Why did God create such evil?

God certainly has a way of stirring our imagination and throwing our thoughts for a loop, especially when faced with Satan being the devil from the start, and therefore it was God who created such evil.

But evil had to come from somewhere, and Scripture quickly indicates the source of it, because who was it who created a tree whose fruit would kill if eaten? It was God. And who created the crafty serpent that got Adam and Eve to eat off that ‘death’ tree too? That was God too. 

And who allowed the crafty serpent, later identified as the “devil and Satan” (Revelation 12:9), to bring the world to a state so evil in Genesis 6:5 that God was all for wiping humans off the map (7)? Again, it was God. You’d think, then, that God would have ended the evil, but he didn’t. So evil continued to destroy people’s lives all through the Old Testament, and God never put an end to it. Why on earth not? 

Because he made a prediction in Genesis 3:15, that “I’m making you (the devil) and the woman (humanity) into enemies, and it will remain so with your offspring too” – the devil having offspring too (John 8:44). 

So God was announcing an ongoing war between humanity and the devil. And he meant it to be this way, because in the end humanity would prevail: the devil would “strike the heel” of humanity (Genesis 3:15), representing a crippling wound, but humanity would “strike a deadly blow to the head” of the devil. Evil exists, then, for humans to fight against and win. 

But for what purpose? It’s to make us “strong in the Lord and in his mighty power,” Ephesians 6:10, which comes from “wrestling against the unseen powers controlling this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil,” verse 12, “so that when evil strikes,” verse 13, “you’ll still be standing strong, no matter what the devil throws at you.” 

This is how God is “bringing many sons to glory,” including his own Son (Hebrews 2:10, 5:7-10). We learn, just as Jesus did, that through obedience to God’s word and trust in his power we can rule over evil, to prepare us perfectly for being “crowned with glory and honour and ruling with Jesus over the whole world” in the future (Hebrew 2:6-8). In the meanwhile, then, we can get used to “Overcoming the evil one” again and again….(next blog)