This is a very fascinating question and also a fair and sensible doubt many Christians and non-Christians struggle with.
I believe this doubt originates from the understanding that the bible tells us that God is good and perfect and that everything He created is good and perfect, so how could God have created evil ?
Before we dive in this question let us clearly define the scope of the meaning of the word “evil”. This first step is very important due to the fact that the word “evil” can have different connotations depending on the context. You might say “The rubbish bin was giving off an evil smell” meaning an extremely unpleasant smell for example.
We also have to disregard the broad meaning of the word evil as “having a harmful effect on people” because the bible has many examples of God in his wisdom availing of disasters, calamities, misfortunes, or hardships to carry out judgment or to accomplish His will.
For the purpose of this article then we’ll define the meaning of the word “evil” as being something that’s morally bad that people do to other people.
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Matthew 4:17
One striking characteristic about the Gospel is the availably and accessibility of the kingdom of heaven.
The word kingdom implies that there is a reign (place and time) which is ruled by a king. In simple terms, the kingdom of God is a whenever and wherever God’s will is done:
This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:9–10
In the book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard states:
Every one of us has a “kingdom” — or a “queendom,” a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens. Here is a truth that reaches into the deepest part of what it is to be a person. We are made to “have dominion” within an appropriate domain of reality. This is the core of the likeness or image of God in us and is the basis of the destiny for which we were formed.
We can clearly see this truth is Genesis 1:27–28:
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Any being that has say over nothing at all is no person, that’s why God made us to have dominion in a limited sphere (body and thoughts being the most basic ones). The sense of having some degree of control over things is a vital factor in both our mental and physical health.
To cut to the chase, evil can be thought of according to the bible as the range of our will which goes against God’s will, in other words, when we sin (miss the mark).
In the same way that there’s no such thing as cold, just the absence of heat,
evil it’s just the absence of God’s effective will in our world.
We were never meant to do life on our own, we need God’s grace to learn how to live and reign.
Jesus’s call to repentance is a call to reconsider our life-style, thoughts, a call to re-think the way we think about everything:
This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God’s eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life.
The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
