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.
First a question: when did God create evil? The answer: before the fall, before Adam's sin …
when everything was perfect. The evil that God created did not corrupt the earth. Most believers and unbelievers alike
do not believe that the Good God could create the evil we see because they assume that evil has been in the world only since Adam and others have been making bad choices.
Yet evil existed before Adam sinned, and did not corrupt the perfect Garden of Eden, in which it first existed.
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 evil to be only that part of the evil that we see to be bad.
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 the first part of the evil God created. 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 without human (my) choices. Most believers are also okay with God commanding Adam as He did.
Finally, most are okay with God declaring consequences for breaking His commandment, and then enforcing those consequences.
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. In Isaiah 45:7, God tells us that He creates evil all the time. 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.
In sum, God created all three parts of evil in the perfect Garden of Eden, and did not corrupt the Garden or the earth or Adam.
So we believe God, Who created evil, and we define evil to be exactly what He created.