Did God create evil?

Some questions are born more from pain than from curiosity. "If God is good, why does evil exist? If He is all-powerful, could He Himself have created evil?" This reaches far beyond philosophy. These are the questions we ask in the face of grief, injustice, war, and abuse. And for anyone who believes in Jesus, answering honestly means returning to Sola Scriptura: what does the Bible say?

Everything God created is good

The Bible opens with a plain affirmation: God is the Creator of all things, and everything He does is good.

In Genesis 1, after each creative act, we read: "And God saw that it was good." (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25 ESV). And, at the end, the Word declares:

"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." (Genesis 1:31, ESV)

If everything God created is "very good," then evil cannot be a positive "thing" that came from His hand, as if it were one more element of creation, standing beside light, water, and the stars. God is light (1 John 1:5) and "in him is no darkness at all" (ESV). He is "good, and his steadfast love endures forever" (Psalm 100:5, ESV).

Therefore, by the very confession of Scripture, evil does not proceed from the nature of God, nor was it created by Him as something good that later became corrupted. God is the Supreme Good, and evil is not born in Him.

So where does evil come from?

The Bible does not hand us a philosophical encyclopedia about the origin of evil. What it does show is how evil enters human experience: through the choice of free creatures who turn away from the will of God.

In Eden, God places the man and the woman in a setting of complete goodness and relates to them in love and trust. There was a single prohibition:

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:17, ESV)

When the serpent deceives, the text makes clear that disobedience rises from the human heart once it is seduced by the lie:

"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate." (Genesis 3:6, ESV)

It was not God who put evil in the heart of Adam and Eve. Faced with the temptation, they chose to distrust the Word of God and to bank on themselves. Evil appears, then, as rebellion: turning one's back on the God who is life in order to try to be "like God" (Genesis 3:5, ESV).

James, already in the New Testament, puts it bluntly: God is not the source of moral evil:

"Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted by his own desire, being lured and enticed by it." (James 1:13-14, ESV)

Notice: evil does not spring from God. It comes from the creature's "own desire." God permits and judges, but He is not the author of sin.

Evil as opposition to God

If God is the Supreme Good, then evil is more than "something bad" in the vague sense; it is, in essence, opposition to the will of God. The Bible describes sin as transgression, as a straying from a path that was good:

"Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness." (1 John 3:4, ESV)

God gave His law to point out the path of life, not to enslave us: "your commandments are my delight" (Psalm 119:143, ESV). When we sin, more happens than the breaking of a rule: we break a relationship, and we reject the wisdom and love of God.

For this reason, perhaps the best way to understand evil is as a lack of conformity with the will of God, the way darkness is a lack of light. Light exists in itself; darkness is only the name we give when light is rejected or removed. God is holy, just, and loving; evil is everything that denies, distorts, or rejects this character.

Freedom, responsibility, and a God who knew of the fall

The Bible shows that God gave freedom to man already knowing that this freedom would be misused and that the fall would come. He "knows everything" (1 John 3:20, ESV) and "declaring the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10, ESV). In creating Adam and Eve, God was not "gambling" in the dark; He knew they could sin, and that they would.

Even so, He gave them a real command, a real choice:

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:17, ESV)

The existence of this commandment shows that God wanted a relationship marked by conscious love and obedience. The fall does not catch God off guard, though neither is it robotic programming: it is the result of the wrong response of a created will, one that could have remained in obedience.

James makes clear where evil is born:

"But each person is tempted by his own desire, being lured and enticed by it." (James 1:14, ESV)

So we can put it this way: God created man free, and He knew the fall would come. It was not that He wanted sin; what He wanted, in His eternal plan, was to create beings capable of responding to Him with love and faith. Evil arises when this freedom, which is a gift, is turned against the Giver Himself. Even so, the God who knew of the fall had already prepared, in Christ, the path of redemption "before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4, ESV).

God remains sovereign in the midst of evil

To say that God did not create evil is not the same as saying that evil slipped out of the control of God. The Bible shows a God who remains sovereign even when free beings choose evil. One of the most striking accounts is Joseph's. Sold by his brothers, betrayed, imprisoned unjustly, he can look back and say:

"As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today." (Genesis 50:20, ESV)

Joseph's brothers meant evil, and the responsibility is theirs. But God, without being the author of the sin they committed, took that very evil and turned it into part of His plan to save an entire nation from famine.

The high point of this truth is the cross of Christ. Peter preaches:

"this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men." (Acts 2:23, ESV)

The death of Jesus was, at once, the fruit of human sin ("you crucified and killed") and part of the eternal purpose of God ("the definite plan and foreknowledge of God"). God did not create the evil of the cross; He took the worst evil in history and used it to accomplish the greatest salvation.

So, after all: did God create evil?

In the light of Scripture, we can answer as follows:

• God did not create evil as a "thing" or substance; everything He created is good. (Genesis 1:31, ESV)
• Evil entered the world when free creatures turned away from the will of God, choosing rebellion instead of obedience. (Genesis 3:6; James 1:13-14, ESV)
• Evil is, in essence, opposition to God, transgression of His law, absence of conformity with His holy character. (1 John 3:4, ESV)
• God remains sovereign: He permits, limits, and, many times, transforms evil into the setting for His greater good, as in the story of Joseph and, supremely, in the cross of Christ. (Genesis 50:20; Acts 2:23, ESV)

We do not have every answer to the mystery of evil, but we do have one firm certainty: God is not the author of sin, and He did not stay distant from our suffering. In Jesus, God Himself stepped into our history marked by evil, carried our sin on the cross, and offers us a fresh beginning:

"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed." (1 Peter 2:24, ESV)

In the face of evil, the Bible does not call us only to explain; it calls us to trust. And to trust in a God who never created evil, a God who is perfectly good, who suffers with us and who, in Christ, has already begun to overcome all evil, until the day when "death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore" (Revelation 21:4, ESV).

Ariel Zimbrão