Does God Control or Permit Evil?

Question 2006. Whenever I sit with someone walking through real suffering, I find that the honest answer to whether God permits evil or actively causes it decides everything else about how we cope with what has happened to them. Does the Lord control every wicked act in this world down to the last detail, or does He stand back and permit it while keeping His own hands clean? I want to give you a straight answer, because a fudged one will not hold up on the day you actually need it.

I do not think this is a question we can afford to answer carelessly. Get it wrong in one direction and God becomes the author of cruelty. Get it wrong in the other and He becomes a distant spectator who cannot be trusted with anything. Scripture will not let us rest in either place, so let us walk through what it actually says about how God permits evil without ever causing it.

God Does Not Do Evil

I want to start where Scripture starts, and Scripture is not shy about this. “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). James goes further still: “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). Habakkuk, wrestling with the apparent triumph of wicked nations, still confesses of the LORD, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing” (Habakkuk 1:13).

These are not delicate theological qualifications added to soften an awkward truth. They are the plain testimony of the Bible about who God is. Evil does not flow out of Him and is never the expression of His character. If I ever find myself constructing a theology in which God directly causes rape, murder or genocide, I have wandered a long way from the God of the Bible, whatever clever philosophical machinery I have used to get there. The whole reason the question of whether God permits evil rather than causing it matters so much is that it protects this one truth above all others.

The Greek word behind “tempted” in James 1:13 is peirazo, which carries the sense of testing toward a fall. James is emphatic that God never operates that way toward anyone.

Where Evil Actually Comes From

If evil does not come from God, where does it come from? Scripture points us to created wills turned against their Maker. Satan’s rebellion was his own choice, not something engineered into him by God. Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the garden was genuinely theirs, freely chosen, not scripted for them by heaven. Every act of cruelty since has the same root: creatures, human or angelic, exercising real freedom against the design of their Creator.

This matters pastorally as much as it matters theologically. When something terrible happens, the person responsible bears real, personal guilt. We are not permitted to say “God made them do it” as a way of explaining away human wickedness. James 1:13-15 traces the anatomy of sin from desire, to temptation, to action, to death, and God is nowhere in that chain as the one pulling the strings. Sin is desire that has been allowed to conceive and give birth, and the parentage is entirely ours, not His.

How God Permits Evil Without Causing It

To say God permits evil is not to say He is passive, indifferent, or absent while it happens. Look at Job. When God allows Satan to test Job, He sets a boundary around it: “Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life” (Job 2:6). That is not heaven washing its hands of the situation. That is a King setting the limits within which evil is allowed to operate, while never losing His grip on the outcome.

The evil Satan inflicted on Job was genuinely Satan’s doing. The boundary around it was genuinely God’s. Holding those two truths apart, rather than collapsing them into one another, is really what it means to say God permits evil rather than ordaining it. It protects something precious: that God bears no moral responsibility for what happened to Job, even though He permitted it within limits only He could set. This is not a technicality. It is the difference between a God worth trusting and a God who cannot be distinguished from the evil He allegedly ordains.

Working Through What He Did Not Cause

What I find remarkable is not only that God permits evil within limits, but that He is skilled enough to work through it toward good purposes He never authored. Joseph’s brothers acted out of jealousy and cruelty when they sold him into slavery, and Joseph does not soften that verdict. “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).

Notice what that verse does not say. It does not say God authored their jealousy or scripted their betrayal. It says their evil was theirs, and God’s good purpose ran alongside it and through it, because He is wise enough to redeem what He never ordained. The supreme instance of this is the cross itself, where lawless men crucified the Lord of glory (Acts 2:23) in an act of genuine human wickedness that God had determined beforehand to use for the redemption of the world. Peter can say in the same breath that Jesus was delivered up “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” and that “you crucified and killed him by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). Both are true. Neither cancels the other, and both illustrate exactly how God permits evil while remaining entirely free of its guilt.

Why the Distinction Actually Matters

Some people ask me why I press so hard on the claim that God permits evil rather than causing it. Here is why. If God ordains evil in the same active sense that He ordains good, then He is complicit in everything ever done in this world, including the worst of it. That is not the God who reveals Himself in Scripture as the Holy One, too pure to look on evil. Confusing permission with causation makes God morally answerable for horrors He explicitly disowns, and it hands a ready excuse to anyone looking for one: if He ordained it, how can I be blamed for doing it?

On the other side, if I say God simply watches evil happen with no involvement at all, I have handed the universe over to chaos and left God powerless in His own creation. Neither extreme survives contact with Scripture. What survives is the biblical picture I have been describing throughout, that God permits evil within limits, restrains it, and ultimately overrules it without ever authoring it. I explore how this fits with His wider governing of history in what God’s providence actually means, and I have also written about whether God’s use of evil for good makes Him responsible for it, which digs further into the Joseph narrative and is well worth reading alongside this one.

The Restraining Hand

There is a further dimension people rarely think through: God actively restrains evil rather than simply watching it unfold. Genesis 20 shows God stopping Abimelech before he sins against Sarah, telling him plainly, “it was I who kept you from sinning against me” (Genesis 20:6). Paul describes a restraining influence at work in history even now, holding back the full unveiling of lawlessness until its appointed time (2 Thessalonians 2:6-7). Evil in this world is genuinely evil, and it is also genuinely limited, held on a leash that only the Lord controls even when He is not the one holding the leash’s other end.

Living With an Honest Answer

I will not pretend this resolves every tear-stained question people bring me. Why this particular tragedy, why now, why her, why him. Scripture does not always tell us. What it does tell us is who bears the blame and who can be trusted with the outcome. The evil is never God’s fault. The final word is never evil’s either. Revelation ends with a new creation “where death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4), and every trace of what evil has done will finally be undone, wiped away by the same hand that never authored it in the first place.

So, now what?

If you are carrying something right now that feels like proof God has abandoned you to chaos, hold on to this. He has not authored your pain, and He has not lost His grip on your story. Bring Him the anger, the confusion, the “why”, exactly as Job and Habakkuk did, and let Him meet you honestly rather than with a tidy answer you were never promised. Could you bring the specific evil you are wrestling with to Him this week, in those words, rather than around them?

“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)