Not So Bad After All

Back in 2019, I answered the question “Why is God so morbidly violent in the Old Testament?” with five solid reasons the God of the Old Testament is not so bad after all, even by our presumptuous, permissive modern standards.

You won’t sell that truth easily to the average non-Bible reader. They are too caught up with the standard media tropes: that the God of the Old Testament was bloodthirsty and capricious, while Jesus was loving, forgiving and tolerant to a fault.

Neither stereotype is accurate. If you look at Jesus closely, he’s exactly like the God of the Old Testament.

The Unity of the Godhead

This is something we should expect, because Jesus constantly reinforced the truth that there is no division in the Godhead: “The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise”, “I and the Father are one”, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” If you like what you see of God in the person of Jesus Christ, well, he gave full credit to the Father for everything he was and everything he did. If he was gentle, meek and loving (or anything else), it’s because God is too. Whatever qualities he brought into the world and displayed to it were 100% consonant with the character qualities of the Father. All that he did the Father initiated, so that the Son could lovingly put his Father’s character on display.

The apostles, who watched all this, said precisely the same thing about the relationship between the Father and the Son. Paul writes, “He is the image of the invisible God.” Hebrews says, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” John proclaims, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

The Bible teaches that you cannot get a more accurate representation of the God of the Old Testament than Jesus Christ. What you see in him is God in his very essence. The old hymn puts this more eloquently than I can:

“True image of the infinite whose essence is concealed,
  Brightness of uncreated light, the heart of God revealed.”

— Josiah Conder

More Evidence for Unity

With that in mind, let’s examine two more biblical evidences of the absolute unity of the Godhead:

1/ The Pre-Incarnate Christ and the Judgment of God

Theologians from almost all denominations agree that Christ is present in the Old Testament, long before the Word was made flesh and came to live among us. The scriptures declare it. John insists Christ existed before the creation of the universe and was the active force behind it.

The Old Testament features a recurring character referred to as the “angel of the Lord”, who is explicitly identified as YHWH. This is how Abraham experienced God’s presence; he heard the angel of the Lord. Unlike other angels, the angel of the Lord accepted worship, which tells us he was deity, just as those who met him believed. Jesus tacitly confirmed that he both predated and knew Abraham, driving the Jewish religious authorities into a frenzy. Why? Effectively, he was claiming to be the angel of the Lord, and Jews in the first century also considered the angel of the Lord deity.

Interestingly, this “angel of the Lord” is frequently associated with the direct judgment of God. The angel of the Lord initiated Israel’s campaigns against her enemies. When Israel was afflicted with a plague because of David’s census, it was the angel of the Lord who David saw working destruction among the people. In one memorable case, the angel of the Lord struck down 185,000 Assyrians in a single night. The psalmist writes concerning his enemies, “Let their way be dark and slippery, with the angel of the Lord pursuing them!”

John finishes the introduction in his first chapter by plainly stating, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” Whenever men have caught glimpses of God throughout history, it was because the Son was present acting on the Father’s behalf and revealing him to the world. He was the angel of the Lord.

One of the features of the Lord’s first advent was that he did not come to act as judge in the course of those 33 years. That said, if you believe the angel of the Lord was the pre-incarnate Christ, then the “God of the New Testament” acted in judgment on behalf of the God of the Old prior to his incarnation, and will do so again in future days.

That’s a pretty consistent character on display, if you ask me. A brief change in tactics during his first advent, and one appropriate to the occasion, but no change whatsoever in character.

2/ The Apostles Viewed the OT Judgments of God Favorably

If anyone knew and understood the true character of the Lord Jesus it would be the men who lived and worked with him every day for the best part of three years. These witnesses directly or indirectly produced our gospels and the rest of the New Testament. No cursory reader of the Bible can ever claim to have a better insight into the mind of Christ than those who could say, “we have seen with our eyes … we looked upon … [we] touched with our hands”. Claiming to know better than they did what Jesus was really like would be the height of arrogance.

These same witnesses saw no inconsistency between God as revealed in Christ to them personally, and God as revealed in the Old Testament. In fact, they cite the certainty of God’s judgment to comfort and reassure believers:

“For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment.”

What’s Peter’s point? Not that God has evolved or changed his character since those times, but rather that God always gets it right, and that we can have confidence in him precisely because he never changes. Both aspects of God’s character glimpsed in this passage are important to us: that he rescues the godly, and that he can be counted on to ensure that evil men get exactly what they deserve.

Even more interesting is this passage from Hebrews. Far from telling us that God has eased up on his judgment of sin or his righteous standards since Old Testament times, Hebrews tells its readers greater revelation makes them even more accountable than the people God judged back then:

“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven … Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

Let me suggest that if God’s history of judging sin did not trouble the apostles and writers of the New Testament, it should not trouble us. After all, they wrote these very things on our account.