Where did evil come from?

Genesis doesn’t open with a perfect machine. It opens with people who could say no, and a voice that wanted them to.

The first pages of the Bible describe a world God calls good, and people made in his image. That phrase meant something specific in the ancient world: an image stood in for the one it represented. Human beings were made to carry God’s likeness into the world, to look after it with him, as family rather than as tools.

He gave them one boundary. A boundary only means something if it can be crossed. A garden where nothing could go wrong would have been a garden where nothing could be chosen either, including him.

Evil came in as a question

Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?Genesis 3:1

The first move wasn’t violence. It was doubt about whether God could be trusted, and the suggestion that people could decide for themselves what is good. Everything that follows in the human story, the jealousy, the murder, the empires, grows from that root. The Bible is also clear that it wasn’t only human beings who turned. There were other powers in that story who had already chosen against God, and they are still at work.

So evil isn’t something God made. It’s what happens when beings he made free turn away from the one they were made for.

What God did next

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?Genesis 3:9

The first thing God does after it all goes wrong is come looking. Not to read out charges, but to call for someone who was hiding. Before they leave the garden he makes them clothes, and he promises that one day the serpent’s head will be crushed by a descendant of the woman.

That promise is the thread the rest of the Bible pulls on. The story doesn’t explain evil away. It shows a Father who won’t give up his family to it.