Does God Rest, Regret or Need a Sacrifice?

Genesis 6:6 states that "the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart". In 1 Samuel 15:11, God says of Saul, "I greatly regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned back from following Me". The theological difficulty is that regret implies a prior decision that turned out differently than expected, and expectation implies limited foreknowledge.

The tension is visible within the same chapter of 1 Samuel. At verse 29, Samuel declares: "the Strength of Israel will not lie nor relent. For He is not a man, that He should relent." The Hebrew verb is the same one used at verse 11. Eighteen verses apart, the text says God regretted and that God does not regret.

The Qur'an's account of divine knowledge leaves no room for a revised decision. "With Him are the keys of the unseen; none knows them except Him. And He knows what is on the land and in the sea. Not a leaf falls but that He knows it" (Qur'an 6:59). "He knows what is presently before them and what will be after them" (Qur'an 2:255). The Qur'an does describe God as pleased and displeased, loving and angry — but never as surprised, and never as revising a decision made on incomplete information.

Again, the Christian reading deserves respect: these passages are generally understood as anthropopathism, describing God's response in human emotional terms so that readers can grasp the seriousness of human wrongdoing, with 1 Samuel 15:29 supplying the doctrinal correction within the text itself. That is a serious and long-established position, not an evasion. The Muslim response is that the correction inside 1 Samuel 15 is itself the evidence — the text is already conscious of the problem — and that a scripture which does not create the problem is preferable to one that has to solve it.

The doctrine of original sin holds that Adam's transgression left humanity in a fallen state, inheriting guilt or at least a corrupted nature from birth. It draws chiefly on Romans 5:12 — "through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men" — and was developed most influentially by Augustine. Christian traditions differ in how strongly they hold it: Eastern Orthodoxy generally speaks of inherited mortality and corruption rather than inherited guilt, and the article should not flatten that difference.

The Qur'an rejects transferred guilt as a principle, and states it three times in nearly identical words: "No bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another" (Qur'an 6:164, 17:15, 35:18). Responsibility is personal, and it is not heritable.

It also tells the story of Adam differently, and the ending is the whole point. Both Adam and his wife are addressed, both eat, both are responsible — the Qur'an does not place the blame on Eve — and both repent: "Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves, and if You do not forgive us and have mercy upon us, we will surely be among the losers" (Qur'an 7:23). The response is immediate: "Then Adam received from his Lord words, and He accepted his repentance. Indeed, it is He who is the Accepting of repentance, the Merciful" (Qur'an 2:37). The narrative ends in forgiveness, not in a condition passed down through every human being who follows.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) stated the resulting anthropology plainly: "No child is born except upon fitrah" — the natural, sound disposition inclined towards God (Sahih al-Bukhari 1358 — sahih). Every child in Islam is born innocent. If a child dies in infancy, there is no question of inherited guilt to resolve.

This is the deepest difference between the two accounts of God, and it should be stated in its strongest Christian form rather than as a caricature.

Mainstream Christian theology holds that God's justice and holiness are not arbitrary preferences but aspects of His nature; that sin against an infinite God incurs a debt that cannot simply be waived without justice being violated; and that God Himself, in the person of the Son, takes on the debt so that mercy and justice are both satisfied. Hebrews 9:22 is the text usually cited: "without shedding of blood there is no remission." On this reading the cross is not God demanding payment from a third party but God paying it Himself, which is a more coherent position than the version Muslims often attack.

The Qur'an's account of forgiveness is direct and unconditional on any payment: "Say: O My servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful" (Qur'an 39:53). What is required is repentance, the abandonment of the wrong, and restitution where another person has been harmed. Nothing stands between the person and God: "And when My servants ask you concerning Me — indeed I am near. I respond to the invocation of the supplicant when he calls upon Me" (Qur'an 2:186).

In a hadith qudsi the Prophet conveyed God's words: "O son of Adam, as long as you call upon Me and place your hope in Me, I will forgive you for whatever you have done, and I will not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask My forgiveness, I would forgive you" (Sunan al-Tirmidhi 3540 — hasan).

The Muslim question underneath all of this is about divine freedom, and it is worth asking without heat: if God is all-powerful and mercy is His own attribute, what is it that prevents Him from forgiving directly? Any answer that names a constraint God cannot set aside has described something with authority over God. And there is a point about the ordinary meaning of forgiveness: a creditor who receives payment in full has been satisfied, not merciful. To forgive is to release a debt unpaid — which is exactly what the Qur'an describes God doing.

The Christian reply is that mercy shown at God's own cost is a greater mercy, not a lesser one, and that the incarnation means the payer and the one owed are the same. Muslims do not accept the premise that a payment was needed, but the reply is a real argument and this article does not pretend it is not.

Against each of these questions the Qur'an sets a positive description, and it is remarkably compact. The chapter every Muslim recites daily runs to four lines: "Say: He is Allah, One. Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, and there is none comparable to Him" (Qur'an 112). One, self-sufficient, not part of a family of beings, without any equivalent.

The rule that governs every other statement about God is a single clause: "There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing" (Qur'an 42:11). The verse both denies resemblance and affirms attributes in the same breath, which is how Sunni orthodoxy has always held the two together — God hears and sees genuinely, and not in the manner of any created thing.

And the summary passage: "He is Allah, other than whom there is no deity, Knower of the unseen and the witnessed. He is the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful. He is Allah, other than whom there is no deity, the Sovereign, the Pure, the Perfection, the Bestower of Faith, the Overseer, the Exalted in Might, the Compeller, the Superior. Exalted is Allah above whatever they associate with Him" (Qur'an 59:22–23).

This is the criterion at work. Where a description would make God tired, surprised, constrained, divisible or in need, the Qur'an sets it aside and replaces it with a statement of what God is.

It would be easy to treat these as debating points — a verse here, a verse there. They are not. Each one determines something practical about how a person relates to God.

If God can be wearied, He is a being with limits, and the question of what else limits Him is open. If God can regret, His knowledge is bounded, and what He promises about the future is less than certain. If guilt is inherited, a person begins life owing a debt they did not incur. And if God cannot forgive without a payment, then the sinner's hope depends on the transaction rather than directly on God's mercy.

The Qur'an's answers run the other way on all four counts, and they converge on a single practical consequence: a person who has done terrible things can turn to God tonight, with no intermediary, no ritual and no payment, and be forgiven. "Do not despair of the mercy of Allah" is addressed, in the verse itself, to those who have transgressed against themselves.

Christians have thoughtful answers to each passage discussed here — anthropomorphism for the resting and the regret, distinctions between inherited guilt and inherited corruption, and a substitutionary atonement in which God bears the cost Himself. These are developed positions worked out over centuries, and dismissing them as evasions is neither accurate nor useful.

The Muslim contention is not that Christians cannot explain their text, but that a scripture requiring this much explanation on the nature of God is doing something the Qur'an does not have to do. The Qur'an states God's transcendence directly and without exception: nothing like Him, untouched by weariness, unchanging in knowledge, burdening no one with another's sin, forgiving whom He wills without needing anything from anyone.

Both books describe the God of Abraham. They describe Him differently in these specific places, and the difference is not decorative. Anyone who wants to know which account is true can read the passages themselves — they are short, they are quoted here in full, and the comparison does not require a scholar.

Qur'an: 2:37, 2:186, 2:255, 6:59, 6:164, 7:19–25, 17:15, 35:18, 39:53, 42:11, 50:38, 59:22–24, 112. Bible: Genesis 2:2–3 and 6:5–7, Exodus 31:17, 1 Samuel 15:10–29, Romans 5:12–21, Hebrews 9:11–28, John 5:17.

For the Christian doctrine of the atonement in its own words, Anselm's Cur Deus Homo is the classic statement and modern systematic theologies set out the alternatives, including views that reject penal substitution. For the Islamic understanding of God's attributes, the commentary tradition on Qur'an 42:11 and 112 in works such as Ibn Kathir's tafsir is the standard reference.