Why Does the God of the Old Testament Seem Different From Jesus?

Posted on by Camaron G. W. Smith

Some Bible passages are difficult because their world is foreign to us. Israel is commanded to destroy entire populations (Deuteronomy 20:16–18). Joshua is said to kill men and women, young and old (Joshua 6:21). Samuel tells Saul not to spare children or infants (1 Samuel 15:3). One of the Psalms ends by blessing the person who kills Babylonian children (Psalm 137:9).

Then we meet Jesus, who tells us to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, forgive repeatedly, and refuse retaliation. When his disciples want to call down fire on a Samaritan village, he rebukes them (Luke 9:51–56). When soldiers arrive to arrest him, he tells Peter to put away his sword (Matthew 26:52). After one of his followers cuts off a servant’s ear, Jesus heals the wounded man (Luke 22:50–51).

The question is unavoidable. If Jesus reveals God perfectly, why do some portrayals of God in the Old Testament seem so unlike him?

Some Christians fear that asking this question puts the authority of the Bible at risk. I think refusing to ask it creates a greater risk. It can leave us defending actions that we would condemn anywhere else, simply because a biblical character attributes them to God. It can also teach people that faithfulness requires silencing their conscience.

I don’t think those are our only choices. Christians can take the whole Bible seriously while recognising that Jesus is its interpretive centre. We don’t have to choose between keeping the Old Testament and following Jesus. The Christian claim is that the Scriptures lead us to Christ, who shows us most clearly what God is like.

Why Does God Seem Different in the Old Testament?

Violence is a big problem, though not the only one. Readers also encounter troubling laws, severe punishments, and stories in which God seems quick to anger. Taken together, these passages can leave the impression that the God of the Old Testament is wrathful while Jesus is merciful.

The Old Testament repeatedly describes God as compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34:6–7; Psalm 103:8). Hosea portrays God recoiling from judgment because of divine compassion (Hosea 11:8–9). Jonah becomes angry precisely because God shows mercy to Nineveh, one of Israel’s enemies (Jonah 4:1–2). The prophets imagine nations laying down their weapons and learning war no more (Isaiah 2:2–4; Micah 4:1–4).

The New Testament also contains judgment. Jesus speaks severe words against religious hypocrisy. Ananias and Sapphira die in Acts 5. Revelation contains terrifying images of violence and divine wrath. Dividing the Bible into an angry Old Testament and a loving New Testament does not survive a careful reading of either.

None of this explains the commands to destroy the Canaanites or reconciles them with Jesus’ teaching about enemies. The difficult passages remain. The difference is not between two simple collections of texts. The tension runs through the entire Bible.

The Old Testament Does Not Reveal a Different God

One early attempt to solve the problem was to separate the God of Israel from the Father of Jesus. In the second century, Marcion taught that the creator described in Israel’s Scriptures was a lesser and harsher deity than the Father revealed by Christ. He rejected the Old Testament and removed parts of the New Testament that connected Jesus to Israel’s God.

The Church rejected Marcion’s solution. Irenaeus insisted that one God stands behind both Testaments and that the God who created the world is the Father revealed by Jesus (Against Heresies 4.32). Christians could not detach Christ from Israel’s story without distorting Christ himself.

Jesus was Jewish. He prayed Israel’s Psalms, taught from the Torah, spoke through the prophets, celebrated Israel’s feasts, and announced the fulfilment of Israel’s hope. His language about covenant, kingdom, Messiah, mercy, justice, and resurrection came from the Scriptures of Israel.

Careless contrasts between an angry “Old Testament God” and a loving Jesus can reproduce an old anti-Jewish caricature. The Hebrew Bible is not a primitive religious failure that Christianity came to replace. It is the scriptural world in which Jesus lived and through which the first Christians understood him. Christian interpretation has to hold two convictions together: the God of Israel is the Father revealed by Jesus, and some biblical portrayals of God remain genuinely difficult when read beside Jesus.

Jesus Is the Clearest Revelation of God

The New Testament presents Jesus as more than another source of information about God. Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). He is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). John says that no one has seen God, but the Son has made him known (John 1:18). Jesus tells Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

Taken together, these passages place Jesus at the centre of Christian interpretation. We do not construct an image of God from every biblical description and then adjust Jesus until he fits. We begin with Jesus because the apostles identify him as the clearest revelation of the Father.

This doesn’t mean that the Son is kind while the Father is violent. The cross is not Jesus rescuing us from a God unlike himself. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). The Father, Son, and Spirit act together for the healing and liberation of creation.

In Jesus, divine power looks unlike the power humans usually admire. He confronts evil without imitating it. He tells Peter to put away the sword, forgives enemies, and restores people shut out by respectable religion. At the cross, he gives himself instead of claiming another victim. In the resurrection, God defeats sin and death without vindicating the methods of the empire that crucified him.

If Jesus is the exact representation of God, his life cannot be treated as an exception to God’s character. Enemy-love is not a temporary mood adopted during the incarnation. It reveals who God is.

The Bible Records a Developing Understanding of God

The Bible is a library formed across centuries. Its laws, stories, poems, prophecies, Gospels, and letters come from different historical situations and reflect different levels of understanding.

That claim doesn’t deny inspiration. It asks us to take the form of inspiration seriously. God speaks through human language and culture, through memory, literary form, and theological reflection. As John Calvin argued, God accommodates revelation to human capacity. God stoops to communicate with people as they are. This same principle helps us interpret Genesis within its historical world.

Accommodation helps explain why Scripture contains development. The law of “an eye for an eye” limited retaliation within a violent world by preventing escalating revenge (Exodus 21:23–25). Jesus later carried that movement further, teaching his followers to relinquish retaliation and love their enemies (Matthew 5:38–48). The prophets looked beyond national warfare towards a future in which swords would become farming tools. The biblical movement is towards reconciliation, restored creation, and peace.

God does not improve morally over the course of Scripture. Human understanding of God develops, and Scripture lets us see it. Job challenges shallow explanations of suffering. Habakkuk questions God’s use of violent empire. Abraham asks whether the Judge of all the earth will do what is just (Genesis 18:25). The lament Psalms give faithful people language to protest, grieve, and demand an answer.

A flat reading obscures that development. As I argued in Moving Beyond Biblical Literalism, it assumes every passage communicates in the same way and every portrayal carries the same degree of clarity. A literary and theological reading asks who is speaking, what kind of text we are reading, where it sits within the biblical story, and how it relates to Christ.

How Did Jesus Read Difficult Scripture?

Jesus did not reject Israel’s Scriptures. He also did not repeat every command without interpretation. He read the law in light of its purpose and brought it to fulfilment in the kingdom of God.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes up the law concerning proportional retaliation: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” That law had restrained vengeance by limiting what an injured party could demand. Jesus then directs his followers beyond proportionate retaliation towards non-retaliation, generosity, and enemy-love (Matthew 5:38–48).

He does something similar when he cites Hosea’s words, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). Jesus uses one part of Scripture to expose readings of another part that produce condemnation without mercy. His argument turns on the purpose of the law, not the Pharisees’ ability to quote a rule.

Luke gives another example. When a Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus, James and John ask whether they should call down fire from heaven. Their request recalls Elijah’s confrontation with royal soldiers in 2 Kings 1. They have a biblical precedent, but Jesus rebukes them (Luke 9:51–56). Possessing a precedent does not mean the disciples have understood the mission or character of Christ.

After the resurrection, Jesus interprets Moses and the prophets in relation to himself (Luke 24:27). The early Church learned to read Scripture through his death and resurrection. Israel’s history, law, worship, suffering, exile, and hope were gathered into the story of Christ and the renewal of creation.

How the Early Church Read Violent Old Testament Passages

Early Christians disagreed about how to interpret difficult passages. Yet many recognised that a surface reading could be morally and theologically inadequate.

Origen believed Scripture contained historical, moral, and spiritual depths. In On First Principles, he argued that apparent impossibilities and incongruities can function as “stumbling-blocks” that stop readers from remaining at the surface and direct them towards a spiritual meaning (On First Principles 4.2.9).

Gregory of Nyssa offers us insight in The Life of Moses. When he reaches the death of the Egyptian firstborn, he refuses to pass over the moral problem. How can a new-born child justly suffer for a parent’s wrongdoing? Gregory recalls Ezekiel’s insistence that a child should not bear the guilt of a parent (Ezekiel 18:20). He then reads the passage spiritually: the “firstborn” to be destroyed are the first beginnings of evil within us, before anger becomes murder or desire becomes exploitation (The Life of Moses 2.91–94).

Gregory does not respond to the death of children with a casual appeal to divine sovereignty. He allows the moral contradiction to change how he reads.

Augustine supplied another important principle. In On Christian Doctrine, he argued that anyone who interprets Scripture in a way that fails to build love of God and neighbour has not yet understood it as they should (1.36.40). That did not make love a sentimental excuse for ignoring hard teachings. Love was the goal of Christian interpretation because Jesus said the law and prophets hang upon love of God and neighbour (Matthew 22:37–40).

Origen, Gregory, Augustine, and Irenaeus differed from one another, and their interpretations should still be examined critically. Their work nevertheless disproves the claim that faithful Christians have always treated the surface meaning of every violent passage as the final meaning. Moral concern about a text was not automatically dismissed as unbelief. It sent these readers back to the text.

How Do Christians Interpret Violence in the Old Testament?

No single approach resolves every violent text. Some passages are narratives about human violence. Others portray divine judgment. Some contain commands attributed directly to God. Poetry, law, conquest accounts, prophetic rhetoric, and apocalyptic imagery cannot be handled as though they were one genre. Several approaches appear in Christian scholarship, and they can overlap.

Divine Judgment in a Unique Historical Setting

A traditional approach argues that God, as creator and judge, may bring temporal judgment and may commission Israel to act within a specific covenant setting. These commands belong to a unique moment in salvation history and give no continuing permission for religious violence.

This view keeps conquest from becoming a reusable political programme. It also recognises that the biblical writers present Canaanite judgment as connected to entrenched injustice rather than ethnicity alone (Genesis 15:16; Deuteronomy 9:4–6).

The moral difficulty remains, particularly where children and non-combatants are included. Saying that God has the right to judge is a theological claim, but it does not answer every question about how a particular human description or command reveals the Father seen in Jesus.

Ancient Warfare Language and Hyperbole

Other scholars emphasise the rhetoric of ancient warfare. Claims that an army “destroyed all” or left no survivors could function as conventional victory language rather than a literal census of every death. Joshua itself uses totalising language and then continues to describe Canaanite populations living in the land (Joshua 10–11; 13:1; 15:63; 16:10).

Recognising hyperbole changes how some conquest texts are understood. It does not remove the violence or make the problem disappear. People still die and land is still taken; the text still attributes the campaign to God.

Progressive Revelation and Divine Accommodation

Another approach distinguishes God’s unchanging character from humanity’s partial understanding of that character. God genuinely meets Israel within the ancient world, but the people’s perception of God is shaped by that world. Revelation develops within the relationship until it reaches its clearest expression in Christ.

This approach takes the humanity of Scripture seriously. The danger is that readers can appoint themselves judges over the Bible and accept only what already agrees with them. Christ, rather than modern preference, must remain the criterion. Historical study, the wider canon, the Church, and the fruit of an interpretation all help restrain private judgement.

Spiritual and Cruciform Readings

The spiritual reading associated with figures such as Origen and Gregory asks how violent imagery portrays God’s struggle against sin, death, oppression, and the powers that deform human life. The enemies to be destroyed are not flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12), but the evils that enslave creation.

A cruciform reading focuses more specifically on the cross. “Cruciform” simply means cross-shaped. Scholars such as Gregory Boyd argue that God’s fullest character is revealed in the self-giving love of the crucified Christ. Even Scripture’s violent portraits must ultimately be interpreted in that light.

Christians disagree over how far this approach should go, but it insists that the cross is not one divine act among many. The cross shows how God confronts evil and saves enemies.

A Christ-Centred Reading Does Not Reject the Old Testament

Reading through Jesus doesn’t erase difficult texts or pretend they say something harmless. It doesn’t reduce the Old Testament to a set of Christian symbols either.

We still need to ask what these texts meant within Israel’s history. Christians should listen to Jewish interpretation and remain alert to readings that treat Judaism as the dark background against which Christianity appears enlightened. The Old Testament also contains its own critique of violence. Matthew Lynch develops this point in Flood and Fury, showing how the biblical narratives can expose the destructive logic of violence even while using violent language.

A Christ-centred reading shouldn’t make Jesus tame. Jesus confronts exploitative power, warns of judgment, overturns tables, and calls people to costly repentance. Divine love is not passive approval. It opposes whatever destroys human beings and creation.

The question is how God opposes evil. Jesus answers through his life, death, and resurrection. He overcomes the powers through faithful, self-giving love. His followers are commanded to take up a cross, not a sword.

Why Our Interpretation of God Matters

The way Christians describe God shapes the way Christians use power. If cruelty becomes good whenever it is attributed to God, people can learn to distrust their moral awareness and obey religious authority without question. If divine love is imagined as coercion for a person’s own good, coercive leaders can easily present themselves as godly. If enemies may be destroyed once they are labelled evil, almost any act of exclusion or violence can acquire religious approval.

The consequences are historical, not hypothetical. Scripture has been used to defend conquest, slavery, colonialism, domestic abuse, racism, and war. Calling an interpretation “biblical” does not settle whether it reflects the character of Christ.

The same pattern appears in religious trauma and spiritual abuse. A person’s image of God can make manipulation feel holy. Fear can be called conviction. Control can be called discipleship. Harm can be defended as obedience.

Jesus gives the Church a concrete standard. Christian authority serves. Correction seeks restoration, truth refuses manipulation, and love protects the vulnerable. The God revealed in Christ does not require us to call evil good.

How to Read Difficult Bible Passages Without Losing Faith

There is no method that makes every troubling passage easy. A few practices can help us read without denial or despair.

  1. Name the moral problem honestly. If a text disturbs you, say why. Honest attention is more faithful than rushing to protect God with an answer you do not believe.
  2. Identify the genre and speaker. A lament, battle report, legal text, prophetic warning, and theological claim do different things. Psalm 137 records the rage of an exiled and brutalised people; it does not issue a timeless command to kill children.
  3. Study the ancient setting. Historical context can clarify warfare rhetoric, covenant language, social structures, and the purpose of particular laws. Context may reduce a difficulty without removing it.
  4. Read the whole Old Testament. Do not isolate conquest from Exodus, wisdom, lament, prophetic criticism, mercy towards outsiders, or the hope of worldwide peace. Israel’s Scriptures contain debate, development, and self-critique.
  5. Bring the passage to Jesus. Ask how it relates to his teaching, character, cross, and resurrection. This is a theological judgement grounded in the New Testament’s claims about Christ.
  6. Read with the Church and with good scholarship. The Christian tradition contains several approaches to these texts. We need voices from different periods, cultures, and theological traditions, including scholars who challenge our preferred explanation.
  7. Allow some questions to remain unresolved. Faith does not require a confident answer to every moral and historical problem in the Bible. Forced certainty often produces weaker interpretations than patient honesty. For some Christians, relinquishing that pressure becomes part of reconstructing a more durable faith.

The God Jesus Reveals

Why does the God of the Old Testament sometimes seem different from Jesus? Part of the answer lies in genre, historical context, ancient rhetoric, and the long development of Israel’s faith. Part lies in the difference between God and every human attempt to describe God. Some passages yield to careful study. Others remain difficult after the usual explanations have been considered.

Christians still have a centre. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He does not reveal a second God or persuade a violent Father to become merciful. He reveals the Father who has always been working to rescue, heal, judge evil, and reconcile creation.

Honouring Scripture requires careful and truthful reading in the light of the One to whom it bears witness. We don’t have to defend every interpretation handed to us.

When the Bible sounds unlike Jesus, discarding one side of the tension will not help. We have to return to the text, test our assumptions, and hear how the wider Christian tradition has wrestled with it, always keeping Christ at the centre. The difficult passages may not become simple, but they need not control our picture of God.

Jesus shows us the Father. For Christians, every interpretation must finally be tested there.

Sources and Further Reading

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