Does God Create Evil? 

Isaiah 45:7

"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

This word evil in the Hebrew is ra, plenty of definitions.....

7451 ra` rah from 7489; bad or (as noun) evil (natural or moral):-- adversity, affliction, bad, calamity, + displease(-ure), distress, evil((- favouredness), man, thing), + exceedingly, X great, grief(-vous), harm, heavy, hurt(-ful), ill (favoured), + mark, mischief(-vous), misery, naught(-ty), noisome, + not please, sad(-ly), sore, sorrow, trouble, vex, wicked(-ly, -ness, one), worse(-st), wretchedness, wrong. (Incl. feminine raaah; as adjective or noun.).

-God can cause natural destruction (judgements)
-God can allow satan to cause natural destruction (testings)
-God is morally good
-Satan is morally evil


Exd 32:12 "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people."

Exd 32:14 "And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people."

1Sa 16:14 "But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him."

Job 2:10 "But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips."

Psa 5:4 "For thou [art] not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee."

What is the conclusion?  We should carefully examine the meaning of the particular word in context of the verses and chapters.   Our english words are too simple and easily manipulated. We "love" both pizza and Mom.

So I humbly ask, of all the definitions offered in the above Hebrew lexicon which will the Holy Spirit apply to God for you personally?

Here is a good analogy for explaining evil:

When people dialogue and witness to atheists they can often get the: "There is no God because there's too much evil in the world!"

Well, when the atheist posits that remark, the burden of proof is on them to explain HOW they know what evil is. Don't let them get away with saying that they just "know" what evil is. No, they have to have a reference point. Someone once said that it's like sailing on a cloudy night without a compass.

Another example is one someone shared with me recently. He went scuba diving in an underwater cave. He said it was soooooo dark that you literally could not tell which direction you were swimming in unless you had your flashlight on and the guide was directing you. He said that his guide told him that even experienced divers have gone into the caves and died because they lost their sense of direction, swam in the wrong direction, exhausted their supply of oxygen and died.

That's like evil. The atheist only knows evil because he sees rays of light, otherwise he would just be lost in the dark not knowing which was up. That light is God's moral law.

But let's go back to the context of Isaiah 45.  You will see the context of the verse is speaking of natural phenomena.

"I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."  (Isaiah 45:5-7)

Notice that the context of the verse is dealing with who God is, that it is God who speaks of natural phenomena (sun, light, dark).  Contextually, this verse is dealing with natural disasters and human comfort issues. It is not speaking of moral evil; rather, it is dealing with calamity, distress (Opposit of peace.  Note Isaiah is presenting contrasts.  He speaks of "light" and "darkness"), etc. This is consistent with other scriptures. For example,

So, in the context, we are seeing two sets of opposites: Light and dark, peace and non-peace, or well being and calamity. The "evil" that is spoken of is not ontological evil, but the evil experienced by people in the form of calamity.

From the above two verses (Exodus 4:11; Amos 3:6) we can see that the Lord is involved in calamity and problems in the earthly realm. Exodus 4:11 is speaking of human frailty and Amos 3:6 is speaking of woes in a city. It is not a moral evil that God brings, but calamity and distress upon people. Of course, this raises other questions of why God would do such a thing.  See here for further detail: "Why So Much Evil?" .  Also see: "Where Was God September 11th?"

There are other verses that clearly show that God is pure and that He cannot approve of evil.

We can see that the Bible teaches that God is pure and does not approve of evil, that the word "rah" (evil) in Hebrew can mean many things, and that contextually the verse is speaking of calamity and distress. Therefore, God does not create evil in the moral sense, but in the sense of disaster or calamity.

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