My children were questioning if Jesus ever sinned. I told them, “No, because Jesus is God, and God cannot sin.” But then, one of my sons said to me that God killed people in the Bible and one of the Commandments is not to kill. You think of examples of the flood, where God intentionally sent a flood to kill people. You think of the angel of death in Egypt when God sent the angel to kill the first-born son of every family unless the family performed the proper Passover. There are plenty of other examples where God directly acts to kill people. So, how do I answer this question to my son? If God cannot sin, which of course is true, how do we reconcile the fact He used His divine power to kill people?

John in Springfield

Dear John,

First, God is not a “part” of His creation. He exists as the creatorof everything else that exists: the universe, its laws, and all it contains, including human beings. The Spirit proclaims through the Book of Wisdom, “You love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made, for you would not fashion what you hate” (Wis. 11:24). This very good creation did not need to exist, but God in his perfect goodness chose to create out of pure love (CCC 293). 

Until the fall of Satan and the original sin of humanity, all human beings received life from God and existed in perfect harmony with His creative love. Additionally, God gave to human beings the gift of reason: an intellect and a will. The original sin was a misuse of the gift of reason and a revolt against the law and life given by God.

“Sin is an offense against God” (CCC 1850), and “it wounds the nature of man” (CCC 1849). A simple answer to the question, “Why can God not sin?” is that God cannot offend Himself or be wounded in His nature.

Death entered the world through the action of human beings: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). We read also in Wisdom, “God did not make death, nor does He rejoice in the destruction of the living” (Wis. 1:13). Adam and Eve and every one of their descendants is subject to death, and one of the first sins after the original sin is the murder of Abel (Gn. 4:8). 

Murder deprives an innocent human being of God’s gift of life. As God is the giver of the gift, only God has the right to take the gift back. Thus, God gave His people the Commandment, “Thou shall not murder” (Ex. 20:13).

It is always evil to destroy innocent life. We read, “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind … there is no one who does good, not even one” (Ps. 14:2-3). For God to take a human life, therefore, would not be the murder of an innocent; it would not be unjust; it would not be evil, for God cannot act out of malice. Death is a consequence of sin. This sounds harsh to our modern sensibilities, but it has been understood from ancient times that God alone has power over life and death. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:21). 

What happens to the people killed in the flood? What happens to the people killed in Sodom and Gomorrah? What happens to the first-born children killed in Egypt? We cannot say for sure. What a Christian can say with confidence, however, is that Jesus died for them, too, and that they were given every grace and opportunity possible for salvation: “[God] wills everyone to be saved … .” (1 Tim. 2:4). Ultimately, God Himself became man and died our death. Through His resurrection, He destroyed death’s power over us and made our death into a doorway to eternal life. 

Father Daniel McGrath is parochial Vicar at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield and assistant chaplain at Sacred Heart-Griffin High School.