Is God Evil?

Taken from John Piper-Desiring God

God has ultimate control of all things, including evil,
1. Is God then the author of sin?
2. And why does He will that there be evil in the world?
God rules the world in such
a way that all calamities and all sin remain in His ultimate control and therefore
within His ultimate design and purpose.
evil, I have two kinds in mind, natural and moral.
“Naked I came from my mother’s
womb, and naked I shall return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away;
blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).
“Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10)

“I form light and create darkness, I make
well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these.” Amos 3:6
He Himself does not commit sin, but He has decreed that there be acts that are sin.
The evil intentions of men cannot frustrate the decrees of God.
Genesis 50:20. He says to his guilty brothers, “As for you, you meant
evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people
should be kept alive, as they are today.”
The hardened disobedience of men’s hearts leads not to the frustration of
God’s plans, but to their fruition.
In the end, one must finally come to see that if there is a God in heaven,
there is no such thing as mere coincidence, not even in the smallest affairs of
life: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD”
(Proverbs 16:33). Not one sparrow “will fall to the ground without your Father’s
will” (Matthew 10:29, RSV)
To put it in my own words, he said that the infinite complexity
of the divine mind is such that God has the capacity to look at the world
through two lenses. He can look through a narrow lens or through a wideangle
lens.
When God looks at a painful or wicked event through His narrow lens, He
sees the tragedy of the sin for what it is in itself, and He is angered and grieved: “I
have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 18:32).
But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through His wide-angle
lens, He sees the tragedy of the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and
everything flowing out from it.
Sin in itself, and the suffering of the innocent, is abhorrent to God.

Proverbs 16:33 answers: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is
from the LORD.”
Proverbs 19:21: “Many plans are in a man’s
heart, But the counsel of the LORD will stand” (NASB)
IS GOD THE AUTHOR OF SIN?
Edwards answers, “If by ‘the author of sin,’ be meant the sinner, the agent, or
the actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing…it would be a reproach and blasphemy,
to suppose God to be the author of sin. In this sense, I utterly deny God
to be the author of sin.”21 But, he argues, willing that sin exist in the world is
not the same as sinning. God does not commit sin in willing that there be sin.
God has established a world in which sin will indeed necessarily
“sin is not the fruit of any positive
agency or influence of the most High, but on the contrary, arises from the withholding
of his action and energy, and under certain circumstances, necessarily
follows on the want of his influence.”
His willing to order things so that evil should come
to pass, for the sake of the contrary good, is no argument that he
doesn’t hate evil, as evil: and if so, then it is no reason why he may not
reasonably forbid evil as evil, and punish it as such.
So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature,
and the completeness of that communication of God, for which
he made the world;