2. Define evil. What did God create when He created evil.
The Definition of Evil:
Evil has three parts and only two of them are bad.
What did God create when He created evil? God did create the evil that entered the world after Adam’s first bad choice,
but that evil is only part of the evil that God created. It seems that all definitions have been wrong because they describe
only the ‘bad’ evil that we see … only those portions of evil that corrupt the world. We see corrupting evil everywhere,
so almost always, we identify and define only that ‘bad’ part of the evil that we see. It is generally assumed that anything
evil must be ‘bad’ but the Good God created evil with three parts.
Defining evil is difficult and most do not include anything that happened before Adam sinned. But that will make it
impossible to solve the Problem of Evil, because evil existed in the Garden of Eden before any consequence of any bad
choice had happened on the earth, as in Genesis 3.
The three parts of evil are first, the created-in-the-image-of-God human ability to make entirely free choices
(Genesis 1:27). This ability, in each entirely free human is good, and is the first part of the evil that God created.
To think about “entirely free choice” is difficult. It makes simplistic explanations impossible. A major
simplistic idea that started early in Bible times, as I summarize in Chapter 16, seems to be persistent. The thought
that people got what they deserve: good people are blessed while bad people are cursed, as Job and his friends believed.
They taught that trouble only happened to bad people, for example. Job, however, did not deserve what happened to him,
and he knew it … so we wonder what was going on?
The answer is that “free choice” is all mixed up by humans. Good people sometimes choose bad and bad people
sometimes choose well … they like being blessed too. This confused those with a simplistic explanation. Even worse,
this mixture of choices, especially the bad choices, affected the food and other parts of the environment. Because of
this, many blame early human choices for our current health challenges, and for other natural evils that assault our lives.
This same simplistic explanation was used in Luke 13:1-5. People asked Jesus if some people who experienced unusual
trouble in their lives were really bad sinners. Jesus’ answer indicates that he did not make that simplistic assumption.
The reality of humans freely making choices with consequences is far more complex. Consequences of choices interact
in complex ways that only God can see. I see in the ideas of ‘karma’ the same simplistic explanation as in
Job and in Luke 13. We are told to “watch out for karma” if we do something to hurt a person, because
“what goes around, comes around” (Chapter 20). Simplistic explanations are easy to say, but to think through the ‘karma’ ideas will leave us with
more unexplained exceptions than we can handle.
Evil has two other parts - the ‘bad’ parts
In Genesis 2:17, God created the second and third parts of evil when He spoke to Adam: “Do not eat from that tree, or
you will die.” The second part of evil is the ‘bad’ option: “do not eat from that tree”.
That was not a bad option for Adam until God commanded him. The third part of evil is the ‘bad’ consequence that happens when the 'bad' option is
chosen: “death”. This bad option and bad consequence for Adam’s free choice is the first evil that God created.
Most believers are okay with God-created humans having the free ability to choose from options … realizing also that
no evil will happen on the earth unless humans choose a bad option. Most believers are also okay with God’s
commandment to Adam. Finally, most are okay with God’s declaration that death is the consequence for breaking His
commandment, and then His enforcement of that consequence. Since these define evil, we should also be okay with
God’s creation of evil. Genesis 1 and 2 describe the first instance of evil that God created. Using the present participle
in Isaiah 45:7, God tells us that He is continually creating evil. This means that today, God creates all of our bad options
(for us to reject), and their consequences if we choose any of these bad options, as in Literal Lenses Book2: Part 1.