God did not create evil; He created the potential for evil. He made creatures capable of choosing whether they would obey Him. Evil entered the picture when the first choice to disobey God was made.

After Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit and were punished as a result. God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil (Genesis 3:22). Previous to this sin, the serpent had told the woman that eating the forbidden fruit would not result in death, but would cause them to “be like God, knowing good and evil” (verses 4,5).

The irony is that man was already “like God” (Genesis 1:26), but, under the devil’s influence, he sought more than was rightfully his. By eating the forbidden fruit, man took upon himself the divine prerogative of deciding what is good and what is evil.

In the Creation narrative, God exercises His divine prerogative when He declares that His creative work is “good.” On the first day of Creation Week, He “saw the light, that it was good” (Genesis 1:4). On the third day, He made the dry land appear, and “saw that it was good” (verse 10). Throughout the account, God sees that His creative work is good (verses 11,12,18,21,25,31).

Later, after being warned that eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would result in death, the woman, influenced by Satan, “saw that the [forbidden] tree was good for food” (Genesis 3:6). By eating the forbidden fruit, the woman and her husband became “like God” in the sense that they had taken to themselves the divine prerogative of deciding what is good. They had declared that which was deadly (and expressly forbidden) to be good.