Within the pages of the Bible, do we witness more than one God? And no, I don’t mean Baal, Asherah, or Molech. I mean the God of the Bible.
Violence. War. Blood.
Mercy! Forgiveness! Grace!
Pestilence. Plague. Retribution.
Salvation! Hope! Love!
There’s a chance you may have felt confused before when comparing the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament.”
Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amelekites, and fight against them until they are exterminated.
1 Samuel 15:18 NASB
But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.
Matthew 5:39 NASB
You may be left wondering…did God change? That’s a perfectly valid question for you to be asking. As we grow closer with God in our spiritual walks, it is incredibly important for us to understand His nature as we try to emulate it in our own lives. And if you’re an atheist, a skeptic, or a wavering believer, this is an important question for you to get answers to as well. For if God can be proven to be incompatible or contradictory with Himself, you can make a pretty solid argument that He does not exist.
And so, let’s briefly unpack this issue. The heart of the question lies in two seemingly opposed images of God—one full of judgment, wrath, and war, while the other is full of love, gentleness, and peace. Perhaps the better questions for us to begin with are: Are these images accurate? Do they represent God justly?
While yes, we do see more “violence” in the Old Testament, does that mean that we lose any of the love we witness in the New Testament? Absolutely not. Before you again think there’s a disconnect between God’s love in the New Testament and what we see of God in the Old Testament, call these Old Testament passages to mind:
But You are God,
Nehemiah 9:17
Ready to pardon,
Gracious and merciful,
Slow to anger,
Abundant in kindness.
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
Lamentations 3:22–24 ESV
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
“For the mountains may be removed and the hills may shake,
Isaiah 54:10 NASB
But My lovingkindness will not be removed from you,
And My covenant of peace will not be shaken,”
Says the LORD who has compassion on you.
We’d like to continue, but you get the picture.
We often forget that the love we see in the New Testament has always existed in God’s communication with mankind. Now, you might say, “Well, actions speak louder than words! What about all the people He ordered to be killed?” That’s an excellent question! Let’s look at this and see if this questioning of God’s character is valid.
Perhaps the go-to passages about God ordering violence are from Joshua 7–12. Here is where we read the account of the Canaanites facing God’s violent judgment in the hands of His people the Israelites. People often jump on this to say that God didn’t give them a chance; He just wiped them all out mercilessly. However, this is not accurate. In Genesis 15:16, which took place many generations prior to Joshua, God did not have Canaan wiped out because their “iniquity had not reached its full measure.” Because there clearly was still some good amongst them, God chose to give them time. This period of time was 400 years! In those 400 years, do you know what these people were up to? There’s a long list of abominations we could give here, but none are so brutally disgusting as this: child sacrifice.
The people of Canaan would regularly burn their children alive as offerings to Molech. The evil of the Canaanites had reached such deplorable depths that they were willing to torture and slaughter their own infants and children to their gods. Musicians would be ordered to bang on drums so loud in order to drown out the screams of agony coming from the dying infants. The priests didn’t want the parents having a change of heart in the middle of their worship of this child-craving god. So these weren’t just “sexually liberated people” who lived in a way God didn’t like. They made abominations a regular part of their society. They had to be brought to an end. Many apologists have brought up the irony that skeptics question why God doesn’t prevent evil in the world, yet when God did eradicate a wicked culture, they complain about it!
This is a prime example of God acting in righteous judgment against darkness and evil. So the first bit of perspective we need to add is that God did not wipe out an innocent group of people simply because they did not follow His exact commands. He commanded their slaying because they were abominable, warping the inherent rights each person had and abusing those around them.
Imagine someone committed a violent crime against one of your family members. The extremity of the crime can be left to your imagination, but the question is this: If the judge decided to show the criminal mercy and just let them go, would you call that a good judge? No! Depending on the severity of the crime, you’d want justice! What if the judge decided he wanted to show “love” to the criminal? Would you call it the “loving” decision to set them free? No! The truly loving decision would be to act out justice for the victim and their family. These child-sacrificing Canaanites had to be taken out of the picture.
God’s judgment and His love are not opposed to each other, nor are they mutually exclusive. They both exist equally within the nature of God; they exist within the same characteristic. If God loves His creation, then He should want justice for His creation. They go hand-in-hand. And so, when looking at a bigger perspective, the most loving course of action God could’ve taken was to eradicate the evil.
The obvious question then becomes, “Well, what about the kids?” It is true that there were vulnerable groups in the population that also faced violence due to the evil around them. This is a difficult thing to come to grips with, because we don’t always see what God sees. Some would say that this very issue is the most difficult issue a modern Christian can wrestle with.
This is because we, as finite beings, cannot fully grasp the nature of an infinite being. And so, when we say that God truly knows in fullness the best possible thing to do, when we see something that isn’t what we would do, it’s hard to see it any other way. We can think everything through, and we can come to some realizations that aid us in understanding these things. Ultimately, it comes down to trusting in God’s authority.
While that is our central imperative, there are a couple of important things to consider that lessen the bad feelings around these events in Scripture. First, these children went to paradise that same day. In the cultures they were raised in, chances are they would’ve grown up corrupted like their parents and grandparents before them. This premature end is ironically a form of mercy from a God loves and can see the end from the beginning. This, of course, does not apply to human action, for we are not God and do not have the ability to truly see the right path every time. This authority belongs to God alone, which of course goes back to trusting in Him. We can sometimes see glimpses into His nature and decision-making, and that’s all we get most of the time.
Now that we’ve gotten some Old Testament perspective, let’s turn to the New Testament, in which, our image of God is seemingly more peaceful and loving (not so much obsessed with justice). Is this one accurate? No—surprise, surprise.
When discussing the New Testament, we perhaps feel scared of stories like Ananias and Sapphira, that they depict a God who is inconsistent with the Gospel. There are likely those who may quip, “that God belongs in the Old Testament.” But that is not the truth of the New Covenant.
You see, we did witness a change between the Covenants. What was a much more physical covenant became a much more spiritual covenant. We no longer sacrifice animals, for Christ was the one sacrifice for many. We no longer are required to worship at the Temple. The examples go on and on. Although these details changed, that doesn’t change that God is a righteous judge who still hates sin and evil. It also doesn’t change that eternal judgment exists for those who ultimately reject the truth of the Gospel.
Jesus says:
Not everyone who says to Me, “Lord, Lord,” shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.
In Matthew 7:21
But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.
Matthew 12:36
So clearly, this still exists in the pages of the New Testament. I suppose you could react to this with disappointment, having your teddy bear version of God being taken away, but this should ultimately give us great reassurance and joy—the Lord hasn’t changed! Just as He has always loved His creation and His people deeply (even in the Old Testament), so He now still is the judge of every soul (even in the New Testament)!
The Lord has not changed, but His mind has. Do you have questions about how an unchanging God can change His mind? Explore that question here.