I just found this interesting
" 113. Since God never sins, how can He possibly create evil?
When we say that God creates evil we are simply quoting from the Word of God (Isa.45:7), and that, too, from the Authorized Version. Nevertheless the statement has been termed nothing less than a “shocking blasphemy.” To substantiate this charge the phrase has been changed, and we are represented as having said that “God is the Author of sin .”
This leads us to restate, with all the emphasis possible, a most important but much neglected principle: When God uses two distinct terms, He has two distinct meanings . God has never said that He created sin. So we, too, refrain from doing so. Sin is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). As God is the Lawgiver, He is not under any law, but is above His own enactments. When He does that which would be sin in man, it is no longer sin. He kills (Deut.32:39). If we should do this it would be a grievous sin. If the state does it it is lawful. When God does it, it is far removed from sin. From this we can see that God is not a man and must not be judged by human standards. Sin, as we have said, is lawlessness. Its most graphic definition in the Hebrew is found in Judges 20:16, where "seven hundred left-handed men could sling stones at a hair breadth and not miss " or sin , for it is the same word. God never misses the mark; He never sins.
We may illustrate this by the most flagrant sin which man has ever committed–the murder of the Son of God. We know that they killed the Inaugurator of Life (Acts 3:15) with lawless hands (Acts 2:23). Yet He was smitten of God . Yahweh desired to crush Him, and caused Him to be wounded (Isa.53:4,10). They were but carrying out what God’s hand and counsel designated beforehand to occur (Acts 4:28). The very act of God which puts away sin, was man’s most grievous sin. The act was the same, but the actors were different in rank and motive and object. What God does is right because He is God and because His motives are divine and His object blessing . The murder of God’s Son, apart from His resurrection, would have been the greatest calamity in the universe. But, unlike man, God was able, not only to kill, but to make alive again.
MATTER IS NOT EVIL
We may learn a parable from the sphere of matter. It is not intrinsically evil, as the gnostics affirmed. When it is displaced, when it is out of harmony with other matter, then it becomes evil. The defiling soot is only a diamond in a different form, or relation to other substances. Just so in the moral sphere. No act is wrong in itself, but only as its relation to other acts or to the actor is wrong . To murder a man is to break the law; to execute a man is to fulfill the law; yet the act is one. The state never murders. God has invested mankind with the power of life and death. God never sins. Yet who will deny that He slew the Lamb, slain from the disruption (cf Rev.13:8; Acts 3:18), and that this had to occur (Luke 24:46)? We might as well contend that the men of Israel were free from the charge, for they did not raise the cross. The soldiers did that. But back of all can we not discern the One Who set Him as a mark for His arrow? Are we not glad that He made Him a sin offering for us (2 Cor.5:21) and sent fire from above to consume Him?
Man usually sins when doing evil (e.g. 1 Kings 16:19), yet God, Who creates, contrives and does evil, remains righteous in all His ways and kindly in all His doings (Psa.145:17). He is working, or operating, all, in accord with the counsel of His will (Eph.1:11). These facts should help us to see that the word “evil,” in itself, has no moral bias, such as we usually associate with it. The Hebrew word for evil often refers to actions of men which are very sinful for them to do. Indeed the Authorized Version often “translates” the word for evil as “wicked” or “wickedness” (e.g. Gen.6:5; 39:9). But this is needless interpretation, not translation.
Whether it is right or wrong for the one who effects a particular evil to do so is not revealed within the word itself. The idea of “morality” is simply not inherent in the term. In the Scriptures, evil is merely spoken of as an act which smashes and demolishes, in one sense or another, and brings with it a train of trouble and distress, But it is neither right nor wrong in itself. Its exact import can best be discovered in such passages as Psalm 2:9, where it is rendered break , or Daniel 2:40, also translated break . Perhaps our word “smash” is its nearest equivalent. In its literal root meaning it describes the effect of iron, the hardest of common metals, when it is used to smash and destroy.
THE WORD OF YAHWEH IS CLEAN
We should reject the popular claim which insists that “evil” sometimes means “immoral” while upon other occasions it simply means “calamity.” Such traditional exigencies of theology are impertinent innovations in the domain of truth. For God’s words are pure ; they have been refined so that they are clean (Psa.12:6). This is true of every one of them (Prov.30:5). The Hebrew vocabulary is so rich that the English language is sorely taxed to provide suitable equivalents. If God had intended to reveal something more than simply the thought of breaking or smashing in those passages where the word “evil” is found, it would not have taxed the Hebrew tongue or the Divine Author to have done so. Yet He has refrained from doing so. Let us be learning not to be disposed above what is written (1 Cor.4:6). “Add not to His words, lest He correct you and you be found a liar” (Prov.30:6).
GOOD IS KNOWN BY MEANS OF EVIL
There is, however, a real difficulty to many in the statement that God creates evil which a little consideration will remove. This is not the first time God is connected with evil in the Scriptures. In the garden of Eden the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was planted by God. Here, indeed, we have the clue to the whole matter. We are inclined to think of this tree as simply imparting the knowledge of evil and not good. But it was first of all “the tree of the knowledge of good…” Adam did not have the knowledge of good. How was he to realize and appreciate good? By this tree. Yet, in tasting the tree, he would have to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The two are inseparable. Good is known only by means of evil . An active choice of good is impossible apart from a refusal of evil. Thus it is in human affairs. But the association of evil with God is, perhaps, the real stumbling block. We will proceed, then, to consider some passages where God is said to use evil.
Job recognized that the evils he was suffering were from God (Job 2:10) and this is confirmed in the end (Job 42:11) in spite of the theology of his friends. Yet should we be guilty of carrying the plague of Egypt it would be criminal. To avoid the spread of disease all incoming vessels are quarantined, and it is a crime to carry a foreign plague to an innocent victim. Yet this is what happened to Job at God’s hand. And Job would be the first one to justify God for the severe evils He brought upon him.
FURTHER EXAMPLES OF DIVINE EVIL
We are not to curse at all, yet He curses His people (Jer.26:3; Dan.9:14). The incendiary is severely punished by our law, yet He burned whole cities (Jer.21:10). We shudder to think of the fiendish men who turned wild beasts upon the Christians in the Roman amphitheater, yet He made His people the prey of evil beasts (Ezek.14:15,21). The dagger of the assassin condemns him to death, yet He puts the people to the sword (Jer.42:17; 44:11; Ezek.14:21). We denounce the avarice of those who withhold food from the people in order to fatten their purse, yet He sends the famine which reaches both rich and poor (2 Kings 6:33; Jer.19:9; 42:17; 44:11; Ezek.14:21). Destruction is a misdemeanor, yet He destroys whole cities (Jer.26:18; Jonah 3:4), and desolates entire countries (Neh.13:18; Jer.44:2). The very quarantine officer who would allow the introduction of a plague would be liable to severe penalties, yet Yahweh sends the pestilence (Jer.32:42; 42:17; Ezek.14:21). A sinister influence may not be brought to bear upon any man, yet God sent an evil spirit to trouble Saul (1 Sam.16:14-23; 19:9), and sent a lying spirit to cause all of Ahab’s prophets to lie to him (1 Kings 22:22).
We may well ask with the man of sorrows, “Who is this who speaks and it is coming to be, when my Lord did not instruct? From the mouth of the Supreme, is not faring forth the evil and the good " (Lam.3:37,38; cf Isa.55:10,11)? And well, too, may we agree with the wise man when he says, " All is contrived by Yahweh for His response, even the wicked one for the day of evil” (Prov.16:4). This is so, for “Yahweh, our Elohim, Thou art the Setter of welfare on the hearthstones for us. For, moreover, all our doings Thou dost contrive for us” (Isa.26:12). God declares, “I will contrive, and who will reverse it” (Isa.43:13)? “See the doing of the Elohim, For who can set in order what He distorts” (Ecc.7:13)?
All of these passages make it plain that the very same acts may have a very different aspect according to the one whose doing of them is in view.
All evil which is done with due authority, such as paternal or political, whether inflicted by parents upon their children, or masters upon their servants, or the state on its subjects, or God on His creatures (of which the rest are but figures) loses its “immoral” quality because it is salutary and corrective. Its morality lies, not in the evil, but in the relation sustained between the one who inflicts and the one who suffers. Consequently, even moral evil, committed by criminal men, loses its immoral quality when referred back to the One Whose purpose was being effected by the evil and Who not only has the undoubted right to inflict it but Whose every act will yet receive the undivided applause of the universe.
In fact the very same act, when viewed from the standpoint of the human perpetrators, is full of “moral” evil; yet when it is viewed from the vantage of the Divine operations, God Himself still calls it an evil and claims that He is the real power behind it (e.g. Isa.10:5-15). But the moment that “moral” evil touches Him it is transformed into “moral” goodness and glory. For just as in the case of Job, its object is the blessing of the creature as well as the honor of the Creator. No evil created by God can have the least taint of moral turpitude, insofar as His contriving of it is concerned, because it is always directed toward the ultimate reconciliation of its object. May God give us the eyes to see and minds to realize this truth: “For if He afflicts, yet He has compassion, according to the abundance of His kindnesses” (Lam.3:32). "