How can God regret things if He is perfect?

from the old testament

• Whenever Scripture uses human emotion to describe something about God, we must be careful to understand that it’s using that language to help us understand God. However, it doesn’t mean that God is like us. Regarding regret, Samuel said of God, “[He] will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret” (1 Samuel 15:29). The context was God removing the kingship from Saul and giving it to David. Samuel was contrasting the way humans operate in a situation like that. God had told Samuel that if he disobeyed, He would remove the kingdom (1 Samuel 13:13–14) and was now fulfilling His promise. Unlike men who are fallible and change their minds, God’s promises are perfect and always carried out “without regret” because they are perfect.
• God does not regret as humans do. However, there is a sense in which God does regret. Earlier in that same 1 Samuel passage, God told Samuel, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments” (1 Samuel 15:11). How can God say that He regretted making Saul king yet also say that He never regrets a few verses later? The key is that God is not reacting to unknown outcomes or making mistaken choices. He fully knows the future and perfectly governs all things. Therefore, His “regret” is not wishful reconsideration but real grief over human sin and its consequences.
• Even before choosing Saul, God knew Saul would disobey Him, as Scripture teaches that He knows everyone’s future even before He creates them (Psalm 139:13–16). In 1 Samuel 15:11, God was expressing His grief that Saul did exactly as God knew he would.
• While we might find it puzzling that God would know someone would sin and still make a decision that would lead to that sin, God has a larger plan in mind, and that sin is a part of how He is working out His plans. In the case of Saul, God planned to bring Jesus to the throne as King in the line of David (2 Samuel 7:12–13). To make David King, God was working through Saul’s sin to teach the people that outward appearances were not an adequate basis for selecting someone (1 Samuel 16:7).
• Another example of God regretting is Genesis 6:5–6. There we read, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” After Adam and Eve sinned, the world was filled with sin. While God intended that to display His glory (see the New Testament section), He still hated the sin, and it still grieved Him.

from the new testament

• God created humans and allowed them to sin so He could demonstrate forgiveness. In Acts 2:23, Peter was explaining to the Jews who they had killed, saying, “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”
• Key to this discussion is that Jesus was killed “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” Even before God created, He already planned to send Jesus to die for sinners. He did this to save some so Paul could say, “he chose us in [Jesus] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will …” (Ephesians 1:4–6). Just like God planned to send His Son to die before He created, He also chose some to save from sin’s effects before He created.
• So, when we read that He regretted creating humans (see Genesis 6:6), it wasn’t that He wished He had made another plan, but that was the plan. He was grieved by the sinfulness that provided the foundation for His revelation of Jesus, but did not regret the plan itself. His goal was to display His glory and mercy to the world by saving undeserving sinners through Jesus (e.g., Romans 9:23).

implications for today

Though we can truly know God, we cannot comprehend Him fully. This is because we are finite and He is eternally divine. To accommodate our inability to fully understand God, Scripture often uses human emotional language that provides us with a degree of understanding of God’s response to a situation. Regret is one such example.

However, while it gives us some insight, we must always be careful not to fully map human emotion onto God. Instead, we must consider how the word helps us understand God without denying other truths about Him. For humans, we regret things all the time. We are grieved by the consequences of a decision we made in the past, and we wish we could go back and change it.

From that, we learn that God is genuinely grieved by sin. He hates it (Habakkuk 1:13), and it makes Him sorrowful (Genesis 6:6; Ephesians 4:30). Yet, we must also remember that He ordains all things (Ephesians 1:11), even sin (e.g., Genesis 50:20; Acts 2:23), and He does so to display aspects of Himself such as mercy and forgiveness. So, unlike us, God does not regret things in the sense of wishing He had made a different decision. Rather, He is grieved by our sin despite deciding to allow it for His greater purposes.

For believers, this is comforting! It means that while God is displeased with and grieved by our sin, He never regrets His decision to save us. Rather, He saved us knowing we would sin and did so to purify us to display His mercy to the world (Ephesians 2:4–7).