God’s Problem?

(A message delivered by Dr Jeffrey Khoo at True Life BPC on September 14, 2008)

God’s Problem (Harper Collins Publishers, 2008) is the title of a book written by Bart Ehrman. We human beings have problems, but God has  a “problem”? What then is “God’s problem”? The subtitle of the book answers: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer.

Who is Bart Ehrman?

Bart Ehrman is James A Gray distinguished professor of the Christian Religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. He is someone who professes to know the Bible and theology inside and out. But his story is quite a sad and tragic one. He testified how he became a “born again” fundamentalist as a teenager, and believed in the total infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture. His commitment to the Christian faith led him to study theology at Moody Bible Institute, a fundamentalist school. Later he studied the New Testament and Greek at Wheaton College, a neo-evangelical school. At Wheaton, he began to question the inerrancy of Scripture when one of his teachers commented that the Bible contains mistakes. Finally he went to a notoriously liberal seminary—Princeton Theological Seminary—where the inerrancy of Scripture is totally denied. At Princeton, his study of historical criticism and textual criticism under unregenerate professors like Bruce Metzger led him to reject that Jesus Christ is God and Saviour altogether. Here is a man who started off as a fundamentalist, became a neo-evangelical, degenerated into a liberal, and ended up an agnostic!

Actually it is quite ironical that Ehrman should call himself an agnostic because an agnostic is one who says God cannot be known and His existence cannot be proven. If Ehrman was asked this question—Does God exist?—he would say, “I don’t know, but if He does exist, we cannot know who or what He is.” Despite his learned ignorance about God, Ehrman says he knows one thing for sure, “This God, if He exists, cannot be Jesus Christ, or the God of the Bible.” Now, how can Ehrman know this for sure if in his mind God cannot be known in the first place? It begs the question: How can you know what something is not when you do not know what it is? Well, this is the self-refuting and self-defeating thinking of Bart Ehrman. God describes such thinkers well, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:22).

Ehrman began his treatise on “God’s Problem” by asking this question, “If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?”

Why Suffering?

No one denies that suffering is a fact of life. Why is there so much suffering in this world? Where is God in all this? What is He doing about it? Where are the answers? Only God has the answers and He has given us the answers in His Word. The Bible tells us that suffering in this world is due to a number of reasons: the primary reason being Sin. God created this world very good, but man made it very bad by sinning against God (Rom 5:12). Our first parents—Adam and Eve—broke God’s law by eating the forbidden fruit (Gen 2:16-17, 3:1-7). Their sin and disobedience plunged the whole of humanity into misery, pain and death (Gen 3:16-19, Rom 6:23). Human beings throughout the ages experience suffering because they are living in a sin- cursed world which is populated by sinful people who are bound by sinful thoughts and feelings and bent on doing sinful things (Rom 3:10-18). No one is innocent; all without exception are guilty (Rom 3:23). God, being holy and just, has to condemn and punish sinners, and the judgement began from the time man fell in the Garden, and continues until the present, and will end in the fiery destruction of world, and the casting of the finally impenitent into the lake of fire for all eternity (2 Pet 3:7-12, Rev 20:11-15). “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31).

The Bible makes it very clear that the problem of suffering is man’s problem, not God’s. Ehrman keeps questioning why the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? But in God’s sight and by His standard, no one is good or innocent. “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood: Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes. … For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:10-23).

Ehrman’s Problem

Who is good? Only God is good and just; all men are bad and wicked. No matter how good any man might appear outwardly, God sees the heart (1 Sam 16:7), and God tells us, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer 17:9). Nonetheless, in Ehrman’s mind, there are good people who do not deserve the pain and misery that they go through. Although there are other biblical reasons why bad things do happen to good people (e.g. Job), he questions why God permits suffering and does not intervene to punish the wicked and deliver the righteous immediately. For this reason, Ehrman feels that the God of the Bible cannot be truly almighty, loving and good since He does not intervene to stop all the suffering right here, right now.

The problem of suffering has led Ehrman to lose his faith. What Ehrman thinks is “God’s Problem” is actually his very own, which is the problem of not believing what God has said in His written words. He confessed, “I came to a point where I could no longer believe … I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to the point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.”

Ehrman’s problem is the same problem of many unbelieving people who do not believe the whole Bible to be the 100% perfect Word of God without any mistake to the last word and letter, and therefore absolutely and supremely authoritative in all matters of faith and life. Ehrman himself confessed that he sees the Bible as “a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, ….”

In an earlier book of his titled—Misquoting Jesus—he argued, “If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture? … This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them. … The fact that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.” In Ehrman, we see a clear case of how the logic of unbelief in denying the Biblical doctrine of Verbal Plenary Preservation (VPP) would naturally and eventually result in a denial of the doctrine of Verbal Plenary Inspiration (VPI) of Scripture.

God’s Solution to Man’s Problem

How do we respond to Ehrman’s attack on VPI and VPP? The only biblical way to respond to such an attack is to quote the Scriptures, “let God be true, but every man a liar” (Rom 3:4). We will all become like Ehrman if we do not live by faith, and faith alone (sola fide). The sinner or the unbeliever lives by sight, or by “science” so called—“I see in order to believe.” But the saint or the child of God lives by faith, “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” (Rom 1:7). If we want to see and know God, we must begin with faith, “I believe in order to see.” And the Christian faith is not blind because it is based on the truth. What is truth? God’s Word is truth (John 17:17). How can we know the truth about origins: how did the world begin, and where did we come from? It is only by faith, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb 11:3). We simply believe the words of our Creator who said that He created the whole universe out of nothing by the power of His Word in the space of six literal 24-hour days, and all very good (Gen 1).

Without the light of God’s Word, and without believing in the integrity and veracity of God’s Word, man will only misinterpret the facts and evidences in the world. Man in his intellectual folly thinks that he comes from the apes. He thinks that since he looks like them, he must be in some way related or linked to them. Therefore, based on human observation and reasoning, the apes must have been man’s ancestors. Thanks to evolution, human beings are actually glorified monkeys! It is no wonder God says this of sinful men, “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things” (Rom 1:21-23).

The only way to please God is by faith, “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Heb 11:6). We must begin with faith and we must end with faith if we are to live and not be lost forever.

The problem with Ehrman is his blindness towards God and His Truth because of His intellectual pride. He gives his own distorted definition of who and what God is; and when his own idea about God does not square with his worldview, he blames God and finds fault with His claims. Indeed, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:22); “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim 3:7). Ehrman has become too clever for his own good.

Logic of Faith

Let us not end up like Ehrman who “lost his faith” (theologically speaking, he never had it in the first place). Let us make sure we have the right starting point which is faith in God’s Word. In all our thinking and reasoning, we must begin and end with God’s Word, believing in all that it says without question, without doubt. Faith is “God says it, that settles it, I believe it.”

God’s Word is 100% perfect, without any mistake, forever infallible and inerrant to the last syllable and letter, even today. How do we know this? God says it in Psalm 12:6-7, “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” Jesus said, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matt 5:18). “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt 24:35).

Applying the logic of faith based on God’s truthful words and promises, we believe that the Bible was not only very pure in the beginning, but also very pure today. By so believing, we are very sure of the 100% inspired and 100% preserved words of God—what they are and where they are. We are very sure of who God is. He is none other than our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who “died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-4).

Let us then live by faith in Christ and His words, and not by “science” or “scholarship” so called. “Let God be true, but every man a liar” (Rom 3:4).