How can God cause evil and still be completely righteous?
Let’s begin by analyzing what Scripture says about God ordaining and being sovereign over moral evil. The best way to go about this, I think, is to look at the passages that most directly deal with this topic. Before we get into those, though, we need to remember that nowhere does Scripture show God doing anything evil. Rather, as Wayne Grudem says, God “brings about evil deeds through the wiling actions of moral creatures. Moreover, Scripture never blames God for evil or shows God as taking pleasure in evil, and Scripture never excuses human beings for the wrong they do.” 1 That is something we need to have at the forefront of our minds as we examine these passages. God may be the author of sin without doing evil. He ordains evil to happen in a way that, for himself, is not evil. He is God and we are not. That is something we must come to terms with. God operates on an entirely different playing field than humans.
On whether or not God is the author of evil, Jonathan Edwards wrote, “If by ‘the author of sin,’ be meant the sinner, the agent, or the actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing…it would be a reproach and blasphemy, to suppose God to be the author of sin. In this sense, I utterly deny God to be the author of sin.” Edwards goes on to say that God is “the permitter…of sin; and at the same time, a disposer of the state of events, in such a manner, for wise, holy and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted…will most certainly and infallibly follow.”
