Why does God allow evil?
Question 60106
Of all the questions people bring to God, this one carries the heaviest weight. Why does a God who is both perfectly good and all-powerful allow the abuse of children, the oppression of the defenceless, the calculated cruelty of one human being toward another? It is the question that has driven more people from faith than almost any other, and it deserves a genuinely honest answer, not one that papers over the difficulty.
Where Evil Comes From
The Bible is unambiguous about the source of evil. It does not come from God. James 1:13 establishes that God neither tempts nor is tempted with evil. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). When God surveyed His creation and declared it very good (Genesis 1:31), that assessment was accurate. Evil is not a created thing in the way that trees and stars are created things. It is a corruption, a defection from the good that God made.
The origin of evil traces back to two acts of rebellion that Scripture records. The first was Satan’s, whose fall is glimpsed in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, where the language of those chapters reaches beyond the human kings they address to the spiritual power behind them. A creature of extraordinary privilege chose to set his will against God’s. The second was human, in the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve chose to follow that rebellion rather than trust the God who had given them everything. Both acts were genuine choices made by genuine agents. God did not cause them.
Why Freedom Makes Evil Possible
The question then becomes: why did God create beings who could make such choices? The answer lies in the nature of love and personhood. A being incapable of refusing God is not a person in any meaningful sense; it is a mechanism. A love that cannot be withheld is not love but function. If God’s intention was to create beings capable of genuine relationship with Him — beings made in His image, capable of knowing, choosing, and loving — then those beings had to be capable of the opposite. The possibility of rebellion is bound up with genuine personhood.
This does not mean that evil was inevitable, or that God was powerless to prevent it. It means that God, who knew exactly what His creatures would do, chose to create them anyway and to address the consequences of their rebellion through a redemptive plan that cost Him everything. The cross is not plan B. It is the expression of a love that knew precisely what creation would cost and moved toward it regardless.
What God Does with Evil
God is not the author of evil, but He is not overwhelmed by it either. The story of Joseph in Genesis 50:20 is one of the clearest statements in Scripture of how God operates in a world damaged by human wickedness: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” God did not cause Joseph’s brothers to sell him into slavery; that was their choice and their sin. But God worked through that sin toward purposes they could not have anticipated. Romans 8:28 extends this principle broadly: God works all things together for good for those who love Him.
This is not the same as saying that God ordains every evil act, or that what is evil is secretly good. Joseph’s brothers’ cruelty was genuinely evil. God’s working through it was genuinely good. The two are distinct and must remain so. God can bring good out of evil without being the cause of the evil, in the same way that a skilled surgeon can repair damage caused by violence without having ordered the attack.
So, now what?
The existence of evil in a world made by a good God is a genuine problem and should be treated as one. It does not have a complete philosophical resolution this side of eternity. What it does have is a response: God entered His broken creation in the person of His Son, bore the weight of human evil at the cross, and will one day set all things right. The promise of Revelation 21:4 — that He will wipe away every tear — is not a philosophical argument. It is a person, and a promise, and the certainty of a God who keeps His word.
“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
