Not unto God; he is not the author of sin, nor tempts unto it; nor is he tempted by it: nor to Satan, only as an instrument, enticing and deceiving; but to themselves, to their own will, it was their own act and deed.

Of the author of sin, we confess that our Lord God, though He is the creator and sustainer of all creatures, yet He is not the author of sin. It is rather the evil will, both in the Devil and in the godless human, that, when he does not obtain help from the Lord God, turns away from God, as Christ speaks in John 8, “When the Devil speaks a lie, he speaks of his own, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (v. 44).

It is true that nature has received a mortal wound, but there is a great difference between a wound inflicted from without, and one inherent in our first condition. It is plain that this wound was inflicted by sin; and, therefore, we have no ground of complaint except against ourselves.

To make God the author of sin is such foul blasphemy, that it can never enter any Christian man’s mind without a shudder. It is indeed true that God had made man mutably good, had infallibly foreseen his sin, had foreordained the permission of the sin and given man no doubt sufficient strength to shun sin, but inoperable without His influx; that meanwhile He had inflowed into man’s faculties for natural actions by not inflowing into the moral entity of such actions. … But it is not less true, that God neither is nor could in any way become the author of sin.

For besides the fact that God, who is supremely good, can make nothing except what is good, if man had been brought forth depraved and evil, God could have had no sufficiently just cause for punishing that wickedness of which he himself would have been the creator and author.