Where Did Evil and Sin Come From?

This is one of the deepest questions there is, and Scripture answers part of it clearly while leaving part of it in shadow—so honesty requires saying both. What is clear is this: evil did not come from God. God made everything good—“God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31)—and “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). He is not the author of evil, and he does not tempt anyone to it (James 1:13). Whatever evil is, it is not a thing God created; it is a corruption, a spoiling, of the good he made.

Where, then, did it enter? Through the misuse of freedom by creatures. God made angels and humans as real persons able to love and obey him—which necessarily meant able not to. Evil first appeared when creatures who were made good turned away from God. Some angels rebelled; then the tempter drew our first parents into the same rebellion in Eden, where distrust of God’s word led to disobedience (Genesis 3), and sin, with all its ruin, entered the human race. Sin, at its root, is not a substance but a turning—a good creature curving away from the God who is the source of all good.

But notice what this does not fully explain, and where the Church has always stopped short: why a good creature, in a good world, with every reason to trust a good God, would turn away at all. That first turn has no reasonable cause—which is exactly why it is called irrational and inexcusable. Sin cannot be given a tidy explanation without half-excusing it. So Scripture describes the entrance of evil without offering a formula that would make it make sense.

What it offers instead is better than an explanation: a remedy. The Bible spends far less energy accounting for evil’s origin than announcing its defeat. The God who let creatures be free did not abandon them to the wreckage; he entered it himself, in Christ, to undo it. Genesis 3 is not the last word. The cross is.