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A Theodicy by Brian A. Nichols

The Devil's
Maker

How God's Love Brought About
the Origin of Evil

A biblical case that reframes the "problem of evil" as the outworking of God's eternal purpose to glorify Christ — resolving what centuries of philosophy have left unanswered.

Paperback & Kindle Available April 5, 2026 Reformed Theology
The Devil's Maker — Front Cover
The Devil's Maker — Back Cover

See the Book Come to Life

Watch the trailer

The Argument of the Book

The Question
If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does evil exist?
Premise 1
God is all-powerful and all-knowing
Premise 2
God is all-good
Premise 3
Evil exists
The Hidden Assumption
A good God would never allow evil for any reason.
This book dismantles that assumption.
Part 1 God Is All-Powerful
Chapter 1
God Controls All Things
Scripture presents God as sovereign over every domain: creation, nature, human will, salvation, nations, and the supernatural realm.
Chapter 2
God Has a Plan
History moves toward a predetermined end: the glorification of Christ. Every event is ordained, not improvised.
Chapter 3
The Nature of God's Word
God's word is eternal, creative, truth-defining, and sustaining. It is the ground of all reality. Scripture is the written form of that decree.
Chapter 4
God Created Everything to Fall
Creation was structured to initiate the fall. Redemption was planned before the world began.
Chapter 5
Patterns in Redemptive History
Numerical patterns, types, mirrored structures, and prophecies reveal a single Author composing a single story.

Conclusion of Part 1: Evil cannot exist outside God's sovereign will. His control is exhaustive.

Part 2 God Is All-Loving
Chapter 6
God Is Love
God is love essentially and eternally—within the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Spirit share the fullness of agapē love before anything was made.
Chapter 7
Why Must Evil Exist?
The Father's love drives Him to glorify the Son fully. The Son's attributes—Redeemer, Judge, Lamb, Conqueror—require a world containing evil.
The Answer
God's love brought about the origin of evil. The Father's eternal love for the Son is the morally sufficient reason evil exists.
Part 3 Implications of the Decree
Chapter 8
Doctrines of Salvation
The nature of God's word requires that election flows from God's decree, not from foreseen human response.
Chapter 9
The Nature of Human Freedom
Freedom is the mind choosing. Human choices are real, meaningful, and accountable—and fully governed by God's decree.
Chapter 10
A Plausible Scenario
A coherent account of how evil arose in Lucifer and in Adam and Eve—without God being the direct cause of sin.
Chapter 11
Resolving Paradoxes
The decree-centered framework resolves classic theological paradoxes: creation's first moment, the atonement, and the incarnation.
Chapter 12
Christian Living
God's sovereignty transforms how Christians face suffering, worship, proclaim the gospel, and treat one another.
Resolution
The "problem of evil" is no problem at all for the God of the Bible.
"The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand."
— John 3:35

This book is for you if you…

Feel stuck between God's sovereignty and human responsibility — and sense that the usual answers dodge the real question.

Want a coherent answer to the origin of evil that doesn't weaken God's power, compromise His goodness, or resort to mystery as a conversation-stopper.

Want Scripture — not modern philosophy — to set the terms of the debate.

Want a framework that makes the Bible "click" as one unified decree, from Genesis to Revelation, centered on the glory of Christ.

Are tired of the Calvinism / Arminianism / Molinism gridlock and want a position that lets the biblical text speak without apology.

Doctrine That Changes
How You Read Everything

01
Think Clearly About Providence
Move past hand-waving and half-answers. See how God's decree encompasses all historical events without making God the author of sin.
02
Read Scripture With a Unified Hermeneutic
Handle anthropomorphic texts, "difficult" Old Testament passages, and the problem of evil with a consistent, exegetically grounded framework.
03
Answer the Hardest Objections
Engage skeptics, Arminians, and open theists with clarity — on evil, freedom, and divine blame — without retreating to "it's a mystery."
04
See Redemptive History as One Narrative
From the eternal decree to the new creation, every event — including the fall — serves the supreme purpose of displaying Christ's glory.

Table of Contents

Part One
God is All-Powerful
  • God's Word as Creative Power
  • The Eternal Nature of Scripture
  • The Decree Encompasses All Things
  • Providence and the Scope of God's Will

Lays the biblical foundation: God's word is not merely informative — it is the sovereign power through which all reality, including evil, comes to be.

Part Two
God is All-Loving
  • The Father's Eternal Love for the Son
  • Evil as the Condition for Glory
  • Christ as the Purpose of All Things
  • The Fall: Decreed, Not Accidental

The heart of the argument: evil exists because certain attributes of Christ — mercy, grace, sacrificial love — require particular conditions to be displayed.

Part Three
Implications
  • God's Holiness and Human Responsibility
  • Freedom, Determinism, and the Will
  • The Problem of Evil — Resolved
  • Living Under the Decree

Works out the consequences: how this framework handles objections, reshapes the free will debate, and transforms everyday faith.

Read an Excerpt

From the Introduction

Introduction

The Bible speaks of the Devil within the first few pages. Moses writes:

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” (Genesis 3:1 NKJV)

This cunning creature deceived mankind (Genesis 3:13), brought sin and death into the world (Romans 5:12), murdered the Son of God (John 8:44), and holds the whole world in bondage, fear, and darkness (Hebrews 2:15; 1 John 4:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4). Scripture later reveals him to be “that serpent of old, who is called the devil…” (Revelation 12:9 NKJV).

God made the Devil.

This statement is the basis for one of the most enduring challenges to the Christian faith:

“If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does evil exist?”

For Christians, this question is deeply personal. How can a God of grace and love have anything to do with a world full of evil, suffering, disaster, and death? Why doesn’t He stop it? What is He doing in the midst of all the evil we experience?

We Christians affirm God’s power and His goodness because the Bible insists on both, and because our lives have been dramatically transformed through faith in Jesus Christ. But when we face loss, illness, suffering, or death—it can lead to confusion and doubt.

Skeptics often wield this question as a weapon against the truth claims of Scripture—specifically the nature and character of God. The accusation is this: if evil entered the world against God’s will, then He is not all-powerful. If God can stop evil but does not, then He is not good. Or this puzzle—impossible to solve—means He never existed in the first place.

This problem, called the Problem of Evil, has challenged thinkers for centuries. The effort to reconcile God’s goodness with the existence of evil is called a theodicy. This book is a theodicy.

How the “Problem of Evil” Is Framed and What It Assumes

The standard philosophical formulation goes like this:

  • God is all-powerful and all-knowing.
  • God is all-good.
  • Evil exists.

Conclusion: Therefore, God is not all-powerful, not all-knowing, not all-good, or does not exist.

The argument frames evil as a fatal problem for belief in the God of the Bible—a contradiction that would force us to revise who God is or abandon belief in Him altogether.

This conclusion, however, does not follow from the premises alone. It requires an assumption.

The assumption is this: a perfectly good God who knows of every evil and has the power to stop it would never allow evil to exist for any reason. If He did, it would mean He has a moral defect, lacks full knowledge, or is weak. Such a God would not be worthy of worship.

It would also mean that Scripture is unreliable in what it says about God’s existence, about Christ’s resurrection, and about eternal life.

This assumption smuggles in a moral framework. It treats evil as something that cannot coexist with God’s goodness and power. But there is no law of logic which requires that such a God must prevent every evil. And feeling distressed or outraged by the idea that a good God coexists with evil does not constitute a logical contradiction.

If the premises above are accepted, the logical conclusion is not contradiction or atheism, but that God has a reason for allowing evil to exist. Let me explain.

The phrase “problem of evil” contains the assumption that the existence of evil poses a problem for an all-powerful and all-good God.

But what makes something a problem?

A problem exists when something goes wrong—when purposes are frustrated, or events escape the control of the one responsible.

If God is all-powerful, nothing exists outside His control. And if God is all-good, He must have morally sufficient reasons for what He allows. It follows from the definition of divine goodness that a perfectly good God cannot permit anything without moral justification rooted in His own nature.

That means if evil exists, it exists only because God has governed it and incorporated it into His purposes—not because it is an autonomous force beyond His control.

If God is all-good and all-powerful, evil does not pose a problem for the God of the Bible.

The so-called “problem of evil” arises not from the biblical doctrine of God, but from an imported assumption about how such a God ought to act—an assumption that neither Scripture nor logic requires us to accept.

But if evil is not a defect in God’s plan, then the question is no longer whether God can exist alongside evil, but why evil exists at all. And the answer must be found not outside God’s purposes, but within them.

This brings us to the core thesis of this book:

Evil exists as a necessary but temporary feature of redemptive history—sovereignly decreed and grounded in the Father’s eternal love for the Son—ordered for the purpose of Christ’s glorification—not an accident, rival force, or moral defect in God.

In other words: evil exists precisely because the biblical God is both in control of all things and all-good.

This claim does not arise from philosophical speculation or opinion. It emerges from taking seriously what God has revealed in Scripture about Himself, His word, and the centrality of Jesus Christ in all things.

From The Devil’s Maker: How God’s Love Brought About the Origin of Evil by Brian A. Nichols
BN

Brian A. Nichols

Brian Nichols is a Reformed Christian and writer whose work sits at the intersection of biblical exegesis, systematic theology, and apologetics. His work is marked by meticulous attention to Scripture and a commitment to making complex doctrinal truths accessible to every reader.

The Devil's Maker is the product of years of study, writing, and wrestling with theology's hardest questions — not to produce another academic abstraction, but to offer believers a framework that holds together under pressure.

"I hope this work helps to ultimately unite the church and bring glory to Christ."

Questions This Book Answers

This is addressed head-on in the book. The distinction between God's decretive will and His revealed will — properly understood from Scripture — demonstrates how God can ordain all things, including evil, while remaining holy and blameless. The book shows that this is not a contradiction but a deeply biblical truth.

It is thoroughly Reformed, yes — but the argument is built exegetically from Scripture, not from any confession or systematic framework imposed on the text. If you're sympathetic to God's sovereignty, you'll find this deepens your understanding. If you're skeptical, you'll find the case made honestly and from the Bible itself.

No. The book is written for thoughtful readers — pastors, students, and laypeople alike. Technical concepts are explained clearly, and the argument builds step by step. If you've ever wondered why evil exists and whether God has something to say about it, this book is for you.

Most theodicies begin with philosophical assumptions — free will, the "best possible world" — and try to fit Scripture into them. This book reverses the method. It begins with Scripture's own claims about God's decree, God's word, and the Father's love for the Son, and lets those claims set the terms. The result is a framework that doesn't soften God's sovereignty or hand-wave at evil.

Included as a supplement, the catechism contains 97 questions and answers that distill the book's argument into a study-friendly format, following the Reformed tradition of catechetical instruction. It's designed for personal study, small groups, or anyone who wants the core claims in a concise, memorable form.

The Devil's Maker is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions. Click the "Buy on Amazon" button anywhere on this page to order your copy.

Reconsider Theology's
Hardest Question

See all of redemptive history in a whole new light. Available Easter 2026 — April 5th — in paperback and Kindle.

Contact the Author

Questions about the book, or just want to share how The Devil's Maker has impacted your understanding of God's sovereignty? I'd love to hear from you.

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