Can God Make Evil Good? The Question Plato Asked—and Scripture Answers

Suppose someone asks you a question that seems designed to leave a Christian with no good answer: If God commanded something cruel, would it become good simply because He commanded it?

Say yes, and morality appears arbitrary. Say no, and it appears that God must answer to a moral standard higher than Himself.

It is a clever trap. It is also a serious question, one worth answering rather than dismissing. But the trap works only if those are the two possible answers. They are not.

The missing answer is not a philosophical loophole invented to rescue Christianity. It is the answer Scripture gives about who God is.

The dilemma—and what it assumes

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates encounters a man prosecuting his own father over the death of a laborer. Euthyphro is confident that his prosecution is pious. Socrates challenges him to explain what makes anything pious: is what is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it (Euthyphro, 10a)? The dialogue is set just before Socrates’ trial in 399 BC. The original discussion concerned the many gods of Greek religion, whose conduct and disagreements were part of the problem.

The question is commonly adapted for Christianity: Does God command an action because it is already good, or is an action good only because God commands it?

On the first answer, goodness seems independent of God. He discovers what is right and then tells us. On the second, goodness seems to have no content beyond a divine decision. If the command changed, right and wrong would change with it.

These are genuine objections to two particular accounts of morality. They do not establish that every account must be one or the other. In fact, the question has already made a questionable assumption: that God’s will can be considered apart from God’s character, as though He were a ruler who could decide tomorrow to be a fundamentally different kind of being.

That is not the God revealed in Scripture.

Goodness does not stand above God. Nor does God invent it at will.

When Moses asks who has sent him, God answers, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). He does not derive His being from something else. He is not a creature inhabiting a moral universe that someone else established. He is the self-existent Creator of that universe (Acts 17:24–25).

Scripture describes His moral character in equally direct terms:

• “You are good and do good” (Psalm 119:68).
• “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne” (Psalm 89:14).
• “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
• “For I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6).

Notice the order in Psalm 119:68. God is good, and He does good. His goodness is not produced by issuing commands; His actions express who He is.

Nor does Scripture describe a morally changeable God whose commands might one day authorize evil. He cannot lie (Titus 1:2). He cannot be tempted with evil (James 1:13). He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). These are not defects in divine power. They are statements about the perfection and consistency of His nature. No one calls it a defect in truth that it cannot be false.

The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith summarizes the biblical teaching by describing God’s will as “immutable and most righteous” (2.1), and declaring that He is “most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and in all His commands” (2.2).

The biblical answer is therefore neither God obeys a higher goodness nor God arbitrarily manufactures goodness. God Himself is the ultimate standard of goodness. His commands reveal His righteous character and His will for the creatures He made.

That conclusion begins with revelation, not with a philosophical system laid over the text. Philosophy can help us state the objection carefully. It cannot be permitted to define in advance what God must be like.

Someone may object that this is circular: Is God good simply because He is God? If “good” were only a complimentary label attached to the strongest being, that would solve nothing. But Scripture does not leave goodness as an empty label. It reveals a God who tells the truth, keeps His promises, loves righteousness, judges wickedness, and never acts unjustly (Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 33:4–5). His goodness has definite content, even though it has no source above Him. This argument does not, by itself, prove that the biblical God exists. It shows why the dilemma’s two options do not accurately describe Him.

Why His commands bind us

An obvious follow-up remains. Even if God is perfectly good, why should His character establish what we ought to do?

Because the God whose character is good is also the God who made us in His image (Genesis 1:26–27). We are not independent moral authorities; we are creatures accountable to our Creator. The Bible does not merely assert that God likes holiness. It grounds our duty to be holy in His holiness:

“You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2).

Peter applies that very command to Christians (1 Peter 1:15–16). Jesus likewise teaches that God’s law reaches beyond outward behavior to anger, lust, and the purposes of the heart (Matthew 5:21–28). Moral obedience is more than complying with a list of prohibitions. It concerns what sort of people we are becoming before God.

The distinction between God’s unchanging moral character and His particular commands also matters. God gave Israel ceremonial requirements that pointed forward to Christ, and civil laws suited to Israel as a covenant nation. Their covenantal purposes were not identical to those of the abiding moral law. The coming of Christ fulfills the former without making murder, theft, adultery, or false witness suddenly acceptable (Colossians 2:16–17; Romans 13:8–10).

The 1689 Confession makes this distinction in chapter 19. It teaches that the moral law continues to bind because of both its content and the authority of the Creator who gave it (19.5). For believers, that law is not a ladder by which to earn justification. It remains a rule of life revealing God’s will and our duty (19.6).

God’s commands matter because God is both righteous and Lord. But their moral force is not detached from the God who speaks them.

What about people who do not believe in God?

Christians do not need to pretend that unbelievers are incapable of recognizing evil or doing what is outwardly good. Scripture teaches otherwise.

Paul says that Gentiles who did not receive the law through Moses nevertheless show “the work of the law” written on their hearts, with conscience bearing witness (Romans 2:14–15). The human ability to recognize justice, guilt, loyalty, and betrayal is not evidence that morality originated apart from God. It is consistent with the Creator having made human beings as moral creatures.

But a conscience is not infallible. It may accuse where God has not condemned or excuse where He has spoken plainly. Romans 1:18–25 describes people suppressing truth, not merely lacking information. Conscience must therefore be examined and corrected by God’s revealed Word, not installed as a rival authority above it.

The Christian claim is not that atheists cannot know that cruelty is wrong. It is that, within the biblical account of reality, objective moral obligation has its ultimate ground in the Creator whose image humanity bears. An unbeliever may challenge that account, but he has not defeated it by observing that people can recognize goodness without first opening a Bible.

The hard passages still deserve answers

At this point, someone will bring up Abraham and Isaac, or God’s judgment on the Canaanites. Those are not frivolous objections. A Christian should not evade them by declaring that anything attributed to God must be good and ending the discussion.

Genesis 22 explicitly presents God’s command to Abraham as a test. God stops Abraham before Isaac is killed and provides a substitute (Genesis 22:11–14). This is not a standing authorization for child sacrifice; elsewhere Scripture explicitly condemns that practice (Deuteronomy 12:31). Hebrews 11:17–19 explains Abraham’s action in connection with his confidence in God’s promise and power to raise the dead.

God’s judgments on nations raise a different and difficult question: what right does God have to judge human life? Scripture presents God as the righteous Judge, not as a creature acting from private malice. The judgment of the Canaanites is not offered as a standing permission for individuals or nations to attack whomever they regard as wicked (Genesis 15:16; Deuteronomy 9:4–5). Nor does acknowledging God’s right to judge mean that every human claim to be acting for God is trustworthy. Such claims must themselves be tested by Scripture.

These passages deserve careful reading in their contexts. But difficulty is not the same as evidence that God could make injustice righteous by whim. Scripture distinguishes righteous judgment from sinful cruelty, and God’s unique authority from the authority delegated to human beings.

The cross presents the sharpest case of all.

The cross: God ordained it, and the men who did it were guilty

Peter declares that Jesus was delivered up according to God’s definite plan and foreknowledge, yet was crucified by lawless men (Acts 2:23). The same event was God’s saving purpose and a wicked act committed by morally responsible people.

That distinction matters enormously. God’s sovereign purpose did not turn the betrayal and murder of Christ into righteous behavior. God brought the greatest good out of an act for which its perpetrators remained accountable.

Joseph had already stated the same principle to his brothers: they meant evil against him, but God meant it for good (Genesis 50:20). God’s good purpose did not erase their evil intention. His providence governed it without making Him its sinful author.

The 1689 Confession is careful here. It affirms God’s sovereign decree without making Him the author of sin (3.1), and says that the sinfulness of creaturely acts proceeds from creatures, while God directs events to His holy ends (5.4).

The cross also answers a still deeper moral question: How can a perfectly just God forgive guilty people without treating their evil as though it did not matter?

Paul’s answer is not that God changed His moral standards. Christ bore sin, and God displayed His righteousness in the redemption accomplished through Him, so that He might be “just and the justifier” of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:25–26; see also 2 Corinthians 5:21).

God’s justice and mercy do not compete. In Christ, the holy God saves sinners without becoming indifferent to sin.

The question finally comes back to us

There is an irony in arguing about whether God could make evil good while quietly assuming that we are competent to decide which of His actual commands we will accept.

It is possible to reject arbitrary divine morality in theory and practice a very ordinary version of it ourselves: If I approve of something, it must be right. If my church permits it, it must be right. If my conscience feels clear, it must be right. That simply relocates moral authority from God to the self, the institution, or the culture.

Yet no pastor, church tradition, government, or private feeling is entitled to replace God’s Word. The 1689 Confession puts the matter plainly: “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (21.2). It likewise places the final judgment of religious controversy in Scripture, not in councils or human opinions (1.10).

And Scripture’s verdict exposes more than the failures of other people. It exposes mine. The law reveals sin; it cannot justify the sinner (Romans 3:20). I do not need a better defense of my own goodness. I need the righteousness of Christ, received by faith rather than earned by obedience (Romans 3:21–26; Ephesians 2:8–10). His grace then trains and transforms those He saves (Titus 2:11–14).

That is where a Christian discussion of morality must finally lead: not merely to a winning argument about right and wrong, but to the God who is righteous, the law that reveals our guilt, and the Savior who delivers sinners from it.

The old dilemma asks whether goodness rules God or God invents goodness. Scripture refuses both alternatives. Goodness does not sit above the Lord, waiting for His approval. Neither does He make evil good by changing His mind.

God is good. He commands what is consistent with His nature. And we are the ones who must answer to Him.

For further biblical study, see “What Scripture Says About God” and “What Scripture Says About Natural Law” in Volume 1 of What Scripture Says. Scripture remains the final authority; the 1689 Confession cited above is a subordinate summary of its teaching.