How Did Evil Begin?

• Scriptures: Genesis 1-3
• Right From the Beginning

• Bible Doctrine, Creation—“The World”

Transcript

Kerry Duke: Hi, I’m Kerry Duke, host of My God and My neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you’ve learned with others.
How many times have you said to God, “Why, Lord?” Why is there evil in the world to begin with? Why is there pain and suffering in this life and why so much? We’re looking at one of the most profound thoughts in life. This is one of the deepest and one of the most important questions you’ll ever think about.
I call it a Grand Canyon issue. If you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon, you realize when you first see it how vast and how huge this part of God’s creation it really is. And if you walk down into the Grand Canyon, you realize that the further you go down into it, the more it expands. The deeper you go into the Grand Canyon, the more ground it seems to open up.
Now, there are some topics like that. There are some issues and there are some questions that are like the Grand Canyon. The deeper you dig into them, the more they expand, the deeper they seem to be. No matter how much you learn, there’s always something else that arises as you look at that issue. Now, the problem of evil that we’re looking at—this question of “Why, Lord? Why is there evil and pain and suffering in this life?—is one of those Grand Canyon issues. You can study it for the rest of your life. You can spend your days and your nights thinking about it, but you’ll never learn everything that you want to. So this is an ocean of material that we’re trying to look at here, and we’re just getting started with it.
When we call this the “problem” of evil, we’re not saying that this is a problem just because it aggravates us or because it’s a burden to bear, but it’s hard to figure out in our minds. It’s hard to live with.
And so we would say that it’s a logical problem. It’s a logical problem from the standpoint that when you look at the facts of the matter, it’s hard for us to reason them out. So here’s the logical side of the problem. First of all, God is all powerful. Secondly, God is all loving. Now He is perfect in power, and He is perfect in His love.
And yet, number three, evil exists. So if God is all powerful, couldn’t He stop all this evil? Couldn’t He put an end to all this suffering that we have? If God is all loving, if He is perfect in his goodness, would He not want to save us from this kind of suffering? Would He not want to put an end to it?
And so how can evil exist if God is all-powerful and God is all-loving? So there are some people that look at that problem and say, “Well, that’s why I don’t believe in God. If God is really all-powerful, then He would have the power to put an end to this. And if God is all-loving, if He really loves us, then shouldn’t He want to put an end to all this suffering?”
And so that’s why I would say that this is a logical problem. Now, we’re not trying to respond to this here. We’re going to look at that later in the study. We’re just getting started with this. But I’m simply pointing out right now that this is a problem inside of our heads because we look at this matter from that standpoint, and even as Christians sometimes we struggle with that, and that’s why we’re going through this series.
That’s why we’re looking at all these questions and all these passages that we’re going to be examining, Lord willing, in this study. So first of all, there is a logical problem. It presents a a problem to our reasoning as human beings, and it’s not simply that we’re trying to figure everything out. It’s not that we’re putting our human reason above God, but God gave us the ability to reason and God gave us this information. He tells us that He’s all-powerful. He tells us that He’s all-loving, and we know that evil exists. So it’s not a wrong thing necessarily to ask the question: how can this be? We’re not looking at a question that is really unheard of or unknown in the human race, in human history. This is something that men have wondered about for thousands of years, and you even find, as we saw in the first lesson in this series, that great and godly men in the Bible, even prophets of God, wondered about this. How can this happen?
But number two, this is also a practical problem and sometimes it’s hard to know which one is the most difficult. There’s a struggle inside of our minds to try to figure out how God can be all-powerful and all-loving, and yet evil exists. He allows evil in spite of the fact that He has those attributes.
But the practical side of this means that we have to live in a world where we suffer. And when I say that we suffer, we suffer physically. We have pains of the body. I don’t have to convince you about that, but we also have pains inside. We have emotional trauma, grief and anger and fear and anxiety and depression and all kinds of things inside that can torment us.
As we saw in the case of Moses and Jeremiah and Habakkuk and Job and many other people in the Bible already, there were great men of God and even prophets of God who cried out to him because they just felt like it was too much. They just considered all the problems of life to be more than they could bear.
So it’s a practical problem in that sense. It’s a logical problem where we use our minds to analyze the facts and try to reason with them, but it’s not just a theoretical issue. It’s not just some kind of academic question. This is a problem of life. It is a practical problem, and that’s where the real life issues and struggles come in with the problem of evil.
So as we talk about this subject for the next few weeks, we need to tread carefully and we need to be respectful because after all we’re talking about God and His creation and how He manages it when we ask this question.
And let’s remember that we have in mind two kinds of evil when we discuss this question. When we talk about the problem of evil, we’re talking about two different things.
First of all, evil in the sense of moral, evil. By that I simply mean sin. Sin is evil in the sight of God. We don’t have to explain that, and that’s what many people oftentimes think of. But there’s also another side to the problem of evil that many people have in mind, maybe even more than the idea of moral evil, and that is natural evil.
That simply refers to suffering. When you read the King James version, you’ll find the word evil used in that sense. Several times in the Bible, for instance, in Job chapter two verse 11, Job’s three friends had heard of all the “evil” that had come upon him. Now that evil there refers to all the hardships that he suffered. He lost his possessions. He lost his children. Then he lost his health. The King James Version refers to that in Job chapter two, verse 11, as “evil.” The New King James Version in that same verse renders that word in the original “adversity,” that is, calamity.
So what we want to do today is to look at the question why by going back to the beginning. And that means we’re going back to the beginning of the Bible, to the Book of Beginnings, which is the Book of Genesis, because here is where we begin to understand what this problem of evil is really all about. So let’s look at some things that I know that you understand well, but I want you to think about these things and review them for just a minute because we’re looking at this from an overall point of view, we’re bringing into mind here so many things that you read about in the Bible and we’re trying to see these from a certain standpoint or from the viewpoint of this question. That is, why do we have this evil in the world? So let’s go back to the very beginning at the start in Genesis chapter one, verse one.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Now, the Bible doesn’t tell us why God created here. It doesn’t state anything about it. There are several indications in other verses in the Bible. You have Isaiah chapter 45, verse 18, which says that God created it not in vain. He created it to be inhabited.
You find in Acts chapter 17, verse 26 and 27, that the Bible says that God made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord; if perhaps they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”
So the ideal purpose of this life, the reason that God created man and placed us on the earth is so that we should seek the Lord. Acts chapter 17 verse 27. That’s the purpose. That’s why we’re here. We’re not here to please ourselves. We’re not here to use our imagination and come up with all kinds of ideas about this universe.
We are here to do the will of God. We are here to seek God. And in Genesis chapter one, you find all kinds of basic facts—fundamental principles about the creation that people really need to understand today. If we’re going to have a good grasp of what we’re talking about, we need to go back to the beginning.
We need to make sure that our foundation is set. We need to make sure that we remember these things as we talk about the problem of evil as we consider it. Now in Genesis chapter one, you find that God created. He created on different levels. He created the dust and the water and the air, the plant life, the land animals, the sea creatures, and mankind.
So God created on these different levels. Now that does enter into the discussion about the problem of evil. God created on all these different levels. Now, He had the power to create any way that He wanted to. He had the power to create one kind of horse, one kind of tree, or one kind of fish. But look at all the variety.
Look at all the diversity in God’s creation. Look at all the different kinds of birds and fish and horses and dogs and cats and trees and insects and all kinds of marine life that you have. This is a wonderful creation, and God had purposes for all these things that we’re talking about. Now, sometimes this is called the principle of plentitude by people because there is so much to consider when you think about the creative hand of God in showing us all these things and giving us all these things, not just for our pleasure and enjoyment to behold these things, but so that we can think about God, so that we can rise in our minds above the creation that we see around us to the creative power of God.
But there are other reasons besides that, and there are some reasons I’m sure about the creation that we will never know until we leave this life (if then). But let’s move on in Genesis, because in Genesis chapter one, verse 26, the Bible tells us something about the way that we’re made that many people just seem to forget these days, but it really goes to the heart of this problem of evil.
When we ask the question, why, Lord, is there so much evil in the world? Genesis one, verse 26: “Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” Now, let’s go to verse 27. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him. Male and female, created He them.” We are made in the image of God.
We are made in the spiritual likeness of God. In other words, our spirits are made like his spirit. We’re not equal to him, obviously, but there is a likeness that is there. And that simply means that we have the ability to thin. We’re above the animals. He makes that clear here in Genesis chapter one. We have the ability to reason.
We have the ability to experience emotional states of mind. We have the ability to think; we have the ability to choose because we have something that we call free will. Now, one of the very short and very important answers to the problem of evil, when we ask the question “Why, Lord” is because of this one thing.
And that is free will. Now, that doesn’t answer everything that we want to know about the problem of evil, but it does answer quite a bit and it probably answers a lot more than people are willing to accept or even think about—maybe even we ourselves sometimes as Christians. God made us as free will beings.
Why is there sin in the world? Because sin is something that you choose. God did not make anybody sin. He never does that. He cannot do that. In James chapter one, verse 13, the Bible says, “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God. For God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempts He any man, but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust.”
Now again, that is James chapter one, verse 13. God does not force anyone to sin. God did not make us as robots where we’re programmed to do good or to do evil. God did not create us as animals where he gives us an instinct that we have no control or any choice about.
And involved in that creation of our spiritual side, you see, God created our bodies, but He also created our spirit or our soul. Implied or involved in the creation of the soul is not only the free will that we have, that is the capacity to choose between good and evil, but also God gave us something that the Bible calls and we understand as the conscience.
God gave us a conscience. Now, God didn’t give a conscience to the animals. He didn’t give a conscience to the trees, but He gave that to us because that is something that helps us to make these decisions about right and wrong. It doesn’t tell us what’s right or wrong, but it does urge us to do what we are convinced is right or to avoid what we’re convinced is wrong.
Sometimes people refer to this as that capacity or that feeling of oughtness. In other words, it urges us to do what we ought to do. So there’s no way to intelligently or rightly talk about the problem of evil, either from a logical standpoint or from a practical viewpoint, unless we keep in mind that we are created in the image of God and that means that we have free will and we also have a conscience.
I would add here also that in Genesis chapter one, verse 27, the Bible says that God created male and female. God created human sexuality. He created male; He created female. And so the Bible shows that this is inherent, this is built into life itself. The concept of male and female is from God, and God made us this way.
That’s why the apostle Paul thousands of years later said in Romans chapter one, verse 26 and 27, that to go against that is to go against nature itself. So in Genesis chapter one, we find that God created all this and everything was good after he created. Now in Genesis chapter two, we find that God created man, He formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
So now man is a living physical as well as a spirit being. The Bible says that God gave man law in the very beginning. In Genesis chapter one, verse 16, the Bible says, “And the Lord God commanded the man saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you shall eat thereof, you shall surely die.”
So they’re created in the image of God. They have free will. That is, they have free choice, they have a conscience, and now they have a divine law, a specific law from God, and they are accountable to him. Now in Genesis chapter three, we read about the entrance of sin into the world. I say the entrance of sin into the world because sin existed before this time, not on earth in human beings, but it was committed.
And I’m talking of course about the angels. The Bible does talk about some of these angels sinning before Adam and Eve sinned. In Second Peter, chapter two, verse four, the Bible talks about the angels that sinned. And then in Jude, verse six, the Bible says, “And the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.”
So some of these angels did go against God’s will. Now exactly and specifically what they did, what their sin consisted of, the Bible does not go into any more detail than what we find here. And it appears that Satan was the leader. He was the ringleader of that rebellion against God. Now, I say that because of Matthew 25, verse 41. That’s where Jesus said to those on the left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” Notice that the devil and his angels. So when we ask the question, why is there evil in the world, we have to go back before that a little bit if we’re going to look at this from the overall standpoint, and that is, we have to look at the question, why is it that angels sinned? And the only thing that we can really say about that is, is that evidently God gave them free will. It would certainly go against Scripture to say that God made or forced the devil to sin or that he made or forced those other angels to sin as well.
Evidently, they sinned of their own free will, of their own free choice and their own accord. So if this happened with the angels and this happened to Satan, then that explains why the Bible says in Romans five, verse 12,by one man sin entered the world. It doesn’t say in Romans five, verse 12 by one man sin “began” in the world.
It says by one man sin “entered” the world. The sin had already been committed by these angels, and now it’s been injected into mankind by the devil himself. So in Genesis chapter three, we have this beginning story of mankind about how sin began in this life. So in Genesis chapter three, verse one, the Bible says, “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, Has God indeed said, You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”
You notice that the Bible here doesn’t say anything about this serpent other than what you read. It doesn’t say anything about the devil. It doesn’t say anything about Satan, but we know because of passages in the New Testament especially that Satan was using this serpent, or he was appearing in the form of serpent because you read about that in second Corinthians 11 verse three.
The serpent Beguiled Eve through his subtlety. That was the devil himself. Revelation chapter 12, verse nine: he’s also called a serpent there and here we find how the devil operates, how he lures us into sin. He doesn’t accuse God of anything at this point. He simply asks a question, and sometimes that starts people thinking in the wrong direction quicker and more effectively than making an outright charge against the Bible and against God.
In other words, he didn’t say God didn’t say that, that God is a bad God, God is an unjust God, He doesn’t love you or anything like that. He merely posed a question. He’s planting a seed of doubt here, and I want you to notice in verse one that it says that he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said…?” The word “indeed” means truly, or verily, or really.
So what the devil is asking here is, “Did God really say this? Did God indeed, did he truly say you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? Did God actually say that?” And perhaps: did he really mean that? This is the approach that the devil used in the beginning, and he uses it to this very day with you and with me.
Now in Genesis chapter three, verse two, the Bible says, “The woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.” Now, those words “nor shall you touch it” are not in the Bible.
What we see is that God said if you eat it, you will die. The Bible tells us then that the serpent came right out. He’s already laid the groundwork and so he’s now ready to make an accusation against God. He says, “You will not surely die.” He outrightly contradicts, he denies, what God has said now, “for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Now it’s important for us to go back to this old story and to review it because here is the first instance where somebody is saying this is not fair. This is not right. God has told you something that is really not going to happen. But not only that, God has told you this because he doesn’t want you to eat that fruit since, if you do, your eyes will be open and you’ll be like God. You’ll know good from evil and God doesn’t want that. And so that’s not fair to you. That’s not right. God has tied you down. God has hemmed you in. This is not good and it is not right or fair for you. That’s what he’s saying here in Genesis chapter three, verse four.
Now, isn’t that the very idea that people struggle with today? Life is not fair for whatever reason. And for whatever grounds that they might dream up as to why life is not fair, that’s their beef with God. That’s their accusation against God. This is just not fair. And so Eve accepted that lure.
The Bible tells us in verse six, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.”
In other words, they gained an understanding here that they didn’t have before—the guilt of what they had done. The shame of what they had done is now coming in upon them, and they have a comprehension of, they have an awareness of their situation that they didn’t have before, and they seek to cover themselves.
They want to cover themselves because they think that they can hide from God. This is what is going through their mind now. That is the twisted nature of sin. That’s what it does to all of us once we commit sin. Now, I’m not saying that that changes our minds and makes us crazy, but it makes us do some things that don’t make sense.
Now as Adam and Eve are hiding from God in the midst of the trees of the garden, the Bible says God called Adam and said, “Where are you? And Adam said, I heard your voice in the garden. I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.” That’s when God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? Then the man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, What is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate.”
So then God pronounces these curses upon everybody that was involved. Now, if you want to talk about why we have suffering in this life, why there is evil in a moral sense and suffering on the physical plane as well, you have to go back to Genesis chapter three and read these verses. In verse 14, the Bible says, “The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.” Verse 15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.” That is the first prophecy. That is the first announcement that we find in the Bible of Jesus Christ.
But let’s move on to verse 16 because we’re talking about why we have sin, and at this point, especially why we have suffering in this life. Now, notice verse 16, “To the woman, He said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain you shall bring forth children, and your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.”
So first of all, there was a change in the physical and emotional state or condition of the woman, and it’s true to this very day. Notice that he said in verse 16, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow.” You were going to have sorrow anyway when you had children. You were going to have pain when you delivered children.
So it was always God’s plan for the woman to have children. But God said it’s going be worse now because of what you’ve done. “I will greatly”—He doesn’t just say, “I will multiply” it, but “I will greatly multiply” your sorrow and your conception also evidently will be more frequent and “in pain you shall bring forth children.”
We don’t need to explain that to any of you that are mothers. You know that better than men do. But at the same time, this passage shows that it is worse today. It is worse after Eve’s sin because of what she did. But then God also turned to Adam and in verse 17 He said to Adam, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you saying “You shall not eat of it,” cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.” Now, that’s not the beginning of work. God did not give him the responsibility to work in Genesis chapter three.
He already had that. In Genesis chapter two, verse five, the Bible says that there was not a man to till the ground. In Genesis chapter two, verse 15, God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and to keep it. So it was always man’s responsibility to work. That had been true from the very creation, but now what He’s saying is that is going to be harder.
So some of the suffering that we have in this life, the fatigue and some of the problems that go with this life are due to the fact that God cursed the ground. And so work is harder now. In Genesis chapter three, then, we not only have the beginning of sin and the human race, but we have the consequences.
We have the penalty that God gave to them, the punishment that God gave, and we live with the result of that punishment to this very day. So women and men today suffer more. They have to bear a heavier burden now because of this sin of Adam and Eve. Now, if you say, “Well, that’s not fair,” then you might need to ask the question, “What would you have done?”
What would we have done if we had been in the garden instead of Adam and Eve? Would we have done any differently? So this is one of the reasons why we need to go back to the beginning, and I want you to notice in Genesis three verse 19 that God says you are to work the ground till you return to the ground.
“For out of it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Then in verse 22, God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us to know good and evil, and now lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever, Therefore, the Lord God sent him out of the garden to till the ground from which he was taken.”
So man now is mortal. Man now is suspect to diseases. He is vulnerable to this life in ways that he was not before. So we have a mortal body. This body is not permanent. This body will not last forever. It’s made of the dust of the ground, and as Adam was told here, that dust will return to the earth. So our bodies are suspect to accidents. They’re suspect to disease. They age, they decay, and they finally go back to the dust because we will die. That will happen when the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 12:7 “the dust will return to the earth as it was.” So I urge you to please go back and read Genesis one, two, and three because that will give you a starting point for looking at and thinking about this question of why, Lord, do these things happen?
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