What is Evil? Part 2

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world 

but that you protect them from the evil.

John 17:15

The statement that set my mind to thinking about what constitutes "evil" was this: "God created evil," and reiterated, "God created both evil and good."  Since God having anything at all to do with the origins of evil (much less creating it) is a concept I can barely wrap my mind around, much less accept, I have been engaged in researching various sources to try and understand exactly what "evil" is, and why in the world anyone would think that God "created" it.  I discovered a fellow blogger in the vastness of the Internet who had this to say on the subject:  "In order to understand what constitutes evil one must first understand good. All things were created by God as "good". Goodness is an integral aspect of man because of this fact."

The first book of the Bible - Genesis - records the creation of all things from God's perspective.  Beginning with a formless void (Gen. 1:2), God progressed through creation in a series of six days.  The first day heralded the creation of light and the subsequent separation of light from darkness. At the end of Day 1, God viewed what He had done - the perfection of His handiwork, and said that it was "good."  Sky was separated from land and water (good); the dry land was decorated with grass, trees, fruit, and every seed (good); the heavenly bodies were flung across the sky (good); fish and fowl filled the empty waters (good); animals, reptiles, and insects filled the planet (good); and finally man was brought forth as the crowning act of creation.  When God surveyed the surrounding perfection at the end of the sixth day, He proclaimed it as very good.

There is one more day in the Creation story - Day Seven - where we might reasonably be expecting to read about the origination of evil, if God indeed did create "good and evil."  However, God did not use Day 7 to create "evil" however - He used it to rest after His creation labors.    At this point, I think it is apropos to point out that in the first six days, God did not create good (a noun, a "thing"); rather, He proclaimed that all things He had created were good (an adjective, a description).

In the entire rest of the Biblical narrative, there is not one mention of the creation process of "evil."  There is, however, the mention of a tree in the midst of the garden (Genesis 2:16-17) - the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.