God of NT & God of OT

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Tony_B

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Hello,
Code: 
 In discussion with a friend about the OT & NT.  He makes comparisons that the God of the OT can be viewed as a God of wrath, anger, and vengeful.  He goes as far as to say that he is jealous.
(Some of the examples he uses are consuming the Israelis in fire while wandering the desert…etc. Numbers 11, Numbers 31, 17-18, Deuteronomy 6 & 7, Deuteronomy 21, 11-14, Deuterornomy 22, 28-30)
Code: 
  He compares that to the God of the NT where Jesus is represented as a "good guy," loving & forgiving.  

  He then poses the question, "Is this the same God?"  

  Hoping that you could elaborate on his comparisons.

  THANKS.
Tony B.

P.S. Glad forums are back up & running! MISSED YOU A GREAT DEAL!!
 
God doesn’t change, just our perception of him, what we understand of him has changed through history.
 
Those people who say that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament simply ignore the passages of the Old Testament where God is portrayed as loving and forgiving (Ezechiel 18:23, for instance) and they ignore the passages of the New Testament where God is portrayed as just, as when Zechariah was struck dumb (Luke 1:20), Saul was struck blind (Acts 9:8), Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead (Acts 5:5, 10), and the Corinthians fell sick and infirm or died (1 Corinthians 11:30). They also ignore what the New Testament says about the Last Judgment when Jesus, as the Judge, will say to those of us at his left hand, `Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…’ (Matthew 25:41
 
Tony_B said:
Hello,
In discussion with a friend about the OT & NT. He makes comparisons that the God of the OT can be viewed as a God of wrath, anger, and vengeful. He goes as far as to say that he is jealous.

(Some of the examples he uses are consuming the Israelis in fire while wandering the desert…etc. Numbers 11, Numbers 31, 17-18, Deuteronomy 6 & 7, Deuteronomy 21, 11-14, Deuterornomy 22, 28-30)
Code: 
  He compares that to the God of the NT where Jesus is represented as a "good guy," loving & forgiving.  

  He then poses the question, "Is this the same God?"
Click to expand...
biblegateway.com/keyword/?search=mercy&version1=50&searchtype=all&limit=none&wholewordsonly=no

biblegateway.com/keyword/?search=God+love&searchtype=all&version1=50&spanbegin=1&spanend=73

The contention that the God of the OT is harsh, judgemental ruler is one which results from an incomplete reading of the OT. Read it all, even in the shorter, Protestant canon, and you have a very definite picture of a God who, as the great Gottle of Geer recently said, “is so immorally, indecently, unethically patient with us sinners.”
 
Tony,

The differences come primarily in the sort of people that God was having to deal with in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Also, as some others have already responded, there is some selective reading going on: there is a lot of love an forgiveness by God in the Old Testament and there is a lot of fire and brimstone in the New Testament.
  • Liberian
 
Tony_B said:
Hello,

In discussion with a friend about the OT & NT. He makes comparisons that the God of the OT can be viewed as a God of wrath, anger, and vengeful. He goes as far as to say that he is jealous.

(Some of the examples he uses are consuming the Israelis in fire while wandering the desert…etc. Numbers 11, Numbers 31, 17-18, Deuteronomy 6 & 7, Deuteronomy 21, 11-14, Deuterornomy 22, 28-30)

He compares that to the God of the NT where Jesus is represented as a “good guy,” loving & forgiving.

He then poses the question, “Is this the same God?”

Hoping that you could elaborate on his comparisons.

THANKS.

Tony B.

P.S. Glad forums are back up & running! MISSED YOU A GREAT DEAL!!
Click to expand...

Painful, wasn’t it 😃 ?​

About that word “jealous” - it would be better understood as “zealous, passionate”; “zealous” and “jealous” are basically the same word; God’s “jealousy” is not envy, but passionate, all-consuming, dynamic committedness - His zeal for His Name, His unreserved electing Love for His Chosen People, His implacable hatred of unrighteousness
in every form, even, & especially among His Chosen People, are all manifestations of the same Divine “instinct”.

That is why God is absolutely trustworthy. And this same Divine Zeal is at the heart of Our Lord’s devotion to His Father’s Will: He was unreservedly & totally, always, in all things, absolutely devoted to that, above all else. The Cross manifests it: He poured out His life for sinners, made a full and perfect atonement for all sin, and destroyed sin, death and the devil, in one and the same act. It is this zeal, this jealousy, that “ate [Him] up” - it can’t be separated from His Love, let alone played off against it.

There is a lot of Divine severity in the OT - but so is there in the NT as well. The Revelation (aka Apocalypse) speaks of the wrath of the Lamb; and there is this too, at the beginning of the book.

Compare

Isa 11:4 But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked

with

Psa 33:6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his **mouth **

&

2Th 2:8 And then shall the Lawless One be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit** of his mouth**, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:

&

Rev 1:16 And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp twoedged sword: and his countenance [was] as the sun shineth in his strength.

&

Rev 19:15 And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

Jesus Christ is unimaginably, infinitely, terribly merciful - but He is no “tame lion”; anything but. In the gospels, He is quite forbidding - John emphasises His Love more than the other gospels do; and the Johannine Jesus is no softy.

His Heart & purpose, are that of God; by the same token, He will destroy all those who rebel against Him, because He is their Sovereign Lord and rightful King: His Father chose Him to be King over us, when He witnessed to His Son at the Baptism & the Transfiguration. They differ in purpose not at all - the Love of the Son for sinful man cannot be set against an imaginary un-Love of the Father for them, for us. To see the Son, is every bit as good as seeing the Father, because the Son “has made Him known”, has “exegeted Him”; that is, has interpreted Him. Jesus is the full, definitive, authoritative, canonical, final Revelation of God - everything to be known about God, is found in Jesus Christ (Romans 11.33-36; Colossians 1.16) We will not find a better this side of heaven. The Holy Spirit is given to us so that this revelation may be as effective now as it was for the Apostles; that, among other reasons, is why there is a NT & a Church & Sacraments ##

The saying “like father, like son”, could have been made for describing the absolute agreement between Father & Son; it fits perfectly 🙂

[continued…]
 
…continued & ended]

Many passages in the OT are echoed in the NT - to those above, can be added this:

Isa 27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.

This is one of the joys of Bible-study - one comes across a verse like that, and then finds oneself chasing the emphasised words & ideas; all of which cast light on the meaning of Revelation. The NT and OT are full of each other, they live in one another - which is one reason that although we find the facts of Our Lord’s earthly Life in the gospels, we also find a lot about Him in the OT:

John 3:13 No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man

with

Pro 30:4 Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth? what [is] his name, and what [is] his son’s name, if thou canst tell?

What the NT verse is saying, is that Jesus is privy to the secrets of creation, to things which are God’s own secret. He is not just a wise man, but far more. The verse in Proverbs is by a human author who did not know the Name of Jesus, for he could not. But God does have a son, and that is His son’s name. The theme of secrecy, mystery, hiddennness, is one of the main NT themes, and it has to do with “Who men say that [Jesus is]”.

As for the love of God in the OT - read Hosea, who was commanded by God to take an unfaithful wife, so that he would know in his own experience something of the love of God for Israel, which had “forgotten” Him (a very important word in the Bible - to forget God, is to desert Him: to go AWOL, as it were); and, to experience the anguish of desertion. Those experiences taught Hosea something of what God “felt” for Israel, and why. And there is Ezekiel, one of whose main themes is the “jealousy” of God.

The Bible is unrivalled in giving a many-sided picture of God’s character; our problem is that we tend to isolate one aspect of His character, as though it were more important than the rest. It is Providential that we have the words “God is Love” twice - this protects us from identifying God with any of His other attributes, and implies that the Holy Spirit is this Love.

God created Israel out of love - He had no Chosen People, so He created one, through the experience of the Exodus. This brings us to unfathomable Divine things like Predestination and Election, which go back to “the eternal purpose of God” “before the creation of the world”.

Ideas of that kind were part & parcel of the OT’s environment; they are associated with the theology of kingship, which Israel “baptised” for its own purposes; in the long run, these ideas were applied to Jesus, as can be seen throughout the NT. God is King & Shepherd of Israel - Jesus is the same: “shepherd” constantly turns up in the titles of Mespotamian kings, who ruled buy the will of the gods, rather as the kingds of Israel & Judah ruled by the Will of JHWH . All these ideas converge in Jesus, the Suffering Servant Messiah-King & Redeemer of His People Israel, Who is the “Desire of all nations”; and are either shared with or have some reference to us, to the Church. As Hebrews says, He is the heir of the ages. And all this is the work of the One God Who is the Primary Author of all the Bible - including the obscure bits 🙂 That in itself is evidence of the continuity in character of the God of the Bible. ##
 
Oh my, where does one begin. I have never come across more doublespeak, convoluted justification, circumlocutive argument, illogical inanity, uncritical exegesis and egregious cognitive dissonance in my life.

There is a reason for you being called Apologists, you NEED to apologize to all of us for your believing in the unbelievable nonsense that our Creator or the One Unitary Consciousness which is God, could ever be confused with the Elohim (plural term by the way…spare us the triune deities argument), the Nephelim, Jehovah (JHWH) or the substituted YHWH, a later attempt at making this REGIONAL Sumerian “deity” more universal. George Orwell would be proud…war is peace, hate is love, murderous wrath (wrath of the Lamb?) is the Love of the Father for his Loyal Flock. You missed the Reformation (they weren’t much better, however), the Enlightenment and America’s own Free Thought movement. Reason and true spirituality have brought most of us out of the enthrallment of believing our Creator, All That Is, would ever have a “Chosen People”, directly cause or order the death of over 3 million of His children, not counting the Flood, dictate or engrave commandments with colloquial period mores which are an offense to the diversity of human traditions and cultures, and quite frankly to our intelligence, which is God given, by the way.

For one example to make my point. What makes you all think that Moses received “God’s revelation”? And, if he had who in his right mind would ever want to be governed by such nonsense! When was the last time you read and tried to understand some of the hundreds of wonderful “laws” recorded in the OT. For one example, try Lev.21:17-23 which contains this quote: “…No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the LORD made by fire” This included all manner of men that this “god” thought not worthy of preparing the barbeque that “He and His Hosts” were about to receive! This is utter blasphemy to any understanding of the loving and divine Father spoke of by Jesus! I could quote hundreds of such nonsense but it takes only ONE such attribution to discredit it ALL as being of our Creator.

It’s like watching the Rodney King video…then being asked by a denier, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? There are no apologies which can deny the obvious, only a suspension of disbelief.

The sad truth as we are now learning, is that the Bible, at least the Old Testament, does not chronicle the acts of God at all, at least regarding our creation! From Genesis on,as I mentioned, it speaks of the Elohim, of the Nephilim and later of a regional member, Jehovah of the Elohim, who were the Annunaki (literally “Those who from heaven to earth came”) of the Sumerians who first described and gave us the stories of these quite remarkable “physical” beings. The ones by the way which imprinted their image and their likeness upon us (sorry, God had already done that with our soul, our primary being. We have the Sumerian texts which tell us how this “imprinting“ was done in rather amazing detail consistent with in vitro fertilization-see Sitchin‘s “Genesis Revisited“). Us or man, the physical component being one of the early hominids, probably Homo Erectus, at that point would have required an additional 2 million years of evolution (the missing link?) to be sufficiently advanced to receive a soul. If they had not intervened genetically we would still be “eating from the grasses, drinking from the ditches and playing with the animals” (a Sumerian description of us prior to the “imprint” of their DNA). I know, this is a lot to absorb in one sitting but the actual texts are quite clear. There is much more.

My point of all this is that the OT had nothing to do with Jesus’ Father who art in Heaven and who’s kingdom is within each of us. As Paul told us and he was correct in this, He is the unseen and unheard God, not the OT "gods"of Abraham for He, Jesus’ Father, truly was the I AM before the Annunaki “gods” of the Old Testament, who He created prior to us.

May I suggest you discover for yourselves the origins of the OT and stop giving anything attributable therein to God (the Source of all that is) any credence at all. Since He is unseen and unheard, any written words (or engraved tablets) or visions of “the glory of God and His Hosts” have absolutely nothing to do with our Creator. If you must "believe in a religion, begin it with Jesus and the New Testament and relegate the OT to a quaint and antiquated human history save a few Psalms and Proverbs which appear to flow from the soul or spiritual essence of the author. Or, write your own scriptures with your own revealed truth.

Jesus came to awaken us to our true spiritual Self which entered into this physical form and world of duality and opposites to manifest the qualities given us by our Source, God, if you will. Beyond this, we know little of our Creator and that is undoubtedly as it should be for now, in our current unrealized form. More will be revealed! Stay tuned.

Awaken to the voice of God within you for that is the only place it can be heard,

Wayne Wohler
 
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