Why Not Force Everyone to Choose Good?

"It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him" (Genesis 2:18). From the very first pages of Scripture, God's stated design is relationship, not machinery — and relationship, by its very nature, cannot be programmed into existence.
Love only counts as love when it could have gone the other way. A "yes" that was never actually capable of being "no" is not consent, it is choreography — and the same holds for obedience: a response with no real alternative on the table was never a response at all, just a mechanism running as designed. A being incapable of choosing otherwise could go through every motion of devotion and still never actually love anyone, in the same way a puppet cannot betray or embrace the hand that moves it. This is why creating free beings who could rebel was never a design flaw God simply failed to prevent. It was the necessary cost of having anything in creation worth calling love in the first place. The comparison to human parents is not incidental to Scripture's logic; it is built into it. Parents who choose to have children know, going in, that those children may one day break their hearts, rebel against everything they were taught, or reject the relationship altogether. They have the child anyway — not because they want the heartbreak, but because they want the relationship the risk alone makes possible. No love without risk has ever existed, in heaven or on earth.
Scripture never treats this as an afterthought bolted onto the story once things went wrong. It treats genuine freedom as intrinsic to what it means to be made in God's image at all — to be a creature capable of loving God rather than merely obeying him. "Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and without defect before him in love" (Ephesians 1:4) — a chosen holiness, offered in love, is the only kind Scripture ever calls good.