Good morning Mr Guth,

Very happy to hear your story and I'm so elated about your recovery from stroke and in particular the fact you recognise God was behind it. May you continue to grow from strength to strength. Now to the question,

Scripture teaches that God made everything good. (Genesis 1:31). In this light, Adam was also created perfect but Adam had a will. This "will" included an option to disobey God. You see, if Adam did not have an option to disobey God (represented by the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden) we would never know if Adam served God because he loved God or just because he had no other option. Adam would have been "trapped" worshipping God.

In the same way, despite Jesus' death and resurrection on the cross, we still have a choice. We could choose to carry on in our Adamic sinful rebellious nature which culminates in us going to hell which we rightly deserve or we could choose to accept Jesus and the work He did.

So Adam had no shortcoming at creation. His ability to disobey due to freewill was part and parcel of his perfect state. God wants men to wilfully choose Him, not to be slaves to Him due to lack of options. He wants true relationship not dictatorship. He wanted human "beings" not robots. Remember even angels in heaven which you would agree are perfect have a will and despite this, some of them still attempted to rebel against God (i.e. Lucifer who became the devil) but there is no hope for rebellious angels for some reason (maybe because they had literally seen God and His glory and still chose to rebel...but this is my speculation) as salvation is for man alone.

I also do podcasts explaining salvation, Jesus Christ and the Bible (see link below). I think I address the background to the gospel in the first couple of episodes.

https://anchor.fm/ab-melchizedek

Thank you for your questions and for sharing your heart. 🙂