Why does God get nicer in the New Testament?

[fish90]

I know in the Old Testament that God brought man the plague to Egypt, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, brought genocide to the Gentiles. My issue is that God goes from “mean” acts against man in the Old Testament and to wishing everyone to be saved in the New Testament. How is this explained?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

The medieval mystic Blessed Julian of Norwich wondered about the wrath of God and how to square it with the God who is love (1 John 4:16). After one of her visions, she is reported to have said, “I saw no wrath except on man’s part, and that he forgives in us.”

We must remember that Scripture is both God-inspired and manmade. In all that it teaches to be true, it is inerrant, but it is still a product of man’s finite limitations. That means that the portrayal of God in the Old and New Testaments is shaded by man’s understanding of God. In the Old Testament, the sacred authors were formed by a religious culture that understood God to be primarily transcedent – he was so much Other and “out there” that his actions could easily be understood to be “harsh” and “angry.”

Then the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He became a man who laughed and cried with us, suffered and died for us. He cuddled children, made breakfast for his friends, defended the weak, stood up to the powerful, showed compassion for the most part and anger only when necessary. When the disciples fully understood him to be God made man, their perception of who God is naturally shifted. As the Second Vatican Council stated in its document Dei Verbum:

In his goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will (see Eph. 1:9) by which through Christ, the Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature (see Eph. 2:18; 2 Peter 1:4). Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (see Col. 1:15, 1 Tim. 1:17) out of the abundance of his love speaks to men as friends (see Ex. 33:11; John 15:14-15) and lives among them (see Bar. 3:38), so that he may invite and take them into fellowship with himself. This plan of revelation is realized by deeds and words having in inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them. By this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation (DV 2).