Did God Create Evil to Corrupt His Perfect Creation?

If God knows it all and created all, why would he create an evil spirit (Satan) that would corrupt his perfect creation?

This question is one of both deep philosophical and theological investigation, and it’s one that’s surfaced countless times over the history of those two disciplines.  We’ll hardly pretend to have the lynchpin answer for this ongoing conversation, and with that in mind, let’s begin by making several observations about God’s initial act of creation here at the outset. 

First, when Satan was created, he was not created as “an evil spirit.”  1 John 3:4 tells us that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”  Everything that God created, including the host of angels of whom Satan was a member, were created without sin.  The Bible is clear that God is incapable of producing evil.

 Second, just as God is a being with personal volition, angels (and Satan) were created with a freedom of choice.  In Isaiah 14:12, Satan is said to have spoken the words: ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north.  ‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’[1]  Satan made the unmitigated decision to oppose God by use of his freedom, distorting a gift which God meant for holy purposes, into something that would cause colossal damage to himself, and eventually humanity.

 Third, it’s certain that God knew how the events proceeding the fall of man would come about.  Isaiah 40:28 tells us that “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.”  God’s understanding exceeds the limits of human comprehension.  He was not surprised by Satan’s rebellion, or his instigation of humanity to rebel.

 In the end, no matter how well the question is clarified, we will ultimately end with the question of, “why did God create things in the way that He did?”  It’s here that we begin to tread some heavily philosophical terrain; because if God is omnipotent and wholly good, then the world as He initially created it was the best possible world which could have been created. 

 When Jesus tells us that “True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him,” [2] this is because God is not coercing us to worship Him.  To force us to love Him would make God anything but good or loving; He would then be a tyrant unworthy of worship.  It is the highest definition of love that two freely acting persons should give themselves to one another, and this is what God made possible by creating the world in the manner He did.  For us to wish for a world with no evil, is to wish for a world of not more abundant love, but less.

 No one hates or suffers from evil more than God Himself.  Yet he was willing to endure it all (even to the culmination of all evil in His Son’s murder), so that He might seek and find those who would love Him without coercion, and eventually give them the object of all their desire when they love Him freely, and spend their eternities with Him in His coming glory.

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[1] This passage has historically been cited as a double reference to both Satan and the King of Babylon who states the same about his own earthly kingdom, though not all scholars agree with this application.

[2] John 4:23

This entry was posted on November 2, 2010 at November 2, 2010 and is filed under Creation, God, The Bible. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.