Isaiah 45:7 says God 'creates evil' in the King James. Amos 3:6 asks if calamity comes to a city without God causing it. But most churches teach that Satan is the author of evil and God is purely good. So which is it? Pick a side: does God own evil, or have we invented a cosmic scapegoat so we never have to ask the hard question?
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Add your commentIsaiah 45:7. Right there. King James Bible. 'I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.' I don't know how much more explicit God can be. Y'all want to explain that away with 'context' but the text is the text.
i grew up being taught that every bad thing that happened to me was 'the devil attacking.' my dad's cancer, my friend's suicide, my miscarriage. it was actually more damaging than helpful because it meant we were always in some kind of spiritual warfare that we couldn't win. i'd rather just sit with mystery than have that tidy explanation.
Bottom line for me: I don't know who created evil. I know evil is real because I've felt it and done it and had it done to me. I know Jesus walked into it and said 'follow me through it.' That's enough to get me out of bed in the morning. The metaphysics can wait.
I spent ten years as an atheist largely because of this exact question. What brought me back wasn't a clean answer. It was realizing that getting rid of God didn't make the problem of evil go away — it just made evil meaningless. At least theism gives evil weight. Atheism just says it's molecules bumping into other molecules. That was somehow worse.
The question asked is actually one of the oldest in philosophy — the Euthyphro dilemma shows up in Plato before Jesus was born. Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If God creates evil, is it therefore good? Or is there a standard above God that evil violates? We have been arguing this for 2,500 years. Anyone who tells you they've solved it is selling something.
Made your peace with it?? God orchestrated the death of Job's children as part of a wager and you've 'made peace with it'? I was a pastor for 22 years and I could never preach that story to a grieving parent without feeling sick. I still can't.
If the CEO knows the employee will corrupt the entire company before he hires him, and hires him anyway, and the people in the company suffer catastrophically as a result — what exactly is the CEO's moral responsibility here? Asking for six billion people.
The Hebrew word in Isaiah 45:7 is 'ra' which does mean calamity or disaster in that context, not moral evil. God is saying He controls all outcomes — good and bad — not that He invented sin. This is a basic translation issue and it's wild how many people skip the lexicon and run straight to controversy.
If you really believe God creates evil — not just calamity but MORAL evil — then you have to explain why you worship Him. Like, genuinely. Not as a gotcha, but as an actual question. What does devotion to an evil-creating God look like? Is it love? Is it fear? Is it just cosmic Stockholm syndrome?
Except the characters in the novel don't actually suffer. My children actually suffer. The novelist analogy collapses the moment you remember the pain is real.
Ezekiel 28 is about the king of Tyre. Isaiah 14 is about the king of Babylon. These are political poems. The whole 'Lucifer falls from heaven' theology is built on reading ancient royal insult poetry as cosmic biography. This is why seminary matters.
Let me ask the question differently: if Satan did not exist, would evil still exist? Because humans were sinning before the serpent showed up in Genesis and we definitely sin without direct demonic prompting today. Maybe the real problem of evil is not a being named Satan but the human heart, and we invented Satan partly to avoid looking at ourselves.
That's a very convenient answer. 'God makes the rules so God can't break the rules.' That's not theology, that's a blank check for justifying anything.
Can I be honest? The 'God is sovereign over everything including evil' crowd and the 'Satan did it' crowd are BOTH trying to solve the same problem and neither answer is fully satisfying. Job literally shows God handing Job over to Satan like a bet. That's not Satan being autonomous. That's God directing evil toward a man who did nothing wrong.
Jacob wrestled with God and walked away limping. That's the most honest picture of faith I know. You can engage, you can push back, and you will probably be changed in uncomfortable ways. But you walk away having ENCOUNTERED something real. That's more than I get from either tidy theodicy OR clean atheism.
The most honest thing I ever heard a theologian say was: 'the problem of evil is not an argument against the existence of God, it is an argument against certain KINDS of God.' Maybe the question isn't whether God exists but whether the God we've been sold is the real one.
ok but even if 'ra' means calamity, who made the being that introduced moral evil into creation? God made Lucifer, right? Fully knowing he would fall. So how exactly is God not ultimately responsible? You can't just say 'free will' and close the book.
This. Thank you. I am so tired of abstract theological frameworks that work perfectly until you put a real grieving person in front of them.
The distinction between 'ordains evil' and 'not the author of sin' sounds like a word game to me. If I plan a murder but hire someone else to pull the trigger, I'm still guilty. I can't just claim my purposes were holy.
The fact that this question makes you uncomfortable doesn't mean it's wrong. Abraham worshipped a God who told him to kill his son. The Psalms are full of people accusing God of abandoning them. Wrestling with God's nature IS worship in the biblical tradition. Jacob literally fought God and got a blessing for it.
This is the question that kept me up at 3am for most of my 20s and eventually led me out of my childhood faith. I came back to faith eventually, but not until I stopped pretending the question wasn't real. The church does nobody any favors by acting like this is settled.
My theology professor said something that stuck with me: 'God is the author of the story that contains evil, not the author of evil within the story.' Like a novelist who writes a villain isn't themselves a villain. I've found that framework genuinely helpful.
This is the most underrated point in the whole thread. Nobody wants to admit that a strong personal devil starts to look a lot like a second god. The early church knew this. We forgot.
Genre matters. You interpret poetry as poetry, law as law, narrative as narrative. That's not editing the Bible, that's reading it the way any literate person reads any text. Pretending Psalms and Leviticus are the same type of literature is the real distortion.
The Book of Job is the most honest book in the Bible precisely because it refuses to give a clean answer. Job demands a hearing. God shows up and basically says 'where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?' Which isn't an answer. It's a reminder that we're not owed one. I've made my peace with that.
That's real and I'm so sorry. The weaponization of spiritual warfare language to explain trauma is something the church badly needs to reckon with.
Jeremiah 17:9. 'The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.' Exactly this. We don't need a devil to explain human evil. We need a mirror.
The tension is intentional. Agreed. But the church's habit of resolving that tension by shouting about Satan every time something bad happens is what this post is actually challenging. If you can sit in the tension, great. Most pew-sitters aren't being taught to.
Here's what nobody wants to say: Calvinism actually takes Isaiah 45:7 seriously. If God is truly sovereign, He ordained evil as part of His plan. Arminians invented a powerful Satan PARTLY to give God an alibi. That's not me being mean, that's the logical structure of the debate.
Comparing Satan's existence to a botanical error is not the flex you think it is. One is a scientific detail, the other is the entire cosmic architecture of New Testament theology. These are not equivalent claims.
That's actually a really important distinction that most church folk never make. Theodicy isn't atheism. You can believe in God and still reject specific claims about His nature. The two conversations get conflated constantly.
Dualism — the idea of two roughly equal cosmic forces, good vs. evil — is actually the heresy the early church fought hardest against, specifically the Manicheans and later the Cathars. If you make Satan THAT powerful and independent, you've basically left monotheism. One God means one source of everything, full stop.
Satan isn't a scapegoat. He's a created being who chose rebellion. We know this from Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, and Revelation 12. To say we invented him is to say Jesus was wrong, because Jesus said He saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. You trust Jesus or you don't.
open theism didn't CREATE problems it NAMED problems that were already there. big difference.
Former pastor here too. The honest answer is that Job was probably never meant to be read as literal history. It reads as wisdom literature — a thought experiment about suffering, not a documentary about a man named Job. That reframing helped me enormously.
the euthyphro crowd never acknowledges that there's a third option: God's nature IS the standard. He doesn't command things arbitrarily and He's not subject to an external standard. He IS goodness. That's the historic Christian answer and it actually breaks the dilemma rather than picking a horn.
Foreknowledge plus creation equals responsibility in any other frame we use for humans. If I build a robot knowing it will harm people, I'm liable. Why does omniscience reduce rather than increase God's responsibility?
Jesus also spoke about mustard seeds being the smallest of all seeds, which isn't botanically accurate. He used the frameworks of his time and culture. That doesn't make him a liar, it makes him human and contextually situated. Yes I believe in the Incarnation. That's the point.
lol so now we're seminary-splaining the devil away. tell that to every missionary who's ever watched a person manifest and speak in a voice that isn't theirs. i've seen things in the field that no exegesis is gonna explain to me.
That's a really honest testimony and I respect it even though I'd push back a bit. The atheist response isn't that evil is meaningless — it's that suffering is real and we should address it without expecting a supernatural rescue. That's not nihilism.
But what's the alternative? A God who is not sovereign? A God who is just as surprised by evil as we are? Open Theism tried that and it created as many problems as it solved. I'd rather have a God who is in control of a painful world than a God who's doing His best and keeps getting blindsided.
As a Calvinist I appreciate the acknowledgment but I'd push back on 'alibi.' Reformed theology says God ordains whatsoever comes to pass including evil events, but He is not the author of sin in the MORAL sense because His purposes in those events are holy. The distinction matters.
Foreknowledge doesn't equal causation. God knowing what Judas would do didn't make God responsible for the betrayal. Judas chose freely. This is basic philosophy of time and omniscience.
Or — wild idea — we trust the revelation God gave us in Scripture rather than crowdsourcing our own version of Him based on what makes us comfortable. The Bible gives us a God who is both wholly good AND sovereign over calamity. Both are true and the tension is intentional.
Personal experience is not a theological argument. I say this gently. People in every religion and every century have reported supernatural experiences that contradict each other. We can't build doctrine on anecdote.
idk man. I've read the atheist philosophers on evil and the Christian philosophers on evil and honestly both groups end up saying 'this is hard and we don't have a perfect answer.' at least Christians get to pray while they're confused. that's not nothing.
But then who tempted Jesus in the wilderness? Who entered Judas? The New Testament writers clearly believe in a personal Satan. You can't dismiss that without dismissing Jesus himself.
Once you start deciding which parts of the Bible are 'just thought experiments' you've put yourself in the editor's chair and God in the passenger seat. Hard pass.
God is not subject to human legal or ethical categories. That's the whole point. He's the standard, not subject to the standard. Once you accept that, a lot of these objections dissolve.
Because God isn't building robots. He's creating beings made in His image with genuine freedom. The analogy fails because robots don't have will and humans do. This is why every analogy for God eventually breaks.
Nope. Hard disagree. Satan is a created being under God's authority. That's not dualism, that's hierarchy. A corrupt employee isn't equal to the CEO.
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