Yes, there is even in ourselves sin and corruption enough, so that there is no need that God should infuse into us either a new or greater measure of wickedness. Therefore, when God is said in the Scripture to harden (Ex. 7:13), to blind (John 12:40) and to deliver us up into a reprobate sense (Rom. 1:28), it is to be understood that God does it by just judgment, as a just judge and avenger.

And just as he that wishes to punish someone by fumigating with a foul smell, sulfur and dung, does not put a foul smell into the sulfur and dung (it already is there), so God, when He punishes sins through the devil and the vessels of wrath with sins, does not put any sin into them, but it is there naturally since the fall in the devil and in men (Eph. 4; Rom. 1).

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.

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).

God does not infuse malice into the wills of evil men, as He infuses goodness into the hearts of the godly.—In one and the same work of the godly what is a good and just action proper to God is to be distinguished from the defect and vice of the ungodly. The sin of the wicked is their own; their doing this or that by sinning is of God’s power,—and so in the same work God is ascertained to be righteous, man to be guilty.