Does God create evil?

The Hebrew word ra (H7451) is as broad as the English word ‘bad’: it can mean moral wickedness, but very often it means harm, trouble or disaster. In Isaiah 45:7 the pairs show which sense is meant. Light is set against darkness, and peace against ra; the opposite of peace (shalom, ‘well-being’) is not sin but calamity, which is how the WEB and BSB translate it. God is saying that he rules over prosperity and disaster alike, and the context is his raising up of Cyrus to overturn empires (45:1–6). Calvin drew the classic distinction: God is the author of the evil of punishment, not of the evil of guilt.

Amos 3:6 is about the same kind of evil: the trumpet in the city is an alarm of war, and the disaster that follows is God’s judgment on Israel (the BSB has “If calamity comes to a city”). Lamentations 3:38 sets ‘evil and good’ side by side as adversity and blessing, in a poem that has just said, “he doth not afflict willingly” (3:33); Job 2:10 and 2 Kings 6:33 use ‘evil’ in the same way, of suffering and famine. Jeremiah 18:11 shows both senses in one verse: God frames evil (disaster) against Judah, and calls each person to turn from “his evil way” (sin). Ezekiel 20:25, where God says he gave Israel “statutes that were not good”, also speaks of judgment: because they had “despised my statutes” and their eyes were after their fathers’ idols (20:24), he gave them up to the corrupt customs they had chosen. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown call this righteous retribution and compare Psalm 81:12, “So I gave them up unto their own hearts’ lust”. James 1:13 and Psalm 5:4 speak of moral evil, and there the Bible is consistent: God never entices anyone to sin.

Against two rival gods

Keil and Delitzsch, among others, also see in Isaiah 45:7, which closes the prophecy about the Persian king Cyrus, a contrast with the dualism of Zarathustra (Zoroaster), in which two opposing powers of light and darkness divide the world between them: Israel’s God has no rival, and rules over all things.