Does God control or merely permit evil?
Question 2006
The existence of evil is, in its most honest form, an uncomfortable subject for theology. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why is there evil at all? Any answer that diminishes God’s power or His goodness in order to resolve the problem has paid too high a price. But the way the question is framed — whether God controls or merely permits evil — matters enormously, because the two options carry very different implications for what kind of God we are actually dealing with.
God Is Not the Author of Evil
Scripture is unambiguous that God does not do evil and does not cause evil. “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). “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” (James 1:13). “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing” (Habakkuk 1:13). These are not carefully hedged theological qualifications — they are stark declarations about God’s character. Evil does not originate with God, flow from God, or represent God’s will for the people He has made.
Human will and satanic agency are the sources of evil in the world. Satan’s rebellion was his own. Adam’s choice to disobey was genuinely his own. Every subsequent act of cruelty, injustice, and rebellion has its source in the exercise of creaturely freedom against the Creator’s design.
What Divine Permission Actually Means
To say that God permits evil is not to say that He is passive or indifferent in the face of it. Permission is not approval. When God permits Satan to afflict Job, He establishes clear limits: “He is in your hand; only spare his life” (Job 2:6). This is not God washing His hands of what happens — it is God allowing evil to operate within a constrained space while maintaining oversight of the outcome. The evil that Satan does is genuinely Satan’s doing. The limits within which it occurs are genuinely God’s.
The distinction between permission and causation preserves something vital about God’s character: that He bears no moral responsibility for evil and no guilt for suffering. To collapse that distinction — to say that because God permits evil He must therefore ordain or will it — is to make God complicit in everything that has ever been done in His world, which is precisely what Scripture refuses to do.
Working Through What He Did Not Cause
What is remarkable about God’s relationship to evil is not merely that He permits it within limits, but that He works through it toward purposes that ultimately serve His good ends. This is declared with particular clarity in the Joseph narrative. What Joseph’s brothers did was genuinely evil — motivated by jealousy and cruelty. Joseph’s statement in Genesis 50:20 does not soften that: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Their evil was theirs. God’s good purpose ran through their evil, not because He orchestrated their malice, but because He is wise enough to redeem what He did not cause.
The cross is the supreme demonstration of this. Those who crucified Jesus acted in genuine wickedness. Acts 2:23 holds both realities simultaneously: Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” and yet crucified “by the hands of lawless men.” The same event is both within God’s redemptive purposes and the moral responsibility of those who carried it out. God did not cause the crucifixion by making the participants evil against their wills; He worked through freely chosen evil to accomplish the redemption of the world.
So, now what?
When people ask “did God cause this?” in the wake of tragedy, the answer Scripture offers is more careful than a simple yes or no. God did not cause the cruelty, the accident, the grief. He is not the architect of suffering. But He is not absent either, and He is working through what He did not cause. Romans 8:28 does not promise that everything that happens is good — it promises that God works all things together for good for those who love Him. That is a very different claim, and a far more honest one.
“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
