Does God Use Evil for Good? Genesis 50:20 Explained

Question 2016. Does God use evil for good, and if so, does that make Him responsible for the evil in the first place? This question sits at the bottom of nearly every conversation I have had with people walking through genuine suffering, whether that is illness, betrayal, bereavement or the aftermath of someone else’s cruelty. They are not usually asking for a philosophy lecture. They want to know whether the pain has any point, and whether God’s hands are clean.

My answer, held together carefully rather than glibly, is this. God does use evil for good, working through suffering and even through the wicked choices of others to bring about purposes that are genuinely good. But using evil for good is not the same as causing evil, ordaining evil, or being the author of it. Scripture is unusually clear that the cause of evil lies with human will and with the malice of Satan, never with God Himself.

The clearest text in the Bible on this question

Genesis 50:20 gives us the sharpest statement of it anywhere in Scripture. Joseph says to the brothers who sold him into slavery, “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.” The Hebrew verb behind both “meant” is the same word, chashab, to devise, to plan, to think something through with intent. The brothers devised evil. God devised good. Same events, two entirely different agents, two entirely different intentions, running through the very same history.

That is the pattern I keep returning to whenever this question comes up pastorally. God is not scrambling to salvage a ruined plan after the fact, the way a builder might repurpose a pile of rubble. He is working, actively and purposefully, within and through the genuine, freely chosen evil of others, to accomplish something He intended for good all along. The evil remains truly evil. The brothers were guilty. Joseph does not pretend otherwise. And yet the good is truly good, not a consolation prize but the actual outcome God intended.

Romans 8:28 and the scope of the promise

Romans 8:28 extends this same principle across the whole life 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.” Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say all things are good. Cancer is not good. Betrayal is not good. Abuse is not good. What Paul promises is that God works all things, including the genuinely evil things done to us or around us, together toward a good outcome for those who belong to Him. The verb is active and ongoing. God is not passively hoping things turn out well. He is working.

Why using evil for good does not make God its author

Here is where I want to be careful, because sloppy language at this point causes real damage to people’s view of God. 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.” God does not ordain evil, decree evil, or cause anyone to sin. Human will, freely exercised in rebellion, and the active malice of Satan are the causes of evil in this world. God permits it, as the necessary consequence of having created beings with genuine freedom rather than programmed automatons. He does not manufacture it.

This distinction between causing and permitting, and then working through what is permitted, is not a dodge. It is the only way to hold together everything Scripture actually says: that God is perfectly good, that evil is genuinely evil and genuinely traceable to human and satanic will, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, falls outside God’s ability to work toward good. To collapse this distinction and say God directly causes evil in order to bring about good would make Him the author of the very thing His character opposes, which Scripture will not allow. I go into this question of causing versus permitting more fully in my article on whether God controls or permits evil, and on whether God could have created a world with genuine freedom but no evil.

Job and the book that wrestles with this longest

Job is the Bible’s most sustained treatment of this exact tension. Satan brings the calamity, the Sabeans and Chaldeans act with real human greed and violence, fire and wind do real damage, and yet Job says, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). The narrator is careful to tell us this was not sin on Job’s part, yet Job’s statement holds God’s ultimate involvement and the immediate human and satanic causes together without collapsing one into the other. By the end of the book, God restores Job, and the restoration is real and material, not just a symbolic gesture, but the book never explains away the horror of what Job lost or pretends the suffering itself was somehow good.

The cross as the ultimate example

Acts 2:23 gives us the pattern in its most concentrated form: Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” and yet the same verse says you “crucified and killed him by the hands of lawless men.” Both statements stand without contradiction. Wicked men, driven by envy, fear and expediency, freely chose to crucify the Son of God, and they bear full moral responsibility for it, as Peter states elsewhere in the same sermon. And God, working through that very evil, accomplished the greatest good in history, the salvation of everyone who believes. If there is one place where using evil for good reaches its highest expression, it is Calvary, where the worst act ever committed became the means of the best gift ever given.

Other places Scripture shows the same pattern

Genesis and Acts are not the only places this pattern appears. Isaiah 10:5-7 describes God using the Assyrian empire as “the rod of my anger” to discipline Israel, while the same passage makes clear that Assyria’s own intent was conquest and plunder, not obedience to God, and that Assyria remains fully culpable for its violence. The book of Habakkuk wrestles with exactly this discomfort, the prophet objecting that God is using a nation more wicked than Judah to judge Judah, and God’s answer is not to deny the difficulty but to promise that Babylon’s own violence will eventually be judged in turn. Esther shows the same pattern from a quieter angle, an entire genocide plotted by Haman is overturned through a sequence of what look like coincidences, a sleepless king, a forgotten record, a moment of good timing, none of which the text ever attributes to random chance. Scripture is comfortable holding this tension across many genres, narrative, prophecy, wisdom literature, without ever resolving it into a simpler but less biblical formula.

What this means when you are the one suffering

I want to be honest that this doctrine can sound cold when spoken too quickly to someone in acute pain, a tension I address more directly in my piece on how God’s rule over creation relates to human suffering. Timing matters. There is a place for simply sitting with someone in grief before reaching for Romans 8:28 at all. But once the moment for it comes, this truth carries real weight. It means your suffering is not wasted, even when you cannot yet see how. It means the people who hurt you remain accountable for what they freely chose, God’s use of it for good does not excuse them. And it means the God who is with you in the suffering is the same God who has already proven, at the cross, that He can bring the greatest good out of the worst evil imaginable.

So, now what?

If you are currently living inside something that feels senseless, I am not going to tell you God caused it for a hidden reason you will discover later, because I do not believe that is what Scripture teaches. What I will say is that the same God who took the worst thing human beings have ever done, the murder of His own Son, and turned it into the means of salvation for the world, has not lost His grip on your story either. Bring Him the honest anger and the honest grief. He can hold both, and He is still working, even now, toward a good you may not see until you see it fully in glory. Joseph could not have made sense of the pit, the false accusation or the years in an Egyptian prison while he was living through them. It was only from the far side, years later, standing in a position to save the very brothers who wronged him, that the whole shape of it became visible. Your own vantage point may simply not be far enough along yet, and that is a genuinely hard place to sit, not a reason to stop trusting the God who has already shown, at the empty tomb, exactly what He can do with the worst that human evil can throw at Him.

“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)