Did God Create Sin
Did God Create Sin
Romans 5:12 tells us that, "sin entered he world through one man (Adam), and death came through sin".
Now let's think about the question of God creating sin.
We will begin by thinking about light and darkness, heat and cold. If you think carefully, you can see that cold does not really exist. Cold is the absence of something. It is the absence of heat. It's the same with darkness. Darkness does not exist. Darkness is the absence of light. If there is light in a place, darkness cannot exist there. However, if there is darkness in a place, light can exist and when light comes, the darkness is dispelled.
It was not necessary for God to create darkness, cold, or sin because they are the absence of something and not things that exist in themselves. We can see this in the first verses of the Bible. Genesis 1:1–3 say, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light." (NASB 2020)
Sin is much the same way. Sin is the absence of righteousness. The Greek word for sin is hamartia. It means "to miss the mark, or target." The Hebrew word translated "sin" also means to miss the mark, or target. The mark, or target, is righteousness. Jesus pointed this out in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:48 He said, "be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." Righteousness comes from God. It comes only from God because He alone is righteous in His essence.
In the presence of righteousness, there can be no sin. Righteousness dispels sin. This is the reason Romans 5:12 told us that sin "entered the world." In the beginning, there was no sin in the world. God created Adam and Eve and said they were very good. There was no death either because it is sin that causes death. Death is the natural consequence, or result, of sin.
God is Love.
Because He is love, He created humankind to have a loving relationship with Him. A loving relationship cannot be forced upon anyone. It must be chosen freely, or it isn't really love. That means that God needed to give people the ability to choose to love and trust Him or to reject His offer of love and righteousness. The way He did that was by giving the first people a single rule. Because this rule existed, they had a choice. The rule was that they were not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they chose to trust God and obeyed that rule, they would experience Life in loving relationship with God, their creator. If they did not, the natural result was that they would be estranged from God, separated from the Source of Life, and therefore dead.
Having this choice, Adam and Eve were free to decide whether to accept God's love and the Life His righteousness gives or try to live life in some other way, a way that, from their human perspective, appeared better to them. In choosing to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve brought sin and death into the world. They did it by giving up the righteousness that had been theirs. In the absence of righteousness, they were in sin.
