Any conscientious reader of the Bible knows there’s a vast difference between the seemingly angry, harsh, and vengeful God of the Old Testament and the loving, grace-filled Jesus we’re introduced to in the New Testament. If we’re the least bit reflective about our faith, this is troubling. It also gives fodder to those who assert Christianity is the source of much of what’s wrong with the world. So many influential atheists—i.e., Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—tap into this as a major issue that highlights the irrationality of belief in God.
One of the cornerstones of Christian theology is God’s immutability—the belief His character is fixed and does not change over the course of time. But when we read in the Old Testament that God occasionally asked His people to obliterate everyone, including women and children, when they swept through a community and conquered it, it puzzles us. At times God comes off as bloodthirsty, ruthless, and barbaric. There is a major shift—something has clearly changed—between the murderous, merciless God we see at times in the Old Testament and the call to love our enemies Jesus espouses in the Sermon on the Mount.
So—how do we reconcile this dilemma? Is God a moral monster that has curtailed his nefarious proclivities in recent years to where He’s now doing a better job of keeping his unseemly tendencies under control? Is He not immutable after all—has He turned over a new leaf and become much less bloodthirsty and cruel since the days of the Old Testament? Or is something else at work here?
A lot of people are turned off by the way God is pictured in the Old Testament. The idea He’d ask Abraham to sacrifice his son—never mind that He provided a ram in the thicket and stayed Abraham’s hand to where he didn’t follow through—is appalling to us. During the conquest of the Promised Land, God commanded the Israelites on a number of occasions to storm into a community and kill everything in sight. In 2 Samuel 24, when King David decided to take a census of the men of fighting age, God dispatched the prophet Gad to him to announce His displeasure with this decision. The punishment? “The Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from that morning until the appointed time; and seventy thousand of the people died” (2 Samuel 24:15). Seems like the punishment didn’t fit the crime. David makes a decision that displeases God and 70,000 Israelites die? How can this action be reconciled with a God of mercy, compassion, and love?
If you read the Old Testament law, there are numerous “crimes” for which God required the death penalty. Among these were sacrificing to a god other than Yahweh (Exodus 22:20), persistent rebelliousness on the part of a child (Deut. 21:18–21), a child who hit or cursed his or her parents (Exodus 21:15 & 17), working on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), and premarital sex (Deut. 22:13–21). While we’d probably classify all of these things as less than ideal, the punishment of death seems a bit severe. In addition—some of the things God asked His prophets to do make Him come off not just as weird, but as a bit deranged and unbalanced. What kind of God would place such bizarre demands on His most ardent followers? To look at this God and say He is immutable and unchangeable—that His character does not shift or change over the course of time—boxes us into a very uncomfortable corner from which it’s hard to escape. In fact, many people’s solution is to gloss over these sections of the Bible and pretend they don’t exist. But we can’t get past the fact the Bible says these things. If the Bible is inspired and every word was chosen by God, then our conclusion must be that, at least during the Old Testament period, He was a violent God—burning people alive, stoning them to death for anything that brought Him offense, killing tens of thousands for the sin of their king, and commanding his own people to wipe out entire cities and peoples.
So how do we reconcile this with the God who’s revealed to us in the New Testament in the person of Jesus—the One the apostle Paul called “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) and in whom “his fullness dwells” (v. 19)? How do we resolve a God who called for the total annihilation of the Canaanites with a Jesus who broke bread with sinners, ministered to prostitutes and adulterers and, while hanging on the cross, prayed for his accusers. There is an incredible disconnect!
And we can’t ignore it! Perhaps when we were younger, we could. Growing up I’d get caught up in the story line—for instance, when the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, I rejoiced at the startling and unexpected victory for the people of God! But as an adult, I realized the residents of Jericho were human beings—people who lived, loved, and had families. Among the lives lost were babies and toddlers, mothers and fathers. To have them be crushed when the walls of their fortified city collapsed at the hands of God or be indiscriminately slaughtered as His people immediately rushed in afterwards and surged to victory—there are some real moral and theological dilemmas here!
A number of years ago—when I was a teen—there was a popular bumper sticker that said, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it!” While I understand the aim of that sticker, I also believe we often bring that overly simplistic mentality to how we read the Bible. Not to say we shouldn’t trust or believe what we read in the Bible. But that very black-and-white mindset can get us into hot water when it comes to some of the things we encounter in the Old Testament. For instance, if “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it!” is true, then we have to conclude that genocide is, in some situations, morally acceptable. Reading the Bible through that lens can open the door to all manner of atrocity—something the human race has proven very adept at doing … projecting our violence onto God in an attempt to assuage our conscience by an imagined divine sanction for our actions. The inhumanity and barbarity of the crusades … the practice of slavery by people who called themselves Christians … Hitler’s minions proclaiming “Gott Mit Uns”—God is with us—as they sought to exterminate Jews … all testify to our penchant to appease our conscience by projecting our sins onto God.
But to say God is not immutable—that His character is not fixed and His nature is changing and evolving as time marches on—is equally disquieting. For if God’s character is not fixed, then the foundation of our faith is unsettled. What’s to say He won’t, at some point, change back? A God who fluctuates, vacillates, and is subject to change cannot serve as an anchor for our faith. He becomes a God of mythology—capricious, unpredictable, and fickle.
Here’s where I’ve landed: I’ve concluded that what needs to change is not our understanding of the consistency and decency of God’s character. What needs to change is how we understand the Old Testament. Paul said in Colossians that Jesus is the image of the invisible God in whom the fullness of God’s nature dwells. The apostle John said essentially the same thing in John 1—that Jesus is the ultimate manifestation of God’s nature—He is the “Word made flesh” (v. 14). The conclusion of the New Testament is that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament pointed to. He is the preeminent and consummate act of God’s self-revelation.
When Jesus began his public ministry, John the Baptist emerged—pointing the people of his day to Jesus’ supremacy and superiority. In our day, the Bible serves a similar role—its purpose is to point people to Jesus. John the Baptist was sent by God, but he was not God. By the same token, while the Old Testament was inspired by God, it is not God. Thus, it is not the perfect revelation of God’s nature or character—Jesus is! The unblemished disclosure of God is not found in a book; it’s found in a person! The Bible’s purpose is to point us to Jesus, which means our priority should not be on the pointing finger but on that toward which the finger points.
Of John the Baptist, the gospel writer says, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe” (John 1:6-7). In the very same way, we could just as easily say, “There was a book sent from God called the Bible. It came as a witness to the light, so that all might believe through it.” The Bible is inspired and authoritative. It infallibly and inerrantly routes our focus to the One who conclusively reveals to us the essence and heart of God and can facilitate a personal and meaningful connection with Him. But it is not to be deified or worshipped. That is reserved for Jesus and Jesus alone!
So—what are we to make of these heinous and horrifying passages in the Old Testament? Here’s what I’ve come to believe: The Old Testament is not so much a revelation of the character and nature of God as it is an account of Israel’s coming to understand the character and nature of their God. Along the way, they made some wrong assumptions. Some of their ideas about who He was and what He was like were drawn from what the neighboring peoples of the ancient Near East believed about their gods. But those ideas were off target and, in time, shown to be flawed. The Old Testament was written in a time when violence was seen as part of God’s way of accomplishing his purposes. They attributed to God words, commands, and deeds they believed He’d have authorized or done. What this means is that the Old Testament passages about violence, bloodshed, and destruction tell us more about what the people who wrote them believed and the times in which they lived than about the God in whose name they claimed the authority to do those things.
In other words, what has changed is not God but the degree to which humanity has attained an understanding of His true nature. Our collective understanding has shifted and morphed because we have the benefit of Jesus. When He deemed the time was right, God broke in and conclusively revealed Himself to us in the person of His Son. Just as the perceived movement of the sun across the sky is not the result of the sun moving but the earth spinning, so the shift in God’s character is not the result of Him gradually changing, but of us progressively coming to a more complete grasp of who He is. The change taking place is not on God’s part, but ours.
Think of it this way: The people in the Old Testament—Moses, Joshua, and David, etc.—were Israel’s heroes. These OT stories were written to inspire those who would come after them to exhibit courage and commitment to God. In many ways, it’s like the account of William Wallace of Scotland. Wallace died in 1305, but to this day he’s regarded as a hero in Scotland for his exploits against the English in their war for independence. Scottish children are taught about William Wallace in school. Memorials to him can be found throughout the countryside. His story was told in the Oscar-winning film Braveheart starring Mel Gibson. You can certainly criticize some of his methods and accuse him of being violent and harsh. But in Scotland he’s remembered for his heroism.
What I’m suggesting is these stories surrounding the conquest of Canaan were to the ancient Israelites what the story of William Wallace is to the Scottish people today—accounts written to depict courage, resolve, and faith on the part of God’s people and to inspire later generations to demonstrate the same in their struggles against their own enemies. But they were written from the theological perspective of the day. Yahweh’s followers assumed—wrongly—that He shared the violent attributes of the other deities that were worshiped by the surrounding peoples of the ancient Near East.
When understood in this light—when we recognize the humanity of the Bible’s authors, their intent in writing, and the culture that shaped them—it helps us make sense of some of the inexcusable and disgraceful stuff we read in the Old Testament without justifying it. If we take the humanity of the Bible seriously, we find that the violence in the Old Testament is more a reflection of the values and theological understanding of its human authors more than it is of the God they sought to serve. The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the people of Israel coming to know their God. Their understanding was a work in progress and not fully formed. God’s revelation was progressive. He didn’t “dump the entire load” at the outset, but His self-disclosure played out over the course of hundreds—thousands—of years. Just as the recommendations from the CDC changed as immunologists came to learn more about the Covid virus during the recent pandemic, so the understanding and behavior of God’s people changed as they came to learn more about Him as He progressively revealed Himself over the course of time.
As a result, we can question those parts of Scripture where God is portrayed in a way that’s inconsistent with Jesus’ life and message. When a passage is at odds with Jesus’ life and example, we need to consider that it may reflect the culture, worldview, and perspectives of the human author more than it does the heart, character, and nature of God.
When we approach the Bible in this way, it will liberate us from some of the feelings of confusion and embarrassment that accompany defending a God who supposedly asked His followers to do some reprehensible and disgraceful stuff. And, hopefully, it will also keep us from repeating some of the contemptible things those who profess allegiance to Him, and who’ve used the Bible to justify and validate them, have done over the years. For the conclusive and definitive revelation of God is not a collection of documents called “The Bible.” It’s a person named Jesus!