Suffering and God's Nature

In his book, God's Problem, Bart D. Ehrman asserts that the suffering of humanity, especially from natural causes such as flood and famine, impunes God's loving nature. If He is in control, and He is loving, then how can He allow such things as the Ethiopian famine when the earth is capable of growing enough food for all, or the hurricane-caused devastation of New Orleans? Dr. Ehrman concludes that this god does not exist.

Well, I agree, the god he is imagining does not exist.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Isaiah 45:7

God is the definition of what love is, not Bart Ehrman. More to the point, the God of Israel and father of our Lord Jesus Christ does exist, whether people understand Him or not: the main object of the Christian life is to get to know Jesus. This is just my opinion, but I think that the main reason God originally chose to personify Himself, and then to create Adam in that pattern, a person, is so that He can be known in some measure, even though we "see through a glass darkly" in this life.

We can get to know Him better in much the same way as we can get to know anyone better. We talk and we listen. We do things together, building trust. We form a broad idea of the nature of the other person's character and then go on to refine it as the relationship continues. Of course, there are some special differences when it comes to Jesus. He isn't just another person, He's God. He was born into this world and took human form, but is no longer in this world with a physical body such as ours; he has been through death and resurrection. He now has a glorified body and lives at the right hand of the Father, beyond our space-time continuum, but not separated from it.

So we must communicate in the spirit. We must get to know His voice. Thank-you, Jesus, for saying that your sheep would know your voice. It can be done, and the main confusion is between His voice and that of our own deceptive hearts. So get to know the Scriptures, the Eternally Being Spoken Word, and pray and worship. But I am straying from the main subject here.

God is a loving person. The proof of his love is that he humbled himself, the creator of the universe and more, and entered into his creation in order to personally take the consequences of our sins. A neighbor of mine once asked me, "why didn't Jesus heal all disease, instead of just some?" At the time I didn't have a good answer; I just said I guessed he had other priorities. But I have come to understand that, even if he had cured all disease in the world, by now it would all be back pretty much as it is, because we have kept right on in sin and error, producing all this death and imbalance in His creation.

So why, Bart, do you blame God for people starving in Ethiopia when, as you yourself pointed out, the world is still easily capable of feeding all? He made it so that even now the earth is capable of feeding everyone, isn't that amazing? And why isn't everyone being fed? Because of human greed and strife mostly. And God stands by allowing it? Yes, well if God didn't tolerate evil, we'd all be dead. And besides, He has, by his own sacrifice on the cross, already taken care of it in the most important way. Consider the parable of the wheat and tares:

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.
So the servants of the owner came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?'
He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' The servants said to him, 'Do you want us then to go and gather them up?' But he said, 'No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, "First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.'

Dr. Ehrman's book has a bunch of different challenges to God's existence, and I am going to try to write a series of answers to them here. Stay tuned :^)