ContradictionsReading order 119Bible context 3 min read
Is God the creator of evil?
God is credited with creating evil and inflicting destruction, yet is also described as opposed to wickedness and as love. The word 'evil' sometimes names calamity rather than moral wrongdoing.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Foundational
- A central claim about origins, salvation, divine justice, or religious authority.
Deliberate destructive harm creates a moral tension with divine love, but calamity and wickedness are different senses of evil rather than a direct lexical contradiction.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
God creates or brings the calamities described as evil
Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone.
1 Kings 14:10
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
Read the full chapter:1 Kings 14
And while he yet talked with them, behold, the messenger came down unto him: and he said, Behold, this evil is of the Lord; what should I wait for the Lord any longer?
2 Kings 6:33
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
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