Devotion 5- Does God Regret?

Since the Bible indicates that God knows all things (omniscient) and had exhaustive knowledge of the future, why are there times when it seems like God does not know what is going to happen and even seems to regret certain outcomes?

Gen.6:5-7 - “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.  So, the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

1 Sam.15:11 – “I greatly regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned back from following Me, and has not performed My commandments.” And it grieved Samuel, and he cried out to the Lord all night.”

1 Sam.15:35 - “And Samuel went no more to see Saul until the day of his death. Nevertheless, Samuel mourned for Saul, and the Lord regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel.”

Does our sovereign God’s regret indicate that He would have acted in a different way if given another chance? What does it mean for God to be ‘sorry’ or to ‘regret’? Is God just like us in that He makes honest mistakes and sometimes look back and regret His decisions? Or else, why would He regret if He knows in advance the consequences of His decision and choose to do it anyway?

Did God not know that humanity would become so sinful before He created humans? Did God not know that Saul would turn evil when He made Saul king? How can we reconcile the passages in Scripture that strongly emphasize God’s knowledge of all things (including the future) with the sort of passages in which God was “sorry” and ‘regretted”?

God’s Regrets vs. Our Regrets

First, we need to be mindful that our sense of regret is not identical to what God is experiencing. God’s way of repenting is unique to God alone. His repentance happens in spite of perfect foreknowledge while most human repentance happens because we lack foreknowledge. Since God has foreknowledge, He would have known these outcomes in advance; yet God allowed them to happen anyway in order to achieve His sovereign purposes.

1Sam.15:11 & 35 should be read in the light of verse 29 “And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor relent. For He is not a man, that He should relent.”. God may feel sorrow for an act in view of foreknown evil, foreknown pain, sorrow and misery, and yet, go ahead and do it with His infinite wisdom. For God to say, “I feel sorrow that I made Saul king” is not the same thing as saying, “I would not make him king if I had to do it over.”

The scripture tells us clearly that God is not like man, and therefore does not regret decisions like men because all God’s decisions are perfect and good. When we regret something, it is because we did not expect the sad results. When God regrets, He fully knows and expects the sad results. This means that God would not have done anything differently with regard to Saul even if He had the chance, and that is a significant difference from how humans regret.

Saul’s disobedience ultimately resulted in David from the tribe of Judah being King. Gen.49:10 states that “The scepter shall not depart from Judah…” meaning the coming King would come from that tribe, not Benjamin (the tribe of Saul). God was not caught off guard. When God chose to make Saul king, He was planning to make good on all His promises through David, and Jesus who would follow after. God in His infinite knowledge had allowed Saul’s rebellion to happen in order to set the stage for Jesus to enter the world in just the right situation in human history.

God foreknew these events and allowed these events to be part of human history in order for Him to achieve His good purposes in the end. God can make a decision and later regret in spite of His perfect foreknowledge. God can feel sorrow for a decision that will cause pain, even misery … and yet go ahead and do it anyway for His own wise and eternal purposes. He is capable of both lamenting something He chose to bring to pass on the one hand, and almost at the very same time affirming it as wise on the other hand, or vice versa…. because He is God and that is what it means to be God!

One of the great implications of all these is that when God makes a promise to us, He does it with complete foreknowledge of all the future circumstances and is, therefore, never caught off guard by anything. And so, His promises will stand according to His infinite wisdom.

It is the nature of our covenant keeping God never to lie, repent, or change His mind.

Num.23:19 – “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?”

Imagine we have a rebellious, stubborn, unwise and wayward teenager and we strongly disciplined him over a very serious offense. He was resentful and ran away from home. We may feel some remorse and yet, at the same time, know that the discipline was the correct and only thing to do, even while knowing that the action would result in heartache. That means, if we were to do it over again, we would still discipline him. This is just an example of how and why God can take an action which He knows in advance He will regret and yet do it anyway. However, our knowledge is finite. How much more, our omniscient God, with His infinite knowledge and wisdom, will make decisions that are best for us.