If God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil?

Suffering, Evil & Hard QuestionsIn theological review

The short answer

Evil exists because God's good creation has been genuinely damaged, first by rebellious spiritual beings and then by human sin, and God has chosen for now to permit what he hates rather than unmake the world and everyone in it. Scripture never calls evil good or necessary. It says God will judge it, has entered its worst in the cross, and will remove it from a renewed creation.

The fuller answer

State the objection at full strength, because the Bible does. If God is perfectly good, he must hate evil. If he is all powerful, he must be able to stop it. Evil plainly exists, in cruelty, disease, disaster and death. So either God is not good, or not powerful, or not there. Any answer that softens one of those three points to escape the problem has stopped answering the question that sufferers are actually asking, and sufferers can always tell the difference.

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.

Romans 5:12 (BSB)

Scripture's first move is not a theory but a story. God made a good world and human beings made in his image, free enough to trust him or to refuse him. In Genesis 3 they refused, and the damage ran in every direction: shame between people, pain, thorns, hard ground and death. Paul sums it up by saying sin and death entered through one man and spread to all. Evil, on this account, is not a rival kingdom God built. It is corruption inside a good one.

I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us.

Romans 8:18 (BSB)

Augustine of Hippo, writing The City of God in the fifth century, gave this a careful name. Evil, he argued, is not a substance God created but a privation, a lack or spoiling of a good thing, the way blindness is a lack in an eye and rot is a spoiling of wood. That does not make evil unreal or painless. It means evil has no independent life of its own. It only ever feeds on good things: bodies, minds, loves and powers that were made good and have gone wrong.

‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:4 (BSB)

Why, then, does God not end it today? Scripture gives pieces, not a complete explanation. His patience leaves room for people to repent. His purposes can bring good even out of acts he condemns. And in Jesus he has not watched suffering from outside: he has been betrayed, beaten and crucified. The final answer the Bible offers is an ending, not an argument. Creation itself, Paul says, groans and waits, and the last chapters promise a renewed world with death, mourning and pain gone. Christians hold the objection seriously because their own book refuses to call evil anything else.

Sources

Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
Augustine, The City of God

Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.

Dig deeper

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Why does God allow suffering?The Bible does not give one reason for every instance, and anyone who offers you one is overselling. It does give a frame: the world is fallen and groaning, human evil does real damage, God is patient toward a world he intends to judge and remake, and in the meantime he has entered the suffering himself in Jesus Christ. The final answer is not an explanation but an ending: a day when he wipes away every tear.Did God create evil?No. Scripture says God is light, with no darkness in him at all, and that he tempts no one to do evil. The one text often quoted against this, Isaiah 45:7, uses a Hebrew word that in its own context means calamity and disaster, the judgment God warned he would bring, not moral wickedness, which Scripture consistently traces to rebellious creatures, not to its Creator.Why do bad things happen to good people?Bad things happen to good people because this world is fallen and its harms are not distributed by merit, a point Jesus made himself when he refused to blame disaster victims for their own deaths. The book of Job strips away the tidy theory that suffering always matches sin. God never told Job he deserved his losses. In the end God vindicated the sufferer and rebuked the friends who had explained him.Where is God when it hurts?With you, is the Bible's answer, though rarely in the way we would have scripted. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble, says the psalm, written out of trouble, not about it. And in Christ he has not watched suffering from outside it. The God of the cross knows the inside of pain, and his invitation to the weary is rest, not explanations.Bible Character: AdamThe first man, formed by God from the dust of the ground and placed in the garden of Eden.Bible Character: EveThe first woman, built by God from Adam's rib, and the mother of all the living.Bible Character: JesusThe Son of God, born of Mary in Bethlehem, who preached the kingdom of God, was crucified for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was raised on the third day.Lesson: The big story of the BibleThe Bible is one story, not sixty-six separate ones. Walk the whole arc once, from creation to new creation, and every book you open will have a place to sit.