Is God really bad?

Atheist Thomas Jefferson described God as “cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.” (cited in George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989, pp. 76-78.) Jefferson cited Isaiah 45:7, where God says “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things.”(ESV)

However, in this verse, the Hebrew word for “calamity” (ESV) or “disaster” (NIV) does not mean “moral evil.” In fact, Hebrew linguist tell us that the word need not have any moral connotations at all. The ESV seems more accurate as this word would be perfectly fitting for the plagues that God inflicted on the Egyptians through Moses. These plagues involved not moral evil but rather calamitous events engineered to bring the Egyptians to repentance. God as judge of the earth can rightly inflict such plagues on sinful human beings without having his character impugned with accusations of evil. Certainly such plagues may seem evil to those experiencing them, but the reality is that these people were experiencing due justice.

If we were to read the bible as a whole (& not out of context), we would understand that God is morally perfect. The bible is clear that God is morally perfect (cf. Deut. 32:4; Matt. 5:48), and it is impossible for him to sin (Heb 6:18). He punish sin because his absolute justice demands that. In the case of the Egyptians, God was merely bringing just justice on unrepentant sinners. God’s good end –the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage –was the result of this judgment.