What did God mean when He changed His mind and said He would not do the evil He had planned?
A viewer named John Smith asks what God meant when He changed His mind and said He would not do the evil He had planned, given that God cannot do evil.
Answer
You are correct that God cannot do moral evil. But the word 'evil' in Scripture is a very generalized word; depending on context it can mean calamity, destruction, or something out of the ordinary. If you came upon a city that had been wiped out, you would naturally call it evil in the sense of a terrible, destructive calamity, not a moral wrong. When God speaks of bringing 'evil' on a city or nation, He is using it in that sense of destruction or judgment, not moral evil, so you must not take it literally as a moral term. God has power over life and death, and even when He takes a life it is for a good reason, though it may look like evil to us. The clearest example is Nineveh: God relented of the evil, that is, the destruction, He was going to bring on the city when the people repented. So the context determines how we understand what 'evil' means.