Why does the “Old Testament God” seem different than the “New Testament God”?

Trivia

Isaiah 40:31 “but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

Hebrews 11:6 “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”

Proverbs 4:23 “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

1 Peter 5:6 “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you,”

Jeremiah 33:3 “‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’”

Isaiah 55:8 ““For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.”

Revelation 4:8 “Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.””

Job 19:25 “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.”

Proverbs 18:21 “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”

Acts 18:10 “For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.””

This is an apologetics week.

Remember apologetics means defending our faith. So in essence, being able to answer difficult questions, either our own, or ones that people we know may ask us.

Our question today is: “Why does the ‘Old Testament God; seem different than the ‘New Testament God’?

This is a common question, and I think a lot of the time when people are asking this question, they are struggling with their idea of God in the Old Testament being portrayed as some vengeful, wrath-filled God that commits mass genocide. And then their idea is that in the New Testament Jesus is meek and mild and gentle.

Howard Jacobson is a Jewish British author, and this is a quote from him

“The God of the Old Testament is wrathful, jealous, touchy, quick to judge, slow to forgive and stylistically forthright – favouring plain speaking over parables. The God of the New Testament, as incarnated in Jesus Christ, is altogether a different kettle of fish. More our friend than our parent.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. We’ll tackle the accusations against God in the Old Testament in a second, but first, I think there is a common misconception that Jesus and God the Father are a little bit different in their character, we talk about God’ judgment and Jesus’s mercy. But that’s not how the bible talks about the relationship between Jesus and God the Father. Jesus makes it really clear. John 10:30

John 10:30 ESV

I and the Father are one.”

They are one, they have the same character, as we looked at the attributes of God the last two weeks, all of the ones that we have in common with God, and all the ones we don’t have in common with Him.

holy, loving, just, good, merciful, gracious, faithful, patient, truthful, and wise

God is self-existent, self-sufficient, eternal, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, sovereign, infinite, and incomprehensible.

Now Jesus for a period laid down some of his divine attirbutes in order to take on human flesh, Philippians 2 makes that clear for us, but ultimately Jesus throughout time has the same attributes as the Father. But at all times, even while in flesh, Jesus did perfectly have the communicable attributes, the ones we can have too, he perfectly displayed all of them.

God in the OT is angry and full of wrath?

So what does God say about Himself, maybe the clearest example of God defining His own character in the Old Testament is in Exodus 34:6, this verse comes right after the golden calf incident, the Israelites try to shape God into the image they want Him to be in, and Moses comes back down and he gets angry and breaks the 10 commandments, and he has to go back up to get them again, and it during this interaction that we get this verse: “And the Lord passed before Moses and said: Yahweh, Yahweh, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, overflowing with loyal-love and faithfulness.”

And this verse is repeated over 30 times in the Old Testament. It’s funny, because when people picture God in the Old Testament that’s definitely not what they’re picturing.

If we go back to the Jacobson quote, he says: “The God of the Old Testament is wrathful, jealous, touchy, quick to judge, slow to forgive…”

Is there truth to that?

Nahum 1:2-3 : “The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The LORD takes vengeance on his foes and vents his wrath against his enemies. The LORD is slow to anger but great in power; the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished.”

So the bible itself does say that sometimes God is filled with wrath, but it also says that God is slow to anger with in the same verse. How does that make sense?

For that we need a good definition of the word wrath. In his book God Has a Name, Dad mentioned this book a couple of weeks ago, Pastor John Mark Comer gives this definition of God’s wrath.

God’s wrath [is] “his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all it’s forms and manifestations.”

So God’s wrath, His judgment, is all based on His hatred for evil. What does God’s wrath and God’s anger look like?

Five Groups: (What is the passage about? What does it say about God? How do you make sense of it?)

Group 1: (Deuteronomy 20:10-18) (Going to War in the Promised Land)

Group 2: (Genesis 19:23-29) (Sodom and Gommorah)

Group 3: (1 Samuel 15:1-9,32-33) (Agag and the Amalekites)

Group 4: (Joshua 6:15-21) (Jericho)

Group 5: (Exodus 4:10-17) (Moses’s excuses)

Does the word anger show up in your passage?

These stories of intense violence and judgment don’t talk about God being angry, or God delighting in people’s suffering. But its the same story that gets repeated over and over, it started with Noah and the flood and it just keeps repeating. Humans have reached a point where our natures have become corrupted and interwoven with sin. And the sin and evil at certain points in time with certain people got so bad that God had no choice but to intervene and wipeout the evil. That’s the case with a lot of these stories of God’s judgement on the Caananite nations. Deuteronomy 9:4-6

Deuteronomy 9:4–6 (NIV)

After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.

God’s judgment in the intense passages we just read, His apparent wrath in them, is not a symptom of God losing His temper, and having a giant cosmic hissy fit, no, God’s judgment is just and calculated, and sometimes its intense and makes us uncomfortable, but it is consistent.

God’s anger is also but for a moment, Psalm 30:5 “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime...”

And that’s the same idea that Jesus gets to when he describes his mission in Luke 4. He’s quoting Isaiah 61, and we can think of this passage similarly to how we thought about Exodus 34:6, that’s the definition that God gives Himself, its who He says that He is, and here Jesus is saying who He is.

Luke 4:18–19 NIV

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Isaiah 61:1–2 NIV

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn,

What’s missing in the Luke passage? Exactly, Jesus stops early and there’s a reason for that. Jesus is clarifying what God has been saying since the Old Testament, His favour is much longer than His vengenace, and in the case that Jesus is making in Luke 4, favour is the part that matters because the time has come for God’s favour to be poured out, Jesus is God in human form come to bring salvation. But Jesus doesn’t neglect the day of vengeance, he brings it up later in the book of Luke.

Luke 21:20–22 ESV

“But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it, for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written.

So Jesus here is talking about a day of vengeance, and he’s talking about the coming destruction of Jerusalem that will happen, because the people haven’t repented, Jesus is doing the same thing that the prophets did in the OT, he’s announcing a coming judgment, as God gives Israel over to the hands of their enemies, just like He did in the OT. In Judges and then again in the exiles to Assyria and Babylon, repeatedly the language is that the people left God and He gave them over to their own desires, and removed His protection and they were conquered by other nations, here too, Jesus is warning that because they have left Him and rejected Him and His teaching, judgment is coming.

God’s wrath and judgment is also shown in the teachings of Jesus. When Jesus rebukes those taking advantage of the poor in the temple and flips the tables, when He rebukes the scribes and Pharisees and pronounces woes on them because they are leading God’s people astray, and finally we see it at the cross.

The wrath of God is based wholly on His righteousness and justice, His antagonism for sin, and it is because of His perfect love and grace that He has this hatred of sin. And like we covered at the beginning, that doesn’t just apply to God the Father it also applies to Jesus. At the cross it’s not that God is pouring out hatred on His son, its that the son and the Father together are enacting justice, the wrath against sin, that should be put on humanity, is put on Jesus, and its at the cross where we best see the paradox of the character of God, the grace and justice brought together perfectly as God in human form takes the punishment for sin, the judgement we collectively deserve, and in His grace puts it on himself. Its not that the Father is all about judgment and justice and Jesus is all about love and grace, they are both equally about all of their characteristics.

Now lets go back and see that, if God in the Old Testament claims to be “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness” then does He back that up, and does it fit with a New Testament idea of Jesus.

Group 1: (Nehemiah 9:26-28, Luke 15:11-24) (Forgiveness : Recounting Israel’s unfaithfulness, Prodigal son)

Group 2: (2 Kings 13:1-5, Mark 10:46-52) (Grace: Deliverance for an evil king, healing for a blind beggar)

Group 3: (John 6:8-13, 30-40) (God Provides: Manna and Bread)

Group 4: (Numbers 21:7-9, John 3:10-18) (God Heals and Saves: Moses’s snake, Nicodemus)

Group 5: (Genesis 16:1-14, Mark 2:13-17) (God is with the Outcasts: Hagar, Levi/Matthew)

We see from these that God’s character is consistent in the Old Testament and with Jesus. The full character of God is displayed in all three parts of the trinity, and even though sometimes its hard to grasp it, there is continuity between the Old and New Testament.

So when someone comes to you and says, God is different in the two, or God in the Old Testament is only judgemental and Jesus is only loving, point them to passages where God is compassionate in the Old Testament, show them where Jesus portrays justice. I was listening to the bible project podcast, and John who’s one of their main guys, he says: “they didn’t crucify Jesus because he said to love your neighbour...” there’s truth in that, God is complex, and when we try to compartmentalize Him we miss out on seeing Him as He really is, and it can be hard to try to put it all together, but if we don’t try we’re going to miss things.

We may not always see it but God even in His name is consistently consistent. In the Old Testament, and we covered this a few weeks ago, His name is YHWH, I am who I am, or a better translation: I will be who I will always be. God is the same yesterday, today and forever, He is the same in the Old and New Testament, God the Father and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all share the same characteristics, they always have and they always will. And even when we find that confusing we can rejoice that we serve a God beyond our understanding, because to be honest it would be kind of boring if we always understood Him.