Can God Do Evil?
Genesis 3:22 tells us that after the Fall, man now knows good and evil. But here's the question nobody wants to sit with: can we be trusted with that knowledge?
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick — who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the heart (Proverbs 21:2). We are not neutral evaluators. We are systematically biased toward self-justification, toward comfortable conclusions, toward a God who agrees with us.
Paul warned that a time would come when people would not endure sound doctrine, but would accumulate teachers to suit their own passions (2 Timothy 4:3). Isaiah recorded the same tendency centuries earlier — people telling the prophets "speak smooth things, prophesy illusions" (Isaiah 30:10). This isn't just a warning about obviously false religion. It describes the subtle drift that happens when we start with a conclusion about what God should be like, and work backwards to build a theology that supports it.
So when the question is "can God do evil?" — we need to ask a prior question first: who defines evil?
God told Moses plainly: I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion (Romans 9:15). He raised Pharaoh up for the explicit purpose of demonstrating His power and proclaiming His name throughout the earth (v.17). He hardens whom He desires (v.18). And when Paul anticipates the obvious human objection — "then why does He still find fault?" — his answer is not a careful philosophical defense. It's a rebuke of the question itself:
Who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "why did you make me like this," will it? (Romans 9:20)
Isaiah says the same thing, with even more force: Woe to him who strives with his Maker (Isaiah 45:9). Not a gentle correction. A woe.
The flood. Job's children. Uzzah at the ark. The bears and the mockers. These are the passages people bring up when they want to put God on trial. And they bring them up using a moral framework that — by their own admission if they believe Genesis 3 — is now filtered through a fallen nature, a deceitful heart, and a strong bias toward conclusions that are comfortable.
God's response to Job wasn't a defense of His actions. It was forty chapters of "where were you?" (Job 38:4). The frame of reference required to judge God's actions is one none of us possess. We have a lifespan of decades on one planet. He is eternal, omniscient, and defines holiness by His own nature — be holy, for I am holy (1 Peter 1:16). Holiness isn't a standard He meets. It's what He is.
Here is perhaps the sharpest test case: the cross. To outside observers, the crucifixion looked like the execution of an innocent man — cruel, unjust, evil by any human standard. And yet Romans 3:25-26 tells us it was precisely there that God demonstrated His righteousness most fully — judging sin completely, justly, finally. The most perfectly just and loving act in all of history looked like a Roman execution.
If our moral intuitions can be that catastrophically wrong about the cross itself — the central event of all Scripture — how much should we humble ourselves when evaluating the flood, or Job, or anything else we find difficult?
The question "can God do evil?" assumes the questioner has a reliable, unbiased, sufficiently informed standard by which to measure the answer. But Proverbs 14:12 reminds us: there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.
Man, with a deceitful heart, a bias toward self-justification, an appetite for smooth theology, and a frame of reference limited to a brief life on one small planet — has appointed himself judge of the eternal, omniscient, holy God. And he does so using moral categories God gave him, now filtered through a fallen nature.
The question is not whether God's actions meet our standard.
The question is whether we are remotely qualified to set that standard in the first place.
