You could try out the whole “maybe the Bible itself stands in need of redemption” approach. A number of people I have known with complaints similar to yours have found it helpful. Kenton Sparks deals with this idea in Sacred Word, Broken Word.
Christie, I can’t help feeling that, in this case, your counsel is not the wisest.
FMW’s problem is not primarily with the Bible, but with God himself, as we find him to act in this world: not with Canaanites but with Syrian refugee children, and not with those left unhealed by Jesus, but with those dying next door.
At the moment he appears to be “theodicy-proof”, and that’s not surprising because the problems he dwells on are inherent in the very concept of ethical monotheism. If there is only one God behind everything, then everything is ultimately his responsibility. That’s why inventing demiurges like an autonomous evolution to say “things just happen” doesn’t help - God made evolution. Even blaming freely-willed human evil can bring back the response, “God could have left free-will out of creation - or not created anything at all.” You can’t rescue monotheism by reverting to dualisms.
Kenton Sparks’ program is to accept the “assured findings” of critical scholars, though they change every year, and that may successfully explain away any “unacceptable” acts of God in the Bible as Hebrew errors, but does nothing whatsoever to explain why God appears to leave prayers unanswered in the 21st century.
Moreover, important to Sparks’ (and Enns’) scheme is that Jesus, if fully man, must have been prone to error (he’s less clear on the implications of Jesus also being fully God, it seems). The key marker of Jesus’ life, and totally relevant here, was his complete trust in the wisdom and goodness of his Father’s will. He taught us to pray “thy will be done”. In the garden, in the face of unjust suffering, he prayed “nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” He accepted, even with tears, the future terrible destruction of Jerusalem that he prophesied as inevitable and just - it would also be his own vindication (see N T Wright on that in Jesus).
But that might, if Sparks’ view of incarnation is right, and if FMW’s analysis of the problem is right, simply have been Jesus’ greatest, catastrophic, error. He could have been a good man trusting, even to death, in an incompetent or malevolent monster. In orthodox Christianity, his bodily resurrection vindicated both the Father and his faith… but remember how many critical scholars demythologize the resurrection as another “error” to be “redeemed” by scholarship. And if the Bible is so wrong about a fundamental thing like the trustworthiness of God, even a genuine resurrection could have been a capricious trick on God’s part.
Now, remember that the very origin of ethical monotheistic religion in the world is the Bible. The God of classical theism is the God of Israel - there have never been any other candidates. Even Mohammad claims continuity with Abraham. Historic Christianity, accepting the Bible as God’s truth, says that those who understand the meaning of suffering best are those - like Moses, the prophets, John the Baptist or Jesus himself - who best understand faith. The gospel, in particular, says we can only know the Father by knowing him in and through the faith of Christ - who knows the Father not as “wise”, but as wisdom, not as “loving” but as love itself, and not as “just” but as the very origin of justice.
The theistic personalism that sees God as just one instance of wisdom, love or justice to be put under our moral scrutiny is doomed to forget that any sense of right and wrong we have originated in God alone. It may try to solve its conflict by denying that God exists. It will then either have to accept the world as blindly unjust and its outrage as an illusion, or become one of those pathetic atheists railing against the God they’ve stopped believing in!
But it will never be able to find peace with God, because that’s only found by learning the faith of Jesus, in the God of Israel, that’s found in the Bible. That is why the Bible completely ignores the kind of rational theodicy originated by Leibniz in an attempt to justify God apart from faith. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” - it was Adam who first tried to put things the other way round by getting wisdom first, hugely unsuccessfully.