As a result all of their descendants have been cursed with an inability to avoid sinning. The only way we can reverse the effects of that is to believe that Jesus died for our sins so we don’t have to (1 Peter 3:18).
If your son is old enough to understand this, you can also tell him that no one after Adam and Eve was a direct creation of God. We are all the result of the procreation process, wherein God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and increase in number (Genesis 1:28). From that point on, it has been up to parents to decide when to bring a child into the world. Otherwise God could have isolated Adam and Eve and created all the rest of us to be perfect. In that case He would have been responsible for making us sinners like your son claims.
If your son is a believer, he’s also correct in saying he shouldn’t feel guilty, because from God’s perspective it’s not his fault. Paul explained this in Romans 7:14-20 saying that God doesn’t count a believer’s sins against him and doesn’t condemn us when we do sin (Romans 8:1). He sees us as if we’re perfect (Hebrews 10:12-14), a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), not because of our behavior, but because of our belief (Romans 3:21-24) .
However, believers do try to avoid sinning as much as we can. We do this out of the gratitude we feel for the fact that the Lord has saved us and we want to please Him. And we do feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit when we sin, because we know it’s not what God wants us to do. It makes us want to ask Him to forgive us.
When we do, God will always agree (1 John 1:9), because Jesus died for all the sins of our life, not just some of them.
In summary, mature believers know they can’t entirely avoid sinning, and they know when they do God will forgive them every time they ask. Out of gratitude for the free gift of salvation, we strive to live in a manner pleasing to Him, because we know that had it not been for His love for us, we would all be lost forever.
I realize I’ve given you a whole course on theology in a few sentences, and some of this may differ from what you’ve been taught. Study the references I’ve included here and they will help you make more sense of it.