It’s bad enough to do evil and abstain from good. But God condemns the moral sleight of hand by which we confuse good and evil: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20).

Paul built on this when he wrote, “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good” (Romans 12:9). Passages like Amos 5:14–15; Romans 16:19; 1 Peter 3:11 and 3 John 11 all presume we know the difference between good and evil. But in a culture that so often switches the price tags so what’s valuable looks worthless and what’s cheap demands a high price, this doesn’t come naturally. We must regularly withdraw to Scripture and ask God’s Spirit to train our minds and consciences to recognize what’s truly good and what’s truly evil.

Evil, in its essence, puts someone or something else in God’s place.

Most people today understand evil as anything that harms others. The more harm done, the more evil the action.

Evil is the fundamental and troubling departure from goodness. The Bible uses the word evil to describe that which violates God’s moral will. The first human evil occurred when Eve and Adam disobeyed God. From that original sin—a moral evil—came the consequence of suffering. Although suffering results from moral evil, it is distinguishable from it, just as an injury caused by drunken driving isn’t synonymous with the offense.

Evil could be defined as “the refusal to accept the true God as God.” For this very reason, the Bible treats idolatry as the ultimate sin.

Any attempt to liberate ourselves from God’s standards constitutes rebellion against God. In replacing His standards with our own, we not only deny God but affirm ourselves as God. Evil is always an attempted coup, an effort to usurp God’s throne.

Psalm 2 describes earthly kings standing against God and His anointed one and declaring, “Let us break their chains.” God scoffs at them and replies that He has installed His king on Zion—and they have no hope of conquering His Chosen One (see 2:2–6).

Evildoers not only reject God’s law and create their own; they attempt to take the moral high ground by calling God’s standards “unloving,” “intolerant,” and “evil.”

Moral evil comes in two forms—blatant evil that admits its hatred for goodness, and subtle evil that professes to love goodness while violating it.

Some view evil as the absence of good.

The logic goes like this: There is no such thing as cold, only lower degrees of heat (or the complete lack of it). Darkness is not the opposite of light, but the absence of light. Death is not the opposite of life, but its privation. A cloth can exist without a hole, but that hole cannot exist without the cloth. Good can, did, and will exist without evil. But evil cannot exist without the good it opposes. A shadow is nothing but the obstruction of light—no light, no shadow. Augustine said in The City of God, “Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”

New Testament vocabulary sometimes supports this concept. We see it in words such as unrighteous, unjust, ungodly, lawless, and godless. These suggest that we best understand evil as a departure from God’s goodness. However, while this definition contains helpful insights, it doesn’t go far enough.

More than merely the absence of good, evil is the corruption of good.

The Holocaust was not “nothing.” The Killing Fields were not “nothing.” The 9/11 attacks were not “nothing.” All were real horrors, down to every emaciated corpse, bullet-riddled body, and person jumping out a window.

Perhaps we could better conceive of evil as a parasite on God’s good creation, since a parasite is something substantial. Without the living organism it uses as a host, the parasite cannot exist. As metal does not need rust, but rust needs metal, so good does not need evil, but evil needs good.

Grace and forgiveness, both expressions of God’s eternal character, are moral goods, but without evil they wouldn’t have become clearly evident. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit don’t need compassion, mercy, grace, or forgiveness. These qualities could only be fully expressed to finite and fallen creatures.

Some of God’s virtues will forever capture the spotlight that, without evil and suffering’s temporary hold on us, never would have taken the stage.

Immoral acts are primary evils, while their consequences, including suffering, are secondary evils.

Scripture portrays moral evils of rebelling against God, and natural evils including disease and disasters.

Child abuse is evil, demonstrated by the harm it inflicts on the innocent victim. We consider cancer and earthquakes evils because they bring suffering. While the evils of cancer and earthquakes differ from the moral evil of rebellion against God, the two are related. Human rebellion led God to curse the earth, which brought severe physical consequences.

Diseases and disasters are in a sense unnatural because they result from evil, an unnatural condition.

Disobeying God, inseparable from the failure to trust God, was the original evil. From that sin—a moral evil—came the consequence of suffering. So suffering follows evil as a caboose follows an engine. Scripture sometimes refers to calamities and tragic events as evils. To distinguish these, we can call moral evil primary evil, and suffering secondary evil.

“But just as every good promise of the LORD your God has come true, so the LORD will bring on you all the evil he has threatened, until he has destroyed you from this good land he has given you” (Joshua 23:15). Note that the “evil” mentioned here is not moral evil. Rather, it’s a holy God bringing judgment upon guilty people.

In some cases God builds punishments into moral evils. Paul says of those committing sexual sins that they “received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion” (Romans 1:27).

Secondary evils provoke our indignation.

Why do innocent people suffer? Although many secondary evils befall us even when we have not directly committed a sin that causes them, we would not have to deal with secondary evils if we didn’t belong to a sinful race. Short-term suffering serves as a warning and foretaste of eternal suffering. Without a taste of Hell, we would neither see its horrors nor feel much motivation to do everything possible to avoid it. Hence, the secondary evil of suffering can get our attention and prompt us to repent of our primary moral evil.

God uses secondary evils as judgments that may produce ultimate good.

Jeremiah 11:17 uses the same Hebrew word for evil in both the primary sense (moral evil) and the secondary sense (adverse consequences of moral evil): “The LORD of hosts, who planted you, has pronounced evil against you because of the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done to pro­voke Me by offering up sacrifices to Baal” (NASB).

Because our English word has a narrower meaning, most translators normally choose “evil” when used of people disobeying God, but “disaster” or “calamity” when used of God bringing judgment on sinful people.

After promising judgment, God also promised He would bring good to His people—good that ultimately would outweigh the evil. Note the repetition of the word “good” in the following. God says,

They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul. (Jeremiah 32:38–41)

God’s people endure temporary judgments for their sin. But God makes an “everlasting covenant,” promising, “I will never stop doing good to them.”

Evils, whether moral or natural, will not have the final say. God will replace both with everlasting good.

The surgeon inflicts suffering on the patient and the parent disciplines the child, but they do good, not evil. Likewise, God can permit and even bring suffering upon His children without being morally evil. God hates moral evil and is committed to utterly destroying it. Yet for now He allows evil and suffering, and can providentially use them for His own good purposes.

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