Why Would Jesus Be Good, If His "God" In the OT Was a Monster?

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I had someone ask me this question about the New Testament, which he referred to as someone “putting a good spin on an old nightmare”. Responses? BTW, I’m going to invite this person to the Catholic Answers forums to participate in the discussion, but only if you all help me out by getting the conversation going. I don’t want to invite them if this is going to be a dud thread. Thanks so much and God bless!
 
I had someone ask me this question about the New Testament, which he referred to as someone “putting a good spin on an old nightmare”. Responses?
Hello DeosalvatoreMeo;

Not quite sure how one would paraphrase the Old Testament as a nightmare.

The title of your post:
Why Would Jesus Be Good, If His “God” In the OT Was a Monster?
First of all Jesus had NO God…HE was God in the MYSTERY of the Holy Trinity.
Read John chap 1: 1-16

John Chapter 1
Note

The divinity and incarnation of Christ. John bears witness of him. He begins to call his disciples.
1:1

In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God.
1:2

The same was in the beginning with God.
1:3

All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.
1:4

In him was life: and the life was the light of men.
1:5

And the light shineth in darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it.
1:6

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
1:7

This man came for a witness, to give testimony of the light, that all men might believe through him.
1:8

He was not the light, but was to give testimony of the light.
1:9

That was the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world.
1:10

He was in the world: and the world was made by him: and the world knew him not.
1:11

He came unto his own: and his own received him not.
1:12

But as many as received him, he gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name.
1:13

Who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
1:14

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.
Why Would Jesus Be Good, If His “God” In the OT Was a Monster?
Forgive me for asking but how is it you title God in the OT as a Monster and Jesus a Good. Perhaps you would like to make a comparative analogy clarifying what makes Jesus different from God in the Old Testament?

You should realize that the SAME Jesus was mystically present in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity when God spoke to Moses and inscribed His holy finger on the stone tablets writing the TEN COMMANDMENTS to God’s holy people for all generations.
 
Sorry if the way the question is posed is confusing. This is the question that a non-believer asked me in a dialogue about Christianity on YouTube. The person wants to know, essentially, how could God appear to be so cruel and punishing in the Old Testament and still be the same loving God of the New Testament. I knew that there would be people here that could help him to understand how the God of the Old and New Testaments could be the same. So, I posted his question for him here and I’ll invite him over once this thread gets a few more responses and then we can really get rolling… If he agrees to come to these forums. Thanks for answering!
 
I recommend you read St. Augustine’s The Harmony of the Gospels to see how a pious Saint handles the Word of God, and how God rewards those who humbly seek His Truth. As the good Saint says:

“Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”
 
Jesus is good because He is God and sinless Man.

God is all-good, the source and summit of all good things, Goodness Itself. He is Goodness because He Himself has said so: “I form the light, and create the darkness, I make well-being and create woe; I, the LORD, do all these things.” God creates woe in that He permits evil to exist so He can bring out of it a greater good - for example, permitting Adam to sin so He can redeem man; permitting the Israelites to become slaves in Egypt so He can rescue them.

Jesus is God and Man, true God and true Man. As Man, He is completely sinless. He is completely sinless because, as Man, He enjoyed the Beatific Vision. The Beatific Vision is God’s Face, seeing God face-to-face, not with our eyes but with our intellects, since God cannot be seen with physical eyes since He is not physical but Spirit. When a man enjoys the Beatific Vision, he is unable to sin, because He is so enraptured by God’s Beauty that he would not wish to offend God by committing a sin. But the Beatific Vision is God’s gift, so He can give it and take it away; if a man should lose the Beatific Vision, he would either go insane or die from sorrow: such is how beautiful God’s Face is. Now, because Jesus is God and Man, He enjoyed the Beautific Vision since the instance of His conception. Now, when a man enjoys seeing God, he sees him to a certain limit; he sees God to the extent that his intellect can comprehend God. Hence, in the womb, Jesus would comprehend God as much as an unborn child could, and, when He was twelve years old, He would comprehend God as much as a twelve year old child could, and so on and so forth. The union of the Divine Nature and Human Nature in Jesus meant Jesus, as Man, could not sin, in light of Him seeing God face-to-face as Man, as I said before. The flip side of the Beatific Vision is that Jesus, as God, communicated Himself to the Man, giving Him all of His graces, powers, and love, to the point that Jesus’ human nature resembled God, i.e., the Visible made known the Invisible. Jesus’ human nature is what God looks like as Man, and, Jesus’ human nature is what Man looks like when He is fully conformed to God, all-holy, united to the Divinity.

The union of the Divine and the Human is a result of the Incarnation, that mystery by which God became incarnate in the womb of Mary. He assumed humanity, all human narture - He assumed your body and soul, your sins and virtues, your life and all, and He assumed my body and soul, my sins and virtues, my life and all, and He assumed the bodies and souls, sins and virtues, lives and all of every human person He has created in history - whereby Jesus is the sum of the human race: In Him is every human person, including the person of His Mother, Mary. Because of this, Jesus is the New Adam. Just as Adam was the father of humanity, and had within himself all humanity, so too, Jesus is the New Father of humanity, having within himself all humanity; but Jesus’ Fatherhood is greater than Adam’s, because, Adam did not have Jesus in himself, but Jesus had Adam in Himself. God took on human flesh because He wished to redeem mankind by dying on a cross, and, by such a sacrifical act, He showed His love for mankind. Now, God, strictly speaking, cannot actually die or be harmed, given His Nature, but, by taking on human nature, He can suffer and die, in the humanity that is, since mortal man is vulnerable to suffering and death (in light of original sin). Because Jesus is sinless, He was completely conformed to God, whereby His Human Will fully submitted itself to His Divine Will, so that, in His Humanity, He did whatever God commanded; because of this, and because Jesus is God, we say that, whenever Jesus spoke, it was God speaking, and whenever He acted, it was God acting, and whenever He suffered, it was God who suffered, and when He died, it was God who died.

A few questions you might ask, which I’d like to answer briefly:

Dose Jesus have a God? Yes, as Man. As Man He was a Jew, and Jews worship God.
Dose God have a body? Yes, in light of the Incarnation.
Did God have a body before the Incarnation? No, since God is not physical. He is Spirit.
Did God foreknow Adam would sin? Yes, and He gave Adam free-will, just as He gave the angels free-will; some of the angels rebelled against God, but He permitted it, for a greater good. The same goes for Adam.
Why didn’t God create a world free of evil? God created everything free of evil, He created everything good - so good, in fact, that men and angels had the good of free-will. But God knew they would abuse their free-wills, and cause evil to come into the world, so He ordered things in such a way that good would come out of evil, ultimately defeating evil.
 
I would suggest that the person in question actually read the old testament.

Over and Over again God was faithful it was people who were the nightmare!
 
It’s easy for us to say “read the OT” but we should realize that this heresy (that the OT God was evil) has been put forth numerous times over the centuries - it was part of the early gnostic heresy which John was already fighting during the New Testament times.

It is true that it is difficult to read of God’s wrath in the OT, the condemnations of pagan peoples that extends to killing children and domestic animals, etc, and reconcile that with the “God is love” teaching of the NT. We should not pretend that it is not hard.

We believe that Jesus is God, and that God is Good, because we accept Jesus’ word and understand it in a way consistent with what has been passed on since the Apostles. We therefore believe that the acts and commands of God as recorded in the Old Testament are consistent with His character which is both all-good and all-holy. We can (and do) try to explain that and we point to His provision of the Way to salvation in the Incarnation. We believe that in His mercy He provides a means of salvation to all His creatures, and that each has an opportunity to accept the gift of grace, although we cannot explain how that is.

To the OP - I think there isn’t an easy response to the challenge, and the best thing to do is to be honest about this while affirming what we believe and have always held to - that there is only One God and that He chose to dwell among us in order to redeem us.
 
Thanks. I really appreciate all of the responses. I find that I am very weak in the area of the OT. I feel that I have a firm grip on topics like Protestant errors and most attacks by atheists, but the area of the OT is something that I rarely am asked or discuss. So, I was a little unsure how to proceed. I’m going to continue at YT to discuss this with this person, who is an atheist, and work off the answers here. Thank you again for helping me! 🙂
 
So, I went back to YouTube, to the video about abortion where this atheist confronted me about the supposed inconsistency of “goodness” between the Old and New Testament God. I was better able to clarify my thoughts after reading all of your responses, and decided that the issue of God’s love in the OT was going to be too in-depth to discuss in the small YouTube comment boxes. Instead, I focused on the obvious consistency of the just God in both Old and New. This was a video about abortion, so it fits. Thanks for helping me get my thoughts together. 👍
 
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