Evil and the Bible Perspective

Question of Evil In the Bible (The Old Testament ) God gives many codes of justice as well as righteous behavior for humans to follow his ten commandments for instance. The philosophical problem, then of why God allows evil and injustice in the world has been looked into by many people. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not willing to prevent it? If so then he is impotent. Is he able to prevent evil, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both willing and not willing to prevent evil and suffering and injustice, and then we must say that God is evil. This paper will be based on Ehrman's views on why we suffer. According to Ehrman the bible has a large number of views as to why people suffer, particularly the people of God. Many of thee views are at odds with one another and most of them are quite different from the views held by highly religious people.

This means that even the highly religious people who think their views are based on the bible tend to think. On his lecture he took the view of suffering that is widely held by most of the authors of Bible particularly the prophets and which can be termed as the prophetic vie.

This is a view that is held by most of the authors of the New Testament which can be termed as the apocalyptic view and finally the view that he finds most sensible but is not widely shared by biblical authors which is the view of the book of Ecclesiastes.

The prophetic view is the that the reason as to why the people of God undergo suffering including political, social nightmares, economic, military defeat, natural disasters and so on is because they have sinned against God and also that they are still continuing to avoid following his laws and the ways that he wants and therefore God is punishing them for this as a way of making sure that they get a wake up call, take note of it and go back to his ways.

The apocalyptic view is a later reaction of the prophetic view. In the apocalyptic view, God is not the one that is causing suffering to his people but forces that are aligned agonist God and his people, the evil cosmic powers which have the world in their grip and hence they are making the lives of those who are righteous miserable as a result. According to this view God is going to intervene soon in history to overthrow these evil forces and go ahead to set up his kingdom.

This means that people have to hold on to their faith and remain true to their God in order to make sure that they will end up being rewarded when the history will finally come to a halt in future. This is the view held by Jesus and Paul as well as the early Christians. The Ecclesiastes view is more.