The God Problem?

“If there’s an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?” This variation of an oft-asked question opens a new book entitled God’s Problem.^* The author, who trained at a well-known Bible institute and then earned his doctorate in New Testament studies from Princeton, eventually rejected Christianity because that question seemed unanswerable.

As he studied the nature of evil and God’s existence, the writer drifted away from his evangelical upbringing and eventually became an agnostic because he found no satisfactory answer.

Apparently, the author of God’s Problem never took seriously Genesis’s account of the origin of death and suffering. Genesis 3 explains that God cursed the world because of mankind’s sin, beginning with Adam. But God’s Word also reveals that He had a higher purpose in mind. He promised to send a Seed of Adam—God’s own Son, Jesus Christ—who would one day “conquer death” and remove the Curse.

^*God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer by Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina.