Is God Responsible for Freedom's Misuse?

"You were made alive when you were dead in transgressions and sins" (Ephesians 2:1). Paul does not soften the diagnosis to make God look better by comparison. Humanity's plight is described in the starkest possible terms — dead, ungodly, alienated, even God's enemies — and Scripture never once treats that devastation as evidence that giving humanity freedom in the first place was a mistake.
The distinction that holds everything together here is the one between divine permission and divine causation. God gave freedom; people misused it — and the moral weight of that misuse falls on the ones who exercised the choice, not on the one who made choice possible. "The good news of the gospel story is that God knew all of this in advance and loved us anyway," long before there was any merit in the beings he was choosing to love. Romans 5:8 puts it directly: "God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." God's love precedes human merit and is not conditioned on it; his justice, in turn, is responsive to real human choices rather than blind or arbitrary. Nowhere does Scripture treat the misuse of freedom as proof that bestowing it was itself the error. Genesis 50:20 makes the same point in miniature: Joseph's brothers meant evil, and their intent to harm him is never excused even as God works through their choice for good. The moral weight of what they did stays entirely theirs.
The only real alternative to a freedom that can be misused is a creation incapable of choosing otherwise — and that would not be a rescue from evil. It would simply be an inability to love, dressed up as safety. Scripture does not offer that trade. It offers a Redeemer for what freedom, badly used, actually cost.