Does God use evil for good, and if so, does that make Him responsible for it?
Question 06066
This question touches one of the deepest fault lines in all of theology — the relationship between God’s purposes and the existence of evil in His creation. Scripture affirms with remarkable plainness that God can and does bring good out of evil. It also affirms with equal plainness that God is not the author of evil and bears no moral responsibility for it. Holding both of these truths simultaneously, without collapsing one into the other, is the task this question requires.
The Biblical Evidence That God Uses Evil for Good
The most concentrated biblical demonstration of this truth is the story of Joseph. Sold into slavery by his brothers out of jealousy, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, imprisoned without trial — Joseph’s experience represents a sustained sequence of genuine human wickedness. Yet at the conclusion of the narrative, his words to his brothers are among the most astonishing in the Old Testament: “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). Two entirely genuine intentions — the brothers’ evil and God’s good — operating through the same sequence of events. Neither negates the other.
The cross of Christ is the supreme example of this principle taken to its ultimate expression. Peter’s sermon at Pentecost states with complete theological precision what happened at Calvary: “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). Two truths in a single sentence: God’s definite plan, and the genuine culpable wickedness of those who carried it out. The crucifixion was the greatest act of injustice in human history and the greatest act of divine redemption in human history. These are not competing descriptions of the same event; they are both fully and simultaneously true. God used the worst evil human beings have ever committed to accomplish the deepest good the universe has ever known.
Romans 8:28 extends this principle to the entire experience of the believer: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” The “all things” is deliberately comprehensive. Not merely convenient things, not morally neutral events, but all things — including suffering, injustice, tragedy, and the consequences of others’ sin directed against the believer. God’s working toward good does not require that each individual event be good in itself.
Does God’s Use of Evil Make Him Responsible for It?
God is not the author of evil and bears no moral responsibility for it. The distinction that does the essential work here is the difference between permitting evil and causing it. God’s foreknowledge of evil — His knowing in advance that it will occur — is not the same as His causing it to occur. These are different things entirely, and the failure to distinguish them is where a great deal of confusion enters.
The biblical testimony on this is consistent. James 1:13 states plainly: “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.” The impossibility stated here — “God cannot be tempted with evil” — points to something fixed in His nature. Evil is not a tool He reaches for; it is incompatible with who He is. Habakkuk 1:13 captures the prophetic wrestling with this: “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong” — even as the prophet grapples with God’s use of the wicked Babylonians as an instrument of judgement. The tension is acknowledged honestly; it is not resolved by reducing God’s holiness or by denying His active involvement in history.
The objection typically follows: if God knows in advance that evil will occur and has the power to prevent it but does not, is He not at least passively responsible for it? This objection has force only if there were no good reasons for God to permit genuine human freedom and allow evil to exist within a creation containing free moral agents. But the very possibility of genuine love, genuine obedience, and genuine moral virtue requires the possibility of their opposites. A world without the possibility of evil would be a world without genuine freedom, and therefore without genuine love. God’s permission of evil is not an oversight or a failure of power; it is a consequence of His choice to create beings capable of genuine relationship with Him, possessed of real moral agency and real responsibility.
Human Responsibility Is Not Diminished
The fact that God can and does bring good from evil does not diminish the moral responsibility of those who commit it. This is precisely the force of Genesis 50:20. God intended the events for good; the brothers intended them for evil. Both are simultaneously true. The brothers are not excused by God’s overruling purpose. In the same way, those who handed Jesus to Pilate and called for His crucifixion bear genuine guilt for their choices, even though God had determined to use those choices to accomplish redemption. Acts 2:23 does not present them as blameless instruments; it describes them as “lawless men.” God’s sovereign working through human wickedness does not transform that wickedness into virtue or its perpetrators into innocent parties.
This is not a logical contradiction. It is a reflection of how genuine human freedom and God’s overarching purposes operate together without collapsing into either a determinism that makes human choice an illusion or an open theism that limits God’s knowledge of what free creatures will do. God’s foreknowledge is complete and exhaustive — nothing surprises Him. But that foreknowledge is not the same as causation, and the distinction between the two is morally vital.
What This Does Not Mean
God’s ability to bring good from evil does not mean that evil is somehow secretly good, or that its victims are obligated to feel grateful for what was done to them. Joseph wept when his brothers pleaded for forgiveness (Genesis 50:17), and his tears were real. The evil was real. The harm was real. The fact that God brought extraordinary good out of it does not retroactively make the betrayal and slavery into something other than what they were. Pastoral care that reaches too quickly for Romans 8:28 as a way of closing down a person’s grief does not serve them well. The doctrine of divine providence over evil is a source of hope, not a reason to minimise suffering or short-circuit the hard work of grief, forgiveness, and recovery.
So, now what?
For the believer who has experienced real evil — injustice, abuse, loss, betrayal — the doctrine of God’s providential use of evil for good is not a glib answer and must not be offered as one. What it provides is a genuine framework of hope that does not require denying the reality of what happened or excusing those who caused it. God is not responsible for the evil someone else chose to do. He is able to bring genuine good from it. Both statements stand together, without either minimising the suffering or reducing God to a bystander watching events He could not control. The Joseph narrative ends not with Joseph pretending the evil never happened, but with him weeping, and then — with full knowledge of what had occurred — extending genuine forgiveness grounded in genuine trust in God’s overarching purposes.
“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
Bibliography
- Carson, D.A. How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Inter-Varsity Press, 1990.
- Feinberg, John S. The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problem of Evil. Crossway, 2004.
