DID GOD CREATE EVIL (IS 45:7)?
April 24, 2019
READ TIME: 1 MINUTE
“Dave, a # of English translations in Isaiah 45:7 say that God created evil. Could you please explain that?”
Josh & Sean McDowell do an excellent job of answering this.
The word for evil in the Hebrew is ra and does not necessarily denote a moral evil. It can also be translated as “calamity, bad or disaster.” The New American Standard Version translates the verse as “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these” (Isaiah 45:7). God can create disasters, but because he is perfectly holy, he cannot create evil.
But Scripture clearly states that God created everything (see John 1:1-3 and Colossians 1:15-17). And if we accept that evil is a reality, how can we say he didn’t create it? The answer lies in the fact that evil is not a thing or substance or entity to be created. Rather, evil is the corruption of a good thing that God did in fact make.
Evil then is not a substance or an entity, but the corruption of that which is good. This means that evil is parasitic upon good. Evil depends upon the existence of good in a way good does not depend upon evil. Thus, while there can be good without evil, there cannot be evil without the existence of goodness.
Source Used
McDowell, Josh; McDowell, Sean. The Bible Handbook of Difficult Verses (The McDowell Apologetics Library). Harvest House Publishers.