One line in the King James says God creates evil. The rest of Scripture, and Jesus most of all, tells you what that line means and what it never meant.
Did God create evil? No. Everything God made He called very good, and evil was never on the list. Evil is what happens when good is bent, broken or refused.
The verse people quote for the other side, Isaiah 45:7 in the King James, uses a Hebrew word that means disaster at least as often as wickedness. And Jesus, the clearest picture of God we will ever get, never once treats evil as something His Father made.
If you came here because something terrible happened, this page will not hand you a tidy reason for your pain. It will tell you plainly what God is like, and that matters more.
Somebody always brings this one up, and they are right to. In the King James, Isaiah 45:7 reads like a confession.
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”
Isaiah 45:7 · KJVA broad everyday word for anything bad. It can mean wickedness, harm, trouble or calamity. Context decides.
It is set against shalom, peace or well-being. Light and darkness, then peace and ra. The pairs are about fortune and misfortune, which is why the NIV reads “I bring prosperity and create disaster.”
The same word appears twice in one verse. Nineveh turns from its evil ways, and God relents from the disaster He had threatened. One word, two meanings, one sentence.
Joseph tells his brothers they thought evil against him. Here it is moral, because people chose it. The word bends with who is acting.
The setting matters too. Isaiah 45 opens by naming Cyrus, a Persian king who did not know the God of Israel, and the chapter keeps returning to one point: there is no other God, no rival power running the bad half of the world. Isaiah is not saying God manufactures cruelty. He is saying Israel's God is Lord over good days and hard ones. That is a claim about who rules history, not about where wickedness comes from.
In Isaiah 45:7, what word is ra set against?
The verse runs in pairs. Light and darkness, then shalom and ra. Set against well-being, ra reads naturally as calamity or disaster, which is how the NIV and ESV translate it.
Genesis 1 has a rhythm. God makes something and sees that it is good, again and again. At the end the verdict gets stronger.
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
Genesis 1:31There is no evil on the inventory. However you read the early chapters of the book of Genesis, and we read them as theology before science, the author makes a point you cannot miss. What came from God's hands was good all the way through.
So where does evil come from? One of the church's oldest answers is still one of the best. Evil is not a thing. It is a lack. Augustine, writing in the early fifth century, put it as a question: “For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?” He compared it to disease, which is not a new substance in the body but the absence of health.
Darkness has no source of its own. You cannot switch it on. You can only get in the way of the light.
Rot needs a good apple. A lie needs a truth to twist, and cruelty needs a life to damage.
A body missing what it should have. Evil in a person looks like that: love bent inward, desire aimed wrong.
Greed twists a need for provision. Lust counterfeits intimacy. The good was there first.
This is exactly how John describes God: “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). It is the picture Jesus used when He called Himself the light of the world.
God made light. Darkness is not His second creation. It is what we get wherever the light is blocked, and the block is never on His side.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Here is the honest part. Isaiah 45:7 is not alone. Amos asks, “shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” (Amos 3:6, KJV). Ancient Israel traced everything, blessing and disaster alike, straight back to God. In a world crowded with rival gods, that was a confession of faith. But the Bible itself shows that way of speaking being refined, and the clearest example is one event told twice.
“Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them.” The census is credited to God.
Retelling the same story later, the Chronicler writes, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David.” The Hebrew has no article here, so it can be read simply as an adversary. Same event. The source has moved away from God.
Asked whose sin made a man born blind, Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” Asked about eighteen people crushed by the tower in Siloam, He asks whether they were more guilty than everyone else in Jerusalem, and answers, “I tell you, no!”
God cannot be tempted by evil, and He tempts no one. Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
That is progressive revelation. Scripture is God-breathed and written by real people who saw God through the lens of their time. The picture sharpens as it goes and comes into full focus in Jesus. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
So if you want to know whether God authors evil, watch what Jesus did with it. He healed it, forgave it, broke its lies, and absorbed it on a cross. He never once sent it. We walk through the same pattern in why God hardened Pharaoh's heart, where Exodus credits God with a hardness Pharaoh chose first.
The common church answer goes like this. God did not create evil, but He created a beautiful angel named Lucifer, who chose pride, fell from heaven with a third of the angels, and brought evil into the world. The story tries to protect God's goodness, and I respect that. It is also not in the Bible.
A glorious angel named Lucifer rebels before Genesis 1, is thrown out of heaven, and becomes the source of evil in God's creation.
Isaiah 14 is a taunt against the king of Babylon. Ezekiel 28 is addressed to the king of Tyre. Lucifer is a Latin rendering of “morning star” that the King James carried into English. The saga was assembled by later tradition.
We cover the details in when Satan was cast out of heaven. Scripture never tells a creation and fall story for Satan, and our answer does not need one.
Our position at Sound of Heaven is that God did not create evil, and He did not create a being who later went bad and now runs a rival kingdom. We read Satan the way the Hebrew word first reads: the adversary, the accuser, the opposition to God's purposes and the pull of temptation. We lay that out in who is Satan. That opposition is real in its effects. It is not a creature God made and lost control of.
Evil lives in the gap between what God made good and what that good becomes when it is refused, twisted or wounded. People choose it. Lies spread it. Trauma hands it down. It has no factory, and none of it comes from God.
We refuse the opposite error just as firmly. Calling evil an absence does not make it imaginary or mild. It kills people and breaks families.
And we are honest about what stays open. Why a good world is exposed to earthquakes and cancer, not only human cruelty, is harder. Paul speaks of creation groaning and subjected to frustration (Romans 8:20 to 22) without a full account of why, and we do not pretend to have mapped it.
If God did not create evil, why did He make a world where it was possible at all? That is the question under the question, and the old argument tied to Epicurus on God, good and evil puts it at its sharpest. If God is able and willing to stop evil, where does it come from?
The Christian answer starts with love. Love that cannot say no is not love. A world where no one could refuse God is a world where no one could truly love Him. Freedom is the price of relationship, and God paid that cost Himself.
God wanted sons and daughters, not machines. A real yes needs a possible no, and every no opens a door to harm.
James traces sin to desire: each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed (James 1:14). The source is in the choice, not in heaven.
Genesis 50:20 shows God taking what people meant for evil and turning it toward saving lives. He never needed the evil. He simply refuses to let it win.
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
James 1:17This is not a complete answer. The book of Job spends forty-two chapters refusing to reduce suffering to a formula, and God is angry with the friends who tried. Free will explains why evil is possible. It does not explain every particular grief, and anyone who uses it to explain yours is saying more than they know.
If something terrible has happened to you or someone you love, hear this first. God did not do this to you. It is not a punishment, a test you failed, or a lesson He arranged. Jesus stood at the grave of His friend Lazarus and wept (John 11:35). God is not at a distance from your grief. He is in it with you.
You do not need this figured out to be held by Him. If you would like someone to pray with you, reach us through our prayer page any time.
If you want to know whether God creates evil, do not start with one line in Isaiah. Start with the One Isaiah was pointing toward.
Jesus touched lepers and they were clean. Tormented people went home in their right minds. He forgave the men driving nails into His hands. Every time evil showed up in front of Him, He undid it. That is what God is like.
And He is still doing it. We are not waiting for a future day when God finally deals with evil. The accuser has been hurled down (Revelation 12:10), the Kingdom is here, and you and I get to live on the undoing side of evil right now. Paul put the whole assignment in one line: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).
For related reading, see why God lets bad things happen, what it means that God is sovereign, predestination and free will and what we believe.
God made a very good world and never made evil, which is good bent or refused; Isaiah 45:7 speaks of disaster rather than wickedness, the Bible's own voice sharpens from “the LORD did it” to “God tempts no one,” and Jesus shows a Father with no darkness in Him at all.
Whether it is a verse that troubles you or a loss that makes no sense, send it in. Someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you and walk through it with you.
No. Genesis 1:31 says God saw all that He had made and it was very good, and evil is not on that list. Evil is best understood as the absence or corruption of good, the way darkness is the absence of light or disease is the absence of health. It comes from good being refused, twisted or wounded. James 1:13 says God cannot be tempted by evil and tempts no one, and 1 John 1:5 says there is no darkness in Him at all.
In the King James it reads “I make peace, and create evil,” but the Hebrew word ra is broad and often means disaster or calamity. In this verse it is set against shalom, peace or well-being, so the NIV renders it “create disaster” and the ESV “create calamity.” The chapter's point is that Israel's God is the only God, Lord over good times and bad, with no rival god of darkness. It is a statement about who rules history, not a claim that God authors wickedness.
Because God made a world with real love in it, and real love needs real freedom. A person who cannot say no cannot truly say yes, and every possible no opens a door to harm. That explains why evil is possible. It does not explain every particular tragedy, and Scripture does not pretend it does. Job's friends tried to explain his suffering and God rebuked them. What Scripture does give us is a God who meets evil in Jesus and overcomes it with good.
At Sound of Heaven we do not teach that Satan is a personal being God created who later rebelled. The Hebrew word satan means adversary or accuser, and we read Satan as the opposition to God's purposes, the voice of accusation and the pull of temptation, real in its effects. The story of Lucifer as a fallen angel leans on Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, which address the kings of Babylon and Tyre, and on later tradition rather than on any creation account in Scripture.
Not in the way it is often taught. When the disciples asked whose sin caused a man's blindness, Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” When people raised the eighteen killed by the tower in Siloam, He asked if they were more guilty than everyone else in Jerusalem and said no. Choices do carry consequences, but Jesus refused to read tragedy as a verdict on the person suffering, and so should we. God is with the hurting, not against them.