19 Mar 2017

“The God of the Old Testament”

Religious 38 Comments

I think a lot of people–including me when I was younger–think that there are two separate Gods in the Christian Bible. First there’s the mean vindictive God of the Old Testament, and then there’s the nice guy Jesus in the New Testament.

However, you do see all of Jesus’ character traits in the “God of the Old Testament.” For example, I grabbed the following from Baker’s Theology of Exodus:

On this occasion, Moses receives a special revelation of Yahweh’s character. He requests a look at God’s glory (33:18 ). The audacity of the request is overlooked, and Yahweh promises to reveal all his “goodness” ( 33:19 ). Whether the “glory” and the “goodness” are the same is not explained. But when Yahweh passes Moses on the mountain, six words or phrases are proclaimed that provide one of the fullest descriptions of the Lord’s character, no matter whether glory or goodness. Yahweh is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, abounding in faithfulness, and forgiving ( 34:6-7 ).

According to the Bible, Jesus and the God of Abraham are the same. (Jesus said, “[B]efore Abraham was, I AM.”)

I have said this before, but the way I interpret the “two different personalities” is that in the Old Testament, you see God in His role God Almighty, creator of the heavens and earth. So yes He sends plagues and orders massacres, but you must keep in mind that He is in control of everything that happens and whether you die from a heart attack, an avalanche, or Joshua’s sword, in a sense “God killed you.” In this setting, God taught us how to live by issuing a long string of commands and giving rewards and punishments accordingly.

However, in the gospel accounts, God has become a man in order to teach us how to live by showing us through His own personal example. He didn’t contradict the Law, but fulfilled its spirit. He showed us how to understand it at a much deeper level. And since He had became one of us, He acted the way a perfect human would act. Jesus in His role as one of us didn’t use violence to resist evil.

If you object that this is all really complicated, yes I agree, but on the other hand if the Bible account were true, then you would expect it to be a bit difficult for a mortal to comprehend.

38 Responses to ““The God of the Old Testament””

  1. Mark says:

    Here’s a good article on the subject: http://creation.com/is-god-inconsistent

  2. Brian says:

    People tend to overlook “nice” aspects of God in the OT (love, grace, mercy, kindness). But they also tend to overlook the tougher aspects of Jesus in the NT. The Jesus of pop culture never says anything mean or condemns anyone. But that’s far from the Jesus the NT describes.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Great point Brian, I meant to emphasize that too but I forgot!

      • Craw says:

        Like how the popular Jesus says all sins can be forgiven, but the biblical Jesus says not, and talks about those who will never be forgiven. And the pop Jesus never says to hate your mother , but biblical Jesus does (revealing I guess the deeper meaning of the fourth commandment.)

        • Mark says:

          “they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them” 1 Cor. 2:14

  3. Jim W K says:

    One thing to add to this, it might not be the case that God “sends plagues and orders massacres” – it might be more the case that people in the Old Testament ascribed things like that to providence. The Hebrews were very tribal and perhaps killing rivals believing God was on their side. In fact, given that scripture is merely God-breathed, I think that probably is what’s happening.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      So were the 10 plagues a coincidence? (I’m not being sarcastic, I’m wondering how your theory explains how the Israelites escaped bondage.)

    • Mark says:

      What does “merely” God-breathed mean to you?

      • Mark says:

        Sorry – the question about the meaning of God-breathed was to Jim, not Bob. I think it’s a question of cookies not being allowed that cause the reply to be posted at a different comment.

        • Mark says:

          Oh, I’m the dummy on this one. I think I looked at something wrong on another subject and thought that happened here. My bad.

      • Jim W K says:

        Hi Bob, Mark,

        I see no reason why we are to take those early books as absolutely literal, including the plagues. By God-breathed, my best guess is that scripture means roughly this. In ancient traditions, particularly oral traditions, the narrative being conveyed is a blend of fact and fiction, where profound truths are disseminated in a way that requires interpretative qualities beyond the headlights of the kind of rigorous historical and scientific analysis we moderns are used to.

        Thus I would contend that Old Testament figures like Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon are such an agglomeration of history, myth, legend, analogy, metaphor and theological aetiology that we can’t hope to pin them down to simple historical/non-historical analyses. That’s not to treat them all the same, of course – there are evidently different extents to which the above applies to Adam than, say, David.

        What’s clear, though, is that while God ‘breathed’ His influence onto the writing of scripture over the many centuries of its composition, He allowed His word to be subjected to the limitations of creation, and the concomitant human fallibility that comes with it. The Bible is, of course, a created artefact, not to be seen as co-equal with God – and as such, the very notion of scripture being God’s word is abstractly analogical to illustrate His power and influence over the written dispensation of Divine truths in language we can understand.

        Best

        Jim

        • Mark says:

          The Bible is more than clear that it is the word of God. The OT persons you mentioned were real people and the historical narrative that provides the accounts of those people is called truth by the Lord Jesus. There is no myth or oral tradition (in the sense of anything other than literal) or fiction or anything of the like in the Bible. There is obviously more than one type of literature in the Bible. I’m not addressing prophecy or apocalyptic literature or poetry or the proverbs, etc. But the vast majority of the OT is written in historical narrative and those accounts are intended to be taken literally. Being God, Jesus knows that and endorsed it in His statement, “Your word is truth.” John 17:17 He also endorsed the historicity of the entire OT in Luke 11:49-51. I think you are treading on thin ice when you tell Jesus that He doesn’t know what He’s talking about.
          See the two articles below for a good introduction as to what “God breathed” (inspired) means along with Jesus’ and others’ comments about the truth, reliability, and inspiration of scripture. You really don’t get to pick and choose what parts of scripture you want to believe – that was never God’s intention.

          https://carm.org/bible-isnt-word-god-it-contains-word-god

          https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_276.cfm

          • Amber says:

            “But the vast majority of the OT is written in historical narrative and those accounts are intended to be taken literally.”

            Does “taken literally” mean it must be a truthful, accurate description of God, or can it instead be a description of how the people at the time understood God? For example, we know that the earth is not separated from the waters of chaos by a dome in the sky with holes in it to let the rain through, but this is the (apparently literal) description of creation given to us in Genesis.

            To me, the only way to make sense of the apparent inconsistencies in God’s character or the obvious flaws in understanding of the physical world is to approach scripture developmentally; that is, we must use not only the context of the culture and time in which it was written, but also understand that it represents a particular point in man’s developing ability to better comprehend God’s true nature.

            • Mark says:

              “Does “taken literally” mean it must be a truthful, accurate description of God, or can it instead be a description of how the people at the time understood God?”

              Amber, you’ve missed the whole point. The Bible is not a collection of stories written by people that are their opinions about God – like if we took your comments, Jim’s and other people’s and put them together in one book – it is the word of God. Not the word of men. And what it reveals to us about God’s nature, character, the creation account, etc., is exactly what He wanted us to know – things that we cannot find out on our own.

              “For example, we know that the earth is not separated from the waters of chaos by a dome in the sky with holes in it to let the rain through, but this is the (apparently literal) description of creation given to us in Genesis.”

              There is not enough information in the Genesis creation account to know exactly what the “waters above” were or that the firmament/expanse mentioned was a dome. There are several theories/interpretations, but they are really speculation – we just don’t have enough information and it’s not something we should be adamant about. But remember the description in Genesis (as brief as it is) is prior to Noah’s Flood, so what it is now is certainly not what was “in the beginning.” Here is one opinion worth considering on the subject if you are interested. http://creation.com/the-waters-above

              “To me, the only way to make sense of the apparent inconsistencies in God’s character…”

              There are no “apparent inconsistencies” in God’s character. There are only people that are incorrect (in varying degrees) in their understanding of God’s nature, character, attributes, etc. As God told us in Malachi 3:6: “For I, the LORD, do not change…”

              Our task is to take God at His word, as He requires. We are to accept Jesus’ statement that His word is truth. If it is not, how are fallible men, who were not there to witness any of the historical events in the Bible, to pick and choose which ones are true? It’s just crazy to think that fallen, sinful creatures are able to determine truth apart from God’s revelation about Himself and His creation.

              • Craw says:

                Amber
                If you care to hunt up what Mark says on other threads he contradicts this. He denies that what Jesus said should be taken literally for example. He’s not consistent.

              • Mark says:

                Amber, normally it’s not a good idea to follow the advice of someone who is incapable of understanding the scriptures (and considers them foolishness – specifically using the word “fables”), ridicules Christians (especially those that follow the biblical command to defend the faith), and ignores the commandment against lying. But in this case, it’s a good idea, because you will find out that he not only does not understand scripture, but has to resort to lying about what Christians have written (or maybe he’s just really, really thick) in his failed attempt at ridiculing Jesus and His followers.

  4. Jeffrey S. says:

    Bob,

    In partial response to Jim, I think it is clear and very difficult from a theological perspective that God can cause death to anyone via natural causes (e.g. using earthquakes, plagues, weather, etc.)

    The much, much, much more difficult passages in the OT are the ones dealing with God commanding slaughter. Jim’s proposal for dealing with those passages is not a bad one. Catholics, since we reject divine command theory, really have a problem with those passages — God just is pure goodness and it is impossible for Him to command us to kill innocent life (e.g. babies.) It would be like God making a square circle — it doesn’t make sense. This post deals very well with the theological problems of those passages:

    http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2014/08/on_paul_copans_attempted_solut.html

    • Mark says:

      I don’t plan on getting involved in this part of the conversation, but I would say that there is no innocent life. Babies inherit Adam’s sin nature.

  5. Jeffrey S. says:

    Whoops — first sentence should say “clear and very easy”!

    Sorry about that.

  6. Craw says:

    It’s clear if you read the Bible, as opposed to commentaries devoted to obscuring inconvenient details, that it refers in places to gods plural. Even one of the commandments envisions the possibility of multiple gods. It is certainly church dogma that there is only one god, but many believers over the centuries have believed that the OT god and Jesus were not the same god. This was a basic belief of the Cathars, roasted so efficiently by the Church. Heresy hunting has produced an incuriosity amongst believers, so it seems an outlandish idea now, but it’s not. The Bible was written over a long time by very different people with very different ideas. If you think it’s simple and homogeneous it’s because you haven’t looked.

    • E. Harding says:
    • Tel says:

      Heresy hunting has produced an incuriosity amongst believers, so it seems an outlandish idea now, but it’s not.

      You could be onto something there. Perhaps some sort of theory where there are survivors and they influence the outcome more than those who don’t survive. At some stage this guy called Victor writes a history book.

      I dunno what to all it, how about the theory of, “Believe it or not!”

      Wait, this is better… the theory of, “Believe it or else!”

    • Mark says:

      “they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them” 1 Cor. 2:14

  7. Mark says:

    Here is a great (and brief!) article posted today at CMI (Creation Ministries International.) It was originally published in Creation magazine in March of 2006. It will only take a few minutes to read, but it addresses many of the issues that are being discussed in this thread – the authority of God’s word, the history in the Bible (especially the Genesis account of creation), the historicity of people mentioned in the Bible, what Jesus and the biblical authors taught regarding the history in the Bible, etc. It’s pretty short, and will only take a few minutes to read, but there’s a ton of great information packed into it. Check it out at http://creation.com/genesis-bible-authors-believed-it-to-be-histor

    • Harold says:

      “So if anyone thinks that Genesis history doesn’t matter, then ask how they should preach to the Australian Aborigines. If they have really been here for 40,000 years (according to carbon-14 dating that old-earthers accept), then how could they come from Adam, and how could they be related to Christ, so how can they be saved?”

      What is being said here? Is it that we must logically reject any and all evidence that humans have been in Australia for 40,000 years, because to accept such evidence would contradict the bible?

      The answer that most Christians come up with is that there is no contradiction. The Earth is old and that does not contradict the bible. Which seems a sensible way to preserve both faith in evidence and faith in God.

      Sticking to a young earth leads to all sorts of problems, such as why would God deliberately deceive us with such good evidence as carbon dating?

      I understand that this problem comes up with red-shift. It seems simple that God could have created the universe a few thousand years ago complete with red-shifted light strung between us and distant galaxies. This is rejected by some because it would be deceiving us, creating reality that appears to have been cause by something other than creation. The alternative seems to be that the universe is old, but the Earth and its immediate environs are young, created within the old universe.

      Both explanations seem a bit desperate to me.

      No, young earth is the flea on the tail of the dog wagging the dog. Forcing all evidence to fit with one conclusion for which there is very little actual evidence has it backwards.

      • Mark says:

        Harold, the Earth is not old (not in the sense that you mean it – millions or billions of years, anyway.) The alleged existence of anything millions or billions of years old does contradict the Bible, since it is more than clear that everything was created about 6,000 years ago. And you are right that God does not deliberately deceive us, but carbon dating has nothing to do with dating the age of the Earth. That’s a common error that many people make.

        You are also wrong that there is no actual evidence indicating a young earth. Here are 101 evidences for a young earth and universe. http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth

        • Harold says:

          I don’t want to get into too much detail about evidence for old vs young. I will say that you may have 101 pieces that support a young Earth, but there are literally millions supporting an old Earth. Every time something new is discovered it fits the Old Earth narrative. I suspect we will not get anywhere with this discussion and I will not seek to change your mind, but there are still areas where productive discussion may be possible.

          Mark, what is your view of red shift? I can understand the idea of Creation of stretched out photons and I don’t really see why this would be an awkward explanation. This article, seems to discuss a lot of fancy footwork to get around the universe as we observe it being 6000 years old.
          https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/cosmology/speculation-redshift-created-universe/

          • Bob Murphy says:

            Harold wrote:

            “I will say that you may have 101 pieces that support a young Earth, but there are literally millions supporting an old Earth. Every time something new is discovered it fits the Old Earth narrative.”

            That seems amazing Harold. You admit there could be 101 pieces of evidence that (erroneously) would make one think the Earth is relatively young, but there’s no way a 102nd piece could ever come to light in the future? Why would that be?

            • Craw says:

              Are you really going to make me defend Harold? He’s not ruling out the logical possibility of some alleged 102 case. He’s pointing out that IN FACT whenever new evidence does come to light it supports the old earth.
              Harold: Every time we find person born before 1500 he’s dead. That tells us something about human lifespan.
              Murphy: So you deny it’s even logically possible to live 518 years?

              • Harold says:

                Craw, perhaps I should have said are consistent with a young Earth. Your example is a good one.

              • Mark says:

                LOL. Craw makes the same mistake as Harold, except in Craw’s case it’s simply a lie.

          • Bob Murphy says:

            Harold, it’s funny because I was going to write on this stuff for next Sunday.

            Can you succinctly state your view, as to what is fishy about the “fancy footwork”? For example, “If someone needs to arbitrarily introduce something into his theory in order to make it fit the observations, when it is clear that that was the motivation of the change, then it’s fancy footwork and unscientific”? I am curious for you to state the general principle here.

            • Harold says:

              It seems to me that God could create a world 6000 years ago complete with fossils, pre-radioactively decayed isotopes and red-shifted light created all the way between distant galaxies and Earth. Yet to explain the time taken for light to travel between those distant galaxies complex and probably inconsistent speculations about speed of light varying by factors of millions and photons decaying energy to explain red shift are used.

              It seems to be unnecessary fancy footwork to explain something that could be as simple as “God made it that way”

              Why not just use the simple explanation? We don’t need to explain why God made it that way, he is after all mysterious.

            • Harold says:

              On more detail, the proposed explanation in that link for light reaching earth from distant galaxies was that the speed of light is not invariant. The evidence cited is not very clear – some of it is not about speed of light in vacuum, and others are controversial. But even if we accepted that speed of light was not invariant, there is no scientific evidence for changes of many orders of magnitude over thousands of years. It is pure speculation about something that could explain things if they happened that way, and the only supporting evidence is that we cannot prove it didn’t happen, and there are some slight suggestions that the constants might not be constant.

              It seems to me that this explanation is derived from a necessity to fit the evidence to the supposed age of the earth rather than using the evidence to conclude the age of the Earth.

              Your description seems to be a reasonable summation. I think the key would be whether the something that is introduced is testable.

              Einstein introduced the cosmological constant to make the universe fit a static model. I believe his equations predicted an expanding or contracting universe.

              He called it his biggest blunder after Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, for not having faith in his equations. But since then the existence of this constant has been vindicated and it turns out to be more or less correct.

              Einstein was wrong to introduce it just to make the evidence fit the hypothesis. It is a very interesting topic that I do not understand enough to comment on in detail. However, it does seem to demonstrate that something introduced just to make the theory fit the limited observations available is not necessarily wrong. In this case it was because the observations were too limited to describe the actual universe. How this turned out to be wrong for a few decades, then right again since the 1990’s I don’t really know, but is very interesting.

          • Mark says:

            “I don’t want to get into too much detail about evidence for old vs young. I will say that you may have 101 pieces that support a young Earth, but there are literally millions supporting an old Earth.”

            Don’t exaggerate. If you take something that you consider evidence for an old earth (say a particular dating method for a rock), you don’t count that over and over again for every rock you find – it only counts once. Otherwise you could take the 101 evidences in that article (which I suspect you didn’t read) and multiply them over and over and come up with millions as well.

            And this is a good time to bring up something that you subtly implied without stating it. This is not an issue of counting the evidences for each side – creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians – and whoever has the most wins. Both sides have the exact same facts/evidence – the same stars, the same fossils, the same rocks, the same trees, etc. It’s a question of interpretation and presuppositions. The facts themselves are neutral. We all have a framework, or grid, or worldview that we start from when we interpret that evidence. The difference is that Christians admit it, and the secularists don’t.

            “Every time something new is discovered it fits the Old Earth narrative.”

            Blatantly wrong. See above.

            “Mark, what is your view of red shift?”

            I haven’t looked that in any real detail. The bigger problem here is that the light-travel time issue is the only aspect of the creation/evolution/young earth/old earth argument that Christians haven’t been able to answer yet. And we may never in this lifetime. You’ve obviously looked at it, and I’m sure you realize that *many* hypotheses have been introduced to answer it. It’s a fascinating subject, one that we cannot be adamant about, but the explanation that appeals to me most is this. https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/a-proposal-for-a-new-solution-to-the-light-travel-time-problem/

            But no matter which one, if any, of the various speculations that a “young-earther” believes, remember that the folks who believe in billions of years have the same problem – https://answersingenesis.org/big-bang/light-travel-time-a-problem-for-the-big-bang/

            “It seems to me that God could create a world 6000 years ago complete with fossils, pre-radioactively decayed isotopes and red-shifted light created all the way between distant galaxies and Earth.”

            I had the impression from a previous post that you understood that God does not deceive us. I guess not. God is not capable of deceiving us – it’s against His nature.

            “It seems to me that this explanation is derived from a necessity to fit the evidence to the supposed age of the earth rather than using the evidence to conclude the age of the Earth.”

            I don’t know if you’ve ever picked up a rock or a fossil, but in case you haven’t, there is no label on the bottom that tells you how old they are. So the evidence doesn’t tell us anything about the age of the earth. This goes back to the presuppositions I mentioned earlier. In your case, you appear to believe in dating methods that are not reliable because of their unproved assumptions. https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/dating-methods/ Why not believe the one who was there? He doesn’t lie to us.

            • Harold says:

              Interesting article. I still find the second explanation the best. The objection is:

              “Since the vast majority of the universe is more than a few thousand light years distant, it would seem that we will never see light that actually left these distant objects, and hence much of the universe amounts to an illusion.”

              However, If Gods purpose requires us to examine the universe for some reason, then this would simply have been necessary for his purpose. This seems to get around lots of problems raised by the other explanations.

              I can see this is something of a “get out of jail free” card for almost any discovery, but I don’t see anything actually wrong with it.

              (On the other point, it seems to me that every new discovery fits with an old Earth, which was not a foregone conclusion.

              An example is DNA and genes. We find that this fits the old Earth in terms of mutations, shared genes between related species etc. We might have found that DNA was stable, that the mutation rate did not exist. That would have pretty much put paid to evolution, but we didn’t. We could still discover a species with invariant DNA which would disprove evolution, but we never do. All new discoveries fit pretty well into the old Earth model. All the discoveries n Cosmology likewise. I am pretty sure we will not change each others mind on this aspect, so I think it would be more productive to discuss other related matters, but feel free to respond to my points.)

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