Can God Create Imperfection?

First, please do tell what the July 7, 1977 story is all about! My guess is it involved a girl. :-)

Secondly, what I'm relaying in these cornerstones is not original at all; I'm simply providing back a distillation of what I've come to understand from my studies. These are the "connections" I see in my mind when I think about things. Eventually I come to see the connections well enough to articulate them.

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I think the answer to your basic question is that God did not create us imperfect; he created us with the ability to disobey if we so chose. The story goes that's what "we" chose, and having made that choice the "stain" of sin has carried down ever since.

Your ancillary question is the intriguing one ... did God intend for us to choose disobedience? Or, stated another way, did he know that we would choose to disobey? The answer to that appears to be "Yes," that in fact he did know ahead of time. The apostle Paul writes of God's plan for salvation through Christ being a plan in God's mind prior to the creation itself. I'll confess I have trouble working through the circular logic of all this.

Did God expect us to be perfect? From what I gather it looks as if he expected us to be perfectly obedient; to do his will rather than ours. To the extent we would then be perfect, we would simply be reflecting his perfection, not ours. That was the very nature of Jesus in his earthly form -- over and over again Jesus claimed that everything he did and said was commanded him by the Father. Jesus the man had the ability to be disobedient just like we have the ability to be disobedient ... but he didn't.

Even today, though our sin is so deeply rooted in us we can't overcome it on our own, we are still expected to practice the act of obedience. There is a very strong thread through the middle of the Christian faith having to do with discipline and daily devotion to obedience to God. This is where I stumble.

Note: there's a tension there -- between legalism and "antinomianism" (the belief that since salvation is through Christ's efforts alone, we are free to live entirely unconstrained by any rules whatsoever).

This is actually a good tie-in to the last conerstone -- our response. But that'll come later.