Is God the author of evil?
No — God ordains that evil occurs and rules it for good, but He never commits it; the guilt is the creature’s. Joseph told his brothers, ‘You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good’ (Genesis 50:20), and the cross was both God’s set purpose and a crime by ‘lawless hands’ (Acts 2:23). God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone (James 1:13); He is the Master of evil, never its author.
The Bible teaches two things that seem impossible to hold together. God created everything that exists, and God is perfectly good — “there is no unrighteousness in Him” (Psalm 92:15). Yet evil is undeniably real. If God made everything and God is good, where did evil come from, and is He behind it?
The answer Scripture gives is careful, and it refuses to collapse into either of the easy errors. It will not say that evil somehow escaped God's control, as though something happens in His universe that He did not permit. And it will not say that God is the doer of evil, as though the sin belongs to Him. Both of those would be false. The truth holds two things at once: God ordains everything that comes to pass, including the evil acts of His creatures — and yet God is not the author of sin, because the creatures who commit evil do so freely, from their own desires, and bear the guilt themselves. This is not a modern compromise. It is what the Christian church has confessed for centuries, and it is drawn straight from the way Scripture itself speaks.
The clearest place to see it is the cross. On the day of Pentecost, Peter told the crowd that Jesus was “delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God” — and in the very same breath said that they had taken Him and “by lawless hands have crucified, and put to death” (Acts 2:23). One sentence, both truths. God had ordained the death of His Son before the foundation of the world; the men who carried it out were murderers, acting freely and wickedly, fully answerable for what they did. The worst crime in human history was, at the same moment, the greatest act of God's saving purpose. If those two truths can meet at the cross, they can meet everywhere.
This is why the word “author” has to be handled with care. To call God the author of sin, in the ordinary sense, would mean He is the one who commits it, delights in it, and is guilty of it — and that Scripture flatly denies. God does not sin, tempt anyone to sin, or take pleasure in evil; He is not “tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone” (James 1:13).
What God does is ordain that evil will occur, set its limits, and govern it toward an end He has chosen — without ever being the one who does the wrong. The sin remains entirely the creature's. The purpose behind permitting it is entirely God's. To lose either half is to lose the biblical answer: deny God's control and evil becomes an accident He is helpless to stop; make God the doer and He becomes a sinner. Scripture holds the narrow line between them.
And it insists that God permits no evil pointlessly. He does not merely tolerate it; He overrules it, bending even the worst that men intend toward a good they never imagined. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, said it to their faces years later: “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 50:20). This is the pattern that runs through all of Scripture, reaching its height at Calvary: God takes the evil that creatures freely choose and makes it serve the very good they set themselves against.
So evil is real, and it is grievous, but it is neither outside God's control nor charged to His account. It exists for a season, under His hand, permitted for reasons that will finally display His mercy, His justice, and His glory. The God who governs it is not its author. He is its Master, and one day its end.