How Can God be Good if He Created Evil Things?

Doesn't the Bible tell us that we can know good from evil by looking at the fruits of the tree (Matt. 7:16, 20)? Yet it also tells us that God is good, holy, and perfect (Deut. 32:4, Lev. 11:45). How can this be, since Satan, demons, and mankind, all works of God, are all evil?

The Bible tells us that God, perfect and holy, created everything in the world. We are also told that all of creation was originally “very good” (Gen. 1:31), but that mankind, Lucifer, and a third of the angels (now demons) eventually rebelled. Now hold still and simply read; merely considering the following should clear your mind.

1. A certain father, a very well-liked and respectable man, was considered to be a very, very good man by all who knew him. This man had a child, whom he loved with all his heart and raised in the best, most suitable and perfect environment possible. He taught his child all the best of laws, customs, and behavior, and no one could find any fault in the man whatsoever. However, much to the poor father's grief, his child grew up and completely rebelled against all that he had been taught. He became disrespectful, a drug addict, a criminal, and a murderer. He was thought of by all as being an evil child. But does this make the father evil?

   God is a loving and perfect father. His children (angels and humans) may have rebelled, but that by no means makes God evil.

2. A certain scientist, known to be a very just, good, and perfect man as far as any human could tell, managed to combine all of his best skills and knowledge into building an amazing robot. The robot could move around on wheels and perform a large number of simple tasks; it served the scientist very well as a helper. But the robot also had within itself a form of weaponry designed to defend it's maker against any attack, and one day the robot completely went hay-wire—it must have short-circuited—and began killing innocent people. Obviously, the robot was no longer good, but very bad. Does this make the scientist evil?

               God designed a marvelous, perfect creation that went completely wrong, turning aside to evil. But this does not make God evil.

In fact, I am firmly convinced that the only evil—that isn't at all evil, but rather justice—God has ever done was in allowing his creation to choose between good and evil.