The Big Questions — The OT God

I’m often confronted with big questions about the Christian faith. I can’t say that I have all the answers, but I’ve tried to study many of these things, and have often found approaches to them that have helped me grow in my faith. This “Big Questions” series will raise some of the questions I’ve encountered and the ways in which I’ve tried to respond.

Today’s question is this: isn’t the God portrayed in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully?” (from Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”). How does the God portrayed in the Old Testament mesh with the seemingly kinder, gentler God of the New Testament?

Though modern atheists such as Richard Dawkins have popularized this view today, this is a very old question that has been asked since the founding of the Christian faith over 2000 years ago. Some early critics, and misguided religious people, responded by suggesting the Old Testament god was a different being than the New Testament god. Many of these were Gnostics, who proposed that a being they called the “demiurge” created the universe. The demiurge is the supposedly spiteful, angry god of the Old Testament, while the New Testament reveals a different, more loving god. This sort of theology was tied to Manicheanism, a belief that there were dualing forces of good and evil in the universe, without any one sovereign God and with an uncertain outcome. These heresies were rejected from the very beginnings of the Church. Much of the writing of the apostolic fathers, such as Origen and Augustine, is directed against the Gnostic and Manichean heresies.

In the context of historic, orthodox Christianity, we can’t suggest that the God revealed in the Old Testament is different than the God of the New Testament. God is one, and His nature is unchanging. The better approach is to acknowledge that there are some things in the OT that seem difficult to us, but to begin placing them in context of the whole story.

Critics like to point out some events in the Old Testament that seem particularly unfair. Take the story of Uzzah in 2 Samuel, for instance. Uzzah was helping to transport the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. When it seemed the Ark was about to fall off of its wagon, Uzzah reached out to steady it. God immediately struck Uzzah dead for this “irreverent” act. Wasn’t it unjust and nasty of God to kill Uzzah? After all, Uzzah wasn’t Uzzah only trying to help, and didn’t he do nothing more than touch a piece of furniture?

A story like Uzzah’s illustrates that we can’t jump into one little section of the story and think we understand the whole thing. To understand what God is revealing about Himself in scripture, we need to take these sorts of difficult events without watering them down, but to place them into the whole narrative of a loving cretor who provided everything we need, how humans rebelled and continually rebel against that loving creator, how God nevertheless by grace chose to enter into a covenant with people who didn’t merit it, and how all of this led to Jesus and the cross.

Once that broader story is told, many of those smaller OT narratives start to make a little more sense in their own context. Yes, they certainly reflect some degree of accomodation to the culture of the time — those were harsh times. But that very fact entails a deeper subtext than a surface reading of isolated accounts would suggest.

Understanding what the Ark meant to ancient Israel and how they thought about God’s unapproachable, ineffable holiness and power, for example, helps contextualize the Uzzah story. Uzzah wasn’t just some regular Joe trying to keep a piece of furniture from getting muddy. He knew very well what the Ark meant and what God had said about approaching it. He was in a position of great honor by being stationed so near the Ark. He was not only one of David’s 30,000 “chosen men” (2 Sam. 6:1), he was assigned along with only one other person to “guide” the cart holding the Ark. (2 Sam. 6:3). From among all Israel, Uzzah had been chosen to accompany David, and from among all the 30,000 who accompanied David, only Uzzah and one other man were chosen to guide the cart holding the Ark. In the context of his culture, the manner in which God related to His covenant people at that time, and Uzzah’s exalted position, Uzzah’s act was irreverent and more. It was a betrayal of his role, a slap in God’s face, an affront to the nation’s covenant realtionship with God. It placed the entire nation in danger.

To begin to undersand some of these difficult Old Testament stories, we need to focus on the love of God but also on His holiness; on the glory of human nature made in the image of God but also on humanity’s desperate, fierce, awful rebellion against God; and on the inconcievable grace of God demonstrated in His covenants with undeserving people and His self-sacrifice in the incarnation and the cross. In short, we need to tell the story of historic, orthodox Christianity.

Is that story grating in some ways to modern ears? Of course it is. We should expect nothing less. How many times are we reminded in scripture that “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God?” (1 Cor. 1:18) Does placing a story like Uzzah’s into this broader context make it simple to understand? No. But it does show that God’s story is a big, multilayered story, not one that is dismantled easily merely by picking out some difficult parts of the story and focusing only on them.