Is God the Author of Evil?

Hi, Nathan W. Bingham here. Before we get to today's episode, I'd like to invite you to a free event in Dallas, Texas on November 14. It's called Renewing Your Mind Live, and it's an opportunity for us to thank you for listening and to give thanks to God for 30 years of broadcasting truth through Renewing Your Mind. Stephen Nichols and Derek Thomas will be joining us to teach on Romans 12-2. Mr. Sproul is planning to join us, and you'll have the opportunity to meet other listeners. Plus, there'll be giveaways. This is a free event, but due to limited capacity, registration is required.

Learn more and register at renewingyourmind.org slash Dallas, and I hope to see you November 14 or in other cities throughout 2025. Now on to today's episode. He knows how to do what is good. He is altogether righteous, altogether holy, and everything that He does, He does well without any shadow of evil upon Him. But it's not one we should skip over, and that will be our topic today on this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

R.C. Sproul is teaching through the Westminster Confession of Faith, and we're spending this week in the fifth chapter of that confession on the topic of providence. If you'd like to study all 33 chapters of this confession with Dr. Sproul's commentary to further help you, you can request the hardcover edition of his book Truths We Confess. You call us at 800-435-4343 with a donation of any amount, or when you give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org.

This is a resource I return to again and again, so give your gift while there's still time. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the providence of God and the origin of evil. We're going to continue now with our study of the Westminster Confession as we look once again at chapter 5, which deals with the doctrine of God's providence. And in our last session, we worked through section 3 of chapter 5, and so in this session we'll take up section 4. Let me read at least the beginning statements of section 4, which goes as following. The almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite goodness of God so far manifest themselves in His providence that it extendeth itself even to the first fall and all other sins of angels and men, semicolon.

You know the Westminster Divines had a propensity for dropping bombs in the first couple of lines and then hanging you in suspended animation with a semicolon before they give you any kind of relief. But what they're doing here at the beginning of section 4 is dealing with one of the most difficult theological questions that we ever are concerned with and wrestle with, and that is the relationship to God's providence and His sovereignty to human sin, and here with specific reference to the fall of the human race. I don't think I had been a Christian for more than three months, and I was a freshman in college, and I was in the men's dormitory in the basement where they had a rec room, and I was playing ping pong, and I vividly recall that in the middle of one of our volleys, I can tell you which end of the table I was on, I was at that end of the table, and the middle of one of these volleys struck me as a new Christian. If God is holy, God is altogether good, how can there possibly be evil in this world? And I was deeply struck by that question and began to search out answers from our professors and from the books and so on in trying to figure out how that can be.

And of course I realize now that that question, I wasn't the first person to raise that question. That question was called by nineteenth-century liberal theologians who were skeptical of supernatural Christianity. It was called the Achilles' Heel of Christianity, that is Christianity's most vulnerable spot in terms of defending the truth claims of that faith. And we think of some of the great philosophers of Western civilization, people like John Stuart Mill who said that if God is all-powerful and all-loving, there couldn't possibly be evil in the world. So since there is evil in the world, either God is not all-loving, and though He has the power to prevent evil from being in the world, if He chooses not to exercise that power but allows evil to exist in this world or in any sense ordains the reality of evil, then He could not be a good and loving God. On the other hand, if He is all-loving and all-good in and of Himself and evil still exists in spite of His goodness and in spite of His loving kindness, then He must not be all-powerful.

He must be impotent with respect to any ability to stop the origin and spread of evil in the world. And so there have been all kinds of struggles throughout history with the theologians offering what they call theodicies. And maybe that word is a new word for you, but the word theodicy is a combination of two Greek words kind of jammed together. The first word you're probably familiar with, the word theos, which is the Greek word for God. We have the term theology, which is the study of God.

And then the word dikaios, which is the word for justice or righteousness or justification, dikaiosune. And so that a theodicy is a rational, intellectual attempt to justify God for the existence of evil in the world. At the university I used to teach the history of philosophy, and on many occasions would have to treat this question in the history of philosophy on how great thinkers through the ages have sought to wrestle with it. And I can remember being sorely tempted on some occasions to use some of the clever, more clever theodicies that have been proffered by Western thinkers that I knew were not sound, that I figured I could convince students anyway, but I didn't do it.

I stepped away from that temptation. But some of these are very, very masterful in their discussion, but most of them fail and fail miserably to answer the question of the origin of evil. And when we look at the boundaries or borders that define the limits of our speculation and understanding with respect to the problem of the origin of evil, there are certain fundamental principles that we gain from Scripture that have to be kept in place as we begin to probe this difficult question. The first one is what we call in theology the biblical a priori.

Now again, this may be some technical language that you're not familiar with. You're familiar with the word biblical. The word a priori is a term that is used frequently in philosophy and in science to talk about those ideas or truths that are learned or discovered prior to experience, that one doesn't have to test them in a laboratory or to experience them personally to know that they are true. An a priori truth would be two plus two is four because those two things are rationally considered as a logical connection, and that's an a priori truth. Well, usually when we talk about a biblical a priori, we're talking about a truth that is so self-evident, so manifest that it in a sense becomes a governing principle for all of our thought about the things of God. And what has been called the biblical a priori is the axiom that says God is neither the author nor doer of evil, that that has to control our thinking about all speculation with respect to the origin of evil, that if we know anything about God, we know that He is absolutely good and that He has no capacity whatsoever for evil. He is the judge of all of the earth who only knows how to do what is good.

He is altogether righteous, altogether holy, and everything that He does, He does well without any shadow of evil upon Him. Now that raises the question then, going back to what John Stuart Mill and others asked a few moments ago, well if the a priori is that God is absolutely good, absolutely righteous, we're still left with the question, how can this be that there's evil in the world? One of the most common ways to answer that question is to deny the reality of evil and to say that evil is simply an illusion.

I mean this is what happens in Christian science for example that denies the reality of evil. I once was involved in a public debate with a professor of Christian science, and we were debating this question of whether evil was real, and I was arguing that there really is such a thing as evil and that it's not just an illusion, and he said, no, it's simply an illusion. And I asked him, do you think I'm an illusion? He said, no, I think you're real. And I said, well, here I am advocating the reality of evil. Do you think that's good that I'm doing that?

He said, no. I said, well, there's one example of the reality of evil because I'm arguing for the reality of evil, which is an evil thing to do if indeed evil is merely an illusion. But anyway, those are the kind of games you get into, but the point is that the Bible sees evil as real and as powerful. Certainly there's a mystery connected to it. It's called the mystery of iniquity.

But what we're most concerned about here in this session is not to look and explore at all the possible philosophical theodicies with respect to evil, but to answer the question here, what is the relationship between God's providence and the origin of evil? Well, there are a couple of things that the Confession affirms here that may make you very uncomfortable, and it may drive you back to chapter 3 when we looked at chapter 3 and the eternal decrees of God, and we remember that that started off with a bombshell where chapter 3 says that God doth freely and immutably from all eternity ordain whatsoever comes to pass. And if the fall of Adam and Eve is something that came to pass, and if God ordains everything that comes to pass, then QED, God must have ordained the fall of Adam and Eve. Well, what do you say to that? I say that the Christian must not shrink from making that affirmation. If you say to me, R.C., do you believe that God ordained the fall of the human race?

I say, certainly, because if He didn't in some sense, it couldn't possibly have happened. Now why is it that that's so troublesome? Why is it that we shrink back in horror at the idea that God ordained the entrance of evil into the world?

Well, let me see if I can answer that for you. I think the reason why we struggle with that and shrink back in horror from asserting that God ordained the fall is that that sounds so very close to the idea that God is the author of evil and the doer of evil because the unspoken, tacit assumption here is that to ordain that evil come into the world is a bad thing. But what if God in His infinite wisdom and perfect goodness for His own inscrutable purposes to manifest His glory in judgment over evil and all the rest ordained that there be such a thing as evil? We know throughout Scripture that even in evil, God can manifest His glory in His triumph over it, in His redemption of it. God manifests His goodness.

Now here's something else we have to be very, very careful of. The Scriptures themselves warn us to beware of people who call good evil and evil good. This is what sin is all about is that when we sin, we want to justify our sin and not only say it's okay to commit the sins that we commit, but actually we go so far in our justification and rationalization of our wicked deeds that we end up praising them as virtues. And that's how depraved human beings can be that they actually begin to call their wickedness goodness and make fun at virtue and ridicule goodness and seek to undermine goodness, assuming that to be good and to be virtuous is bad. And so there is that solemn warning by sacred Scripture to flee from those who teach that good is evil and that evil is good.

And if that's what you hear me saying, then you ought to run away from me because I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that evil is good. Evil is evil, and evil is worthy of God's just punishment. What I am saying is in the eternal scope of things, it is good that there is evil. And that's not the same thing as saying that evil is good. Evil is not good. Evil is evil. But it's a good thing that there is evil or God couldn't have ordained that it come to pass. And if evil enters into the world against the helpless impotency of a sovereign God over which He would have no control, that would exonerate Him from any culpability in the origin of evil, but it would also be the end of His deity because if He is not sovereign over all things, He's not God at all.

And so that price is too heavy to pay to deal with it. And so I think that the authors of the Westminster Confession are right on the money in the way they handle this question. And again, let's look at it. But what they're affirming here is first of all the almighty power. Evil is under the omnipotence of God. Evil is not omnipotent over God. God is omnipotent over evil. And that's great news for us because we live in a world where every day evil triumphs. Recently we celebrated Good Friday, which when it occurred simply looked like Bad Friday because it looked like the greatest miscarriage of justice, the most wicked day in human history when the Son of God incarnate was put to death by evil men.

But against the background of eternity, it was the best day that ever happened for us because in that wicked event that took place in Jerusalem, the redemption of God's people was brought to pass. That's how God has the ability to make all things work together for good, including evil things because His goodness and His almighty power always has the capacity to trump the power of evil. And so the almighty power, the unsearchable wisdom. According to our wisdom, we like to conceive of a world that is unfallen, unblemished, unmarred.

If it were up to me, I would create a world without sin, a world without suffering, not just in the next life but in this life, no pain, no sorrow, no wickedness. That's the extent of my wisdom because that's the way I would do it if I were God. But if you give less than five minutes thought to that hypothetical possibility, I think that you would rejoice in quickly coming to the conclusion that indeed I am not God.

And aren't you glad? Because the wisdom of God so, so surpasses anything that I could ever think or do. And so the divines have it right here. They say, we're going to look at God's power, and we're going to look at His wisdom, and we're going to look what? At the infinite goodness, a goodness that has no boundaries, a goodness that doesn't pass into wickedness at some point on the spectrum. Because in the moral character of God, there is not a spectrum between good and evil.

There's only good, and it goes perfectly in every direction infinitely. And so they start off by affirming the Almighty power, the unsearchable wisdom, the infinities of God so far manifest themselves in His providence that it extends itself even. See, they're understanding the pain of this question, that they're saying that God is so powerful, so good, and so wise that His manifest providence extends even to the first fall and all other sins of angels and men.

Now we get finally to the semicolon. And not by a bare permission, but such as hath joined with it a most wise and powerful bounding and otherwise ordering and governing of them in a manifold dispensation to His own holy ends. Now let me stop there for a minute and take a breath because the relief that's coming after the semicolon at first doesn't sound like much relief because the second part of the sentence goes on and makes it even tougher, puts us on the rack because it says that it doesn't just vaguely somehow within God's providence that evil exists. And it's not there by bare permission where God steps back and allows it to happen, which is the way people like to think about it. But again, whenever God allows something to happen, He chooses to allow it to happen, and He chooses to allow it to happen because He wills that it should happen. So it can't be seen as a bare, passive, spectator type of permission but such that it is joined with a most wise, there again the superlative wisdom and powerful bounding, ordering and governing in a manifold dispensation to His own holy ends.

So what the framers are saying is we don't understand. We don't understand all the mysterious aspects of this, but we know this, that God is in this, in His perfect providence, in His perfect goodness, in His perfect power and wisdom, and for His own purposes, for His own ends, which ends are not just barely eking out a positive affirmation of goodness, which ends are not only holy ends, but they are most holy ends. Now let me just say that's hard.

This is a hard saying, but I'm going to give you a challenge. If you think about this and after thinking about it deeply, you say, I don't believe that. I don't believe in a God who's like that.

I urge you to be honest enough to resign your membership from any Christian church because you're out of grace if you cannot trust God and His character for the world that He has created. And so what we're having here is not simply an intelligent defense of the problem of evil, but a moral defense as well, a moral defense of the character of God, which has to be an a priori in the heart of every Christian. That was R.C. Sproul on this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. In Dr. Sproul's closing remarks today, you heard how serious of a question the providence of God is because how you answer this question reflects on the character of God.

And R.C. Sproul spent his entire ministry helping people know who God is, which is one of the reasons he produced resources like Truths We Confess, taking what he called one of the most important confessions of faith ever penned and providing commentary to help you understand what this confession is teaching and how it summarized biblical Christianity. You can add the hardcover edition of Truths We Confess to your library when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, by phone at 800-435-4343, or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. In addition to receiving this popular resource, your generosity helps keep Renewing Your Mind freely available to Christians around the world, including on our new YouTube channel. If you haven't subscribed yet, I encourage you to do so and to turn on notifications. So give your gift today as this offer ends on Friday. We've thought about the origins of evil, but what about the evil, the sin in your life? How does that relate to God's sovereignty and providence? Join us Thursday here on Renewing Your Mind.