Even God Couldn't Prevent It

A few years ago, one of my favorite people gifted me a hefty two-book set called The Bible Study: A One-Year Study of the Bible and How It Relates to You. I was genuinely excited about it. I made a plan to start right after the holidays, got through the introduction and the first few pages… and then it sat on my shelf for the next three years.

So here we are now.

I've been in a season where I'm craving a deeper connection with God. Not because anything tragic has happened, but because something feels off. The churches I've historically been part of haven't quite worked for what I'm looking for right now. When I go to services, I don't feel as connected as I used to. And practically, the schedules don't align well with my life anymore, especially running a small experiential business open on Sundays.

So I picked the study guide back up where I left off: Genesis 6, right before the story of Noah. Which, to be clear, means I didn't make it very far the first time. But undeterred, I dove into reading to answer the questions about Noah, only to find myself stuck at Genesis 6:7 on three words: the Lord regretted.

This comes from a moment in Genesis 6 where, after creating humanity, the text describes people becoming deeply corrupt. It says God was grieved by what man had become and decided to destroy most of humanity, which is what leads into the story of Noah and the flood. The destruction is the story everyone knows. What I couldn't move past was something smaller — not what God regretted, but that He regretted at all.

That word regret stopped me. Because I associate regret with something avoidable, something that, if I had tried harder or made better decisions, I could have prevented. So seeing regret attributed to God felt off. If God is all-knowing, how could He regret anything?

The Hebrew translation helped, but only partway. The original word points more toward grief than regret. God wasn't second-guessing Himself. He was responding emotionally to what humanity had become. That distinction mattered. But it didn't resolve the deeper question, because the issue was never really the word. It was the logic underneath it.

God makes a decision. Time passes. Something unfolds that is not aligned with what He wants. He has a real emotional response to it, despite having known in advance the thing He didn't want was absolutely going to happen. As a result He has to then do something He doesn't want to do, but still does anyway.

I kept coming back to four things I hold to be true. The Bible is accurate. God is all-knowing. God is fully in control. If He wanted to avoid a bad outcome, He absolutely could have. And I have always believed that making a decision with an outcome you didn't want, whose consequences you'll spend active time mitigating going forward, is a flawed decision. That if you had the information and still didn't prevent it, you made a mistake. The problem is that all four of those things can't simultaneously be true. God is not flawed. Which means the belief I've been carrying about what makes a decision good or bad is the thing that has to give.

What God's decision makes undeniable is that even perfect information doesn't always prevent outcomes you didn't want and will have to actively mitigate going forward. He knew everything. He could have prevented it. The outcome still required course correction. Which means the belief I keep turning on myself, that if I'd worked harder at knowing more, it would have gone better, doesn't always hold. Not even for God. So it certainly doesn't always hold for me.

What I started to understand, working through this, is that not every decision is designed to solve everything that follows it. Some decisions set something in motion. They initiate a process that will require you to keep engaging, keep deciding, as reality unfolds. Creating human beings with genuine free will was worth doing. That choice didn't eliminate what would come next. It set it in motion. Which means the grief that followed wasn't evidence that something went wrong in the original decision. It was part of what staying engaged with that decision looked like over time.

And that's where this became less about theology and more about me.

I live and die by a particular kind of thinking. If we'd planned that better, it would have been more efficient. This isn't a great use of time. Let's step back and figure it out first. Those instincts have taken me far. There is no version of me that abandons them, and I'm not interested in becoming someone who does. But the rigidity with which I've been clinging to them is something else entirely.

Because underneath the planning and the efficiency is a belief I've never fully examined: that if I think carefully enough, prepare thoroughly enough, consider every angle before I move, I can make decisions I won't have to regret. And when something goes wrong, that belief turns on me. If I'd worked harder at the decision, if I'd known more, if I'd been more thorough, I could have prevented this. I've applied that logic to myself for years. If I'm honest, I've applied it to other people too.

What this scripture cracked open is the possibility that the logic is wrong. Not always. Sometimes you genuinely could have decided better, and sitting with that honestly is how you grow. But sometimes the outcome is just the outcome. Not a verdict. Just the next thing that happened. And what that moment calls for isn't a better autopsy of the original decision. It's the next one.

None of this is new information. I'm aware that's what you're thinking, because it's what I thought too. But knowing something and actually shifting the emotional wiring, the internal monologue, the unconscious way you respond in conversations and make a hundred small decisions every day, that's not a rational exercise. It doesn't happen because you've understood the concept. This feels less like a revelation and more like an adult growth spurt. A mental version of a toddler getting teeth. It changes how you fundamentally engage with the world. It doesn't mean you can eat tough steak on day one. It means you have to test it, learn it slowly, and keep coming back to check whether it's actually true.

I'll probably still relitigate. That's honestly just how my brain works. But I think I'll do it knowing the premise was always flawed. I wasn't supposed to know all of this upfront. I was just supposed to decide, and then keep deciding.

That's a smaller ask than I've been making of myself. And right now, that feels like enough.