Did God create sin?

Therefore it was a necessity that sin should be allowed entrance into this world, for though an enemy has brought it to pass, God will make it serve to give effect to His eternal purpose. It must not for a moment be supposed that He was the author of sin, or that He brought it into the world. Had He done either His purpose never could have been effectuated. It was by one of His creatures it was brought into existence, and by another of His creatures it found entrance into the world. The devil was the first sinner. His pride made him think he was the equal of God (Ezek. 28:9); Adam by an attempt at equality with God allowed it to come into the world (Gen. 3:5). That God could have prevented the existence of sin, or having allowed it to exist, He could have prevented its entrance into the world, cannot rightly be questioned. It is obnoxious to Him, and He will eventually cleanse His universe from its presence, but in the meantime He makes it, as well as the one who is its father, to serve His purpose.

It would, I am persuaded, be impossible for anyone possessing even in a feeble measure the knowledge of God, to think that anything could enter His creation unknown to Him, or that a thought could spring up in the mind of any intelligent being without His cognition. Every enlightened soul will gladly acknowledge, that from no quarter could the omniscient One be surprised by an enemy. Nothing could possibly be hid from Him, before whom hell is naked, and destruction without a covering. At the same time the faithful heart revolts with horror from the doctrine that would make the holy and righteous God the Author and Inventor of the evil which has ruined His fair creation. Evil could not enter the creation without His knowledge and permission, but He is not the author of it, the devil is that; he abode not in the truth. “He is a liar and the father of it.” And this is just what sin is; it is lawlessness, and lawlessness is departure from the truth, for the truth is the right relation of everything to God, and sin is falsehood and departure from this, and becomes manifested in the lawlessness of the rebel creature.

But although God is not the author of sin, but its Judge, He, for His own wise purposes, allowed it to enter His dominions. He will make it serve Him, and He will get glory to His great and holy name through it, and in the end banish it from His sight forever; and we may be sure enough of this, that were it not destined to serve the purposes of His heart, it could have gained no entrance. But it does serve Him, not willingly, but in spite of the fact that it is an enemy it is made to serve Him, as is every other creature, be that creature good or evil, be it the horrible invention of the wicked mind of angel or of man, or be it the offspring of the goodness of God Himself, everything must serve in the carrying out of the purposes of His love; and in nothing shall the creature be triumphant, for dust must be the serpent’s meat, and every proud spirit must be humbled, and in the end come to learn, in the bitterness of eternal defeat, destruction and death, that all its profound plotting and restless wickedness have only been helping on the end the blessed God had in view from the beginning.

There is only one answer to be given. God is not the author of evil, but He has allowed sin for His own glory. He did not create creatures who were incapable of choosing between good and evil, else He would have created mere machines—infinitely more wonderful than motor cars and aeroplanes, but yet on the same level.

Could such a Being be the Author of sin? Assuredly not. But Scripture does not enlighten us as to how sin came into existence. We have the history of its first appearance, but we are not enlightened as to the why and wherefore.

He is not the author of it: the devil is, he sins from the beginning (1 John 3:8). There was no sinner before him. Set in the most exalted position in which creature was ever set, his pride rose up in rebellion against the One who had made him, and who in goodness gave him that exalted place. We have him addressed by the prophet under the figure of the king of Tyrus (Ezek. 28), and he is told, “Thou wast perfect in thy ways, from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” Sin began to exist in the thought of that anointed cherub. There the inky river whose foul waters found their way into the garden of Eden, and from thence have filled the world with violence, corruption, sorrow, death, and woe, is traced to its source. How many ages have run their courses since this terrific being brought sin into God’s fair creation Scripture does not say, but the earth seems to bear upon its granite ribs many a scar of past conflict, and violence seems to have been for ages rampant in the lower order of creation, as it is today; but whether this was due to the influence of sin’s primogenitor, or whether it was not, we cannot tell. We do know that he was the first transgressor, and that to this day he remains the same evil, lawless, God-hating being he ever was, and that all who have fallen under his baleful influence remain in their fallen condition unchanged—all except man, who has become the subject of grace, and from whose race God makes a selection, recreating the objects of His choice, that they may be vessels of His praise. The rest remain in their natural rebellious condition, the enemies of God and of His Christ and of the gospel of His grace.

Of course God never created any being or intelligence sinful. Sinfulness was acquired by self-will. As Satan fell and became the destroyer, Apollyon, so his angels fell and became demons. All through the four Gospels we get constant allusions to demons. These are clearly those fallen angels who are not under everlasting chains.

Either God must refrain, — we write the words with reverence — from creating such a being, of this high and glorious order of existence, with a free choice and will; or He must leave the question of evil a possibility to him. Alas, for the result! of which a fallen race speaks with such terrible reality. He chose the evil and refused the good; and the moment he exercised his choice he became a sinner. Man, created in the image of God, fell from that pinnacle of eminence, never to be restored to it again. Fallen Adam begets a son in his own likeness after his image (Gen. 5:3), while unfallen Adam had been created “in the likeness of God” (Gen. 5:1).

Observe, in all this there was no thought of man being holy: nor could it have been said as afterwards of the “new man,” that he of Him, was “created in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph. 4:24). God is holy — absolutely so. But holiness is relative, inasmuch as it supposes evil to exist, and implies absolute separation from it. This could not be said of man, as God created him. He was pure, and perfectly good, but evil was not for him in existence, until he chose evil, when presented in the form of a temptation, and thus he threw aside the authority and will of God, who had given it to him. So of righteousness, which also presupposes the existence of evil.

When God made man, He did not make him as he is, any more than the world as it is. He made everything good, but He was not pleased to put forth His power to keep everything good. He was pleased to put the creature to the proof. He tried the creature in two great spheres — above and below. The angels fell before man; and the chief of those that fell above is the great tempter. No man can account for sin, for the ruin of the world, in any other way than Scripture reveals. Many a man has essayed to do so. The brightest wits and the greatest minds have attempted it; but they have never conceived anything that was not rubbish when they have not followed the word of God. Some have endeavoured to account for sin by supposing that there are two Gods — a good one and a bad one; because there are evidences of goodness all around us, and there are too plainly the evidences of badness. This hypothesis, I need not stay to show, is sheer folly. There is but one who is Almighty; and man cannot get rid of the consciousness of One — not merely one thing but One Being — One who has power and will and purpose, One who has affections no less than mind, but who, nevertheless, subjects the creatures that He made to a moral probation. If He kept everything from falling, there could be no such trial at all. All would be mechanical or chemical; and the wonderful scene of the conflict of good and evil — of good wrought by His grace in the heart of man, and rising above Satan's power and wiles of evil — would be quite lost. What is still more important, the active display of love and righteousness on God's part, of moral qualities reproduced in repentant believing man, would be completely destroyed, if it were merely divine power so keeping the creature that there could be no failure.

But evil never came from God — only from the creature once innocent, now fallen, that kept not his first estate, but chose to do his own will and have his own way. An angel did this first. Man was misled by him who, straying and exalting himself, beguiled others both in heaven and on earth. That creature is called Satan — the Devil. All efforts to get rid of this fact have proved utterly vain, so much so that the boasted lights of antiquity fell consequently into one or other of these notions: either that God is everything, which denies sin; or, secondly, that there is no such being as God at all; while both cases led to worshipping ever so many false gods. Witness now the two greatest philosophers of Greece who have exercised perhaps the largest and most enduring influence over civilised men outside the Bible — the one the head of Pantheism, the other of Atheism. There is what man's thought ends in when it is logically carried out. Man in his fallen estate may reason God away; yet he excludes God, not from his conscience, but in his reason; for at the bottom of the man's heart who does so there is the uneasy feeling that what he sees around him did not grow like a potato — least of all, he himself and his fellows. He feels that, though fallen, he is a moral being who will have to give an account of his action; and to whom but to God — the One who made him and all things?

It appears from Scripture that the action of the Throne in holy government came into operation before man came into being. For the entrance of sin, and its continued presence, one of only two reasons can be given. It is permitted for wise reasons on the part of Him who is Sovereign Ruler, or else it is there in defiance of Him, and at His expense. The latter is unthinkable, as we conclude, for all Scripture, and indeed all nature, proves that sin is permitted as serving the great Creator's end. We know not when sin first came in, but we know by whom it came. It certainly was known to God, as an abstract conception, from eternity, but it had its origin in the creature. "The devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). This beginning of sin, which Scripture defines to be lawlessness, called into action that Throne of which justice and judgment are said to be the character (Ps. 89:14). "God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment" (2 Peter 2:4). Man's departure from God into sin transferred these operations of moral government into the race of God's predilection. It is remarkable how the later parts of divine revelation refer to these activities of God in moral government from the very earliest of His ways. The outstanding instances of holy government are recorded for us in 2 Peter 2:4-6. Against fallen angels first, then the deluge in the days of Noah, and further the destruction of the ungodly in the fires of Sodom and Gomorrha.

It is well for suffering saints to know that God holds the reins. "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed" (Job 38:11). In the working out of His ways, He may change the times and the seasons and remove kings and set up kings (Dan. 2:21). He may even go back upon what we speak of as the laws of nature, but never for one moment has He changed His word. "Thou hast magnified Thy Word above all Thy name" (Psalm 138:2). In the material realm iron has been made to swim, the Jordan while in spate was made to divide and go backwards, the sea to divide and made a path for the redeemed of the Lord, and the sun to go back in his course — but never once has He gone back upon His word. From this He never has, never will, nor ever can depart. While it is clear there can be no limit to His power, we know He is governed by His love, and, in the region of moral verities, there are certain things He cannot do. "He cannot deny Himself" (2 Tim. 2:13). "God cannot be tempted with evil" (James 1:13). "God is not unrighteous" (Heb. 6:10). "For Thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with Thee" (Psalm 5:4). From these, and other passages, we learn that God is so governed by His nature, that He cannot do anything that is opposed to justice. It is not that He obligates Himself to use His almighty power in accord with the principle of Justice, but that justice so inheres in His moral nature that He cannot act otherwise. Think for a moment of the grace of the Almighty stooping down to tell us this, that we may be able to stay ourselves upon Himself.

There is ample light as to the origin and entrance of evil into this world, and with that we have been dealing. Scripture also indicates that it was through pride that sin found a place originally with the devil (1 Tim. 3:6), and under the title "King of Tyre" we appear to get a description of Satan's original glory and irremediable fall in Ezekiel 28:11-19. But as to why God, knowing all that would ultimately be involved, ever created Satan or man, and why He permitted evil to ever invade any part of His fair creation, Scripture is silent, and we know nothing.