If God Created Everything, How Is It That God Didn’t Create Evil?

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: We’re recording live from Ligonier’s 2022 National Conference, and I’m joined by the president and professor of theology from Union School of Theology in Oxford, England. Dr. Reeves, if God created everything and evil exists, how is it that God did not create evil?

DR. MICHAEL REEVES: This was a question that really bothered Augustine. He was the one who spent the most time seeking to answer it. He said, let’s look at Genesis. God creates everything, and it is good. So, he asked exactly this question: So, what of evil then? The simple answer that he gave that was trying to piece together all the different little indications of Scripture was that evil is not a thing. God created every thing good. But evil is not a thing. What he meant by that is not that evil doesn’t exist, but that there is no such thing as a lump of evil. I can’t throw you a block of evil. Because God created every thing, evil is not a created thing. Evil is a perversion. It is a lack of being. A clear biblical illustration of this is the difference between light and darkness.

Light actually exists. There are waves and particles. There is such a thing as light. But there is no such thing as darkness. Darkness is simply a lack of light, which is enormously helpful in seeing a few things. First of all, God, while sovereign over all things, is not the creator, the author, of evil. But it also means that evil simply does not have the kind of existence good does. Good and evil are not equal and opposite things. Good is an eternal reality found in God. Evil is a consequential lacking thing. And pastorally that’s very important, rather like darkness and light. Pastorally it’s important because it means that where sin will promise happiness, by its very nature, we see it cannot deliver, because it has no thing to give us.

So, there are two Hebrew words that really try to capture this theme, I think. And the two words are kavod and hevel. Kavod is the word for “glory,” particularly associated with God. God is the One who has being. He is glorious, weighty, substantial. The opposite of that kavod is hevel. It’s the name “Abel.” It’s the word used in Ecclesiastics, “meaningless, meaningless,” or “vanity, vanity.” It’s the word used for “just a breath of air”—so insubstantial it’s there and gone. Hevel is a word used of false gods. They’re just utterly insubstantial compared to the glorious living God. But also hevel is used of the inglorious insubstantiality we turn to when we turn away from God into sin—that we are made for the glory of God, but to walk into evil and sin is to walk into nothingness. It’s to be unmade.