Against Marcion 2.14

At every point the same God meets you: striking but also healing, killing but also making alive, humbling but also exalting, creating evils but also making peace — so that here too I may answer the heretics. “See,” they say, “he himself professes to be the creator of evils, when he says: I am he who creates evils.” Seizing on a word that is shared, which by its ambiguity confuses two kinds of evils — since both sins and punishments are called evils — they want him to be understood indiscriminately as the creator of evils, so that he may be declared the author of malice as well. We, however, drawing a distinction between the two forms, and separating the evils of sin from the evils of punishment, the evils of fault from the evils of penalty, assign to each part its own author: of the evils of sin and fault, the devil; of the evils of punishment and penalty, God the Creator; so that the former part is credited to malice and the latter to justice — the justice of a judgment that creates evils against the evils of sin. It is of these evils, then, that the Creator professes to be the author, the evils that befit a judge. They are indeed evils to those on whom they are repaid; but in their own right they are good, as being just, defending the good, and hostile to sins, and in this order worthy of God. Or else prove them unjust, so that you may prove they are to be credited to malice, that is, that they are evils of injustice; for if they belong to justice, they will no longer be evils but goods — evils only to the wicked, by whom even goods are condemned outright as evils.

Establish, then, that it was unjust that man, the willful despiser of the divine law, received in return what he had not wanted to do without; unjust that the malice of that age was struck down by rains, and later by fires; unjust that Egypt, most foul and superstitious, and moreover the oppressor of a people who were its guests, was struck with a tenfold chastisement. He hardens Pharaoh's heart — but the man had deserved to be delivered to destruction, who had already denied God, who had already so often proudly rebuffed his envoys, who had already added to the people's burden of labour; and finally, as an Egyptian, he had long been guilty before God of heathen idolatry, worshipping the ibis and the crocodile sooner than the living God. He gave up even his own people — but they were ungrateful. He sent bears against the boys too — but they were irreverent toward the prophet. The impudence of an age that owed modesty had to be punished.