Have you ever heard that the God of the Old Testament is an angry God of judgment, whereas the God of the New Testament is a merciful God of love? It’s a very common cliche. This is the sort of thing that people say to me all the time. And this simple summary is a good reminder of how hard it is to differentiate between thoughts and feelings.
The intensity of God is often in plain sight in the Old Testament and that intensity is so hot that we can feel its heat. But the anger that the prophets speak of isn’t anger the way we think of anger. This isn’t anger as a human emotion. The wrath of God in the Bible isn’t an emotion. This isn’t God blowing off steam. God’s wrath is God’s inexorable, relentless antipathy to anything that thwarts God’s merciful and loving purposes.
This antipathy of the Lord is represented in the Bible in the persona of Satan. The New Testament is full of references to Satan. In all four Gospels, Jesus is in a contest with demonic powers from the first day of his ministry to the last. I think of the story in Luke’s gospel of the woman who had been bent double for 18 years. Jesus healed her on the Sabbath and the Pharisees objected. Jesus speaks to them in a tone of palpable anger. He calls them hypocrites and rebukes them: “Should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16) Jesus’ response is the wrath of God in action. When Jesus heals someone, he’s not just being loving and non-judgmental. He’s engaged in mortal combat with dark death-dealing powers. The job of the good shepherd is to beat back the wolves that seek to devour the sheep.
Indeed, Jesus speaks about himself in terms of being a good shepherd because the Old Testament speaks in these terms. The twenty-third psalm reminds us that “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The prophet Jeremiah proclaims, “Hear the word of the Lord, O nations...He who scattered [his people] will gather them, and will keep them as a shepherd keeps his flock. For the Lord has ransomed [his people], and has redeemed them from hands too strong for them.” (Jeremiah 31:10-11).
The New Testament tells us about a Jesus who shows us the love of a good shepherd because the Old Testament had proclaimed it first.
In the Old Testament as well as the New, the people of God are shown as being in bondage to powers too strong for them. At the same time, we’ve got to admit that we are our own worst enemy. So how does God save us without destroying us? How does God temper justice with mercy?
The story told across the Bible running from the Old Testament through the New Testament, is that God stands both inside and outside the human experience. He stands inside it because God knows us better than we know ourselves and in his Son Jesus Christ, God became us.
Yet, at the same time, God stands above and beyond all of our human perspectives. Abraham Lincoln understood this. In his epic Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln spoke of the two warring sides in the Civil War. Both sides read the same Bible, both sides prayed to the same God. Both sides could not be right. One had to be wrong. But suppose the Lord had a purpose of his own, a purpose that was larger than either side and transcended them both? That is what Lincoln concluded, as he quoted Psalm 19:9: "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
God’s project is a seamless garment told across the Testaments of Scripture. God looks at the creation God has made and sees a world in disarray, a human race time and time again being brought to the brink of ruin. The Bible speaks of God’s frustration as "fierce anger." The whole Bible is constructed around the idea that humanity is fallen away from its original perfection and bent on self-destruction. Indeed, this is more pointed in the New Testament than it is in the Old. We need to be saved from ourselves, redeemed from "powers too strong for us."
The difference between God's perspective on this and ours is that God has a purpose for good in it all. This purpose cannot and will not be defeated. And so the judgments of God, like Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisees who objected to a woman being healed, are the synergy of justice and mercy. We do not have two gods, one of justice and one of mercy. We have one God, whose judgments are merciful and righteous at the same time. God's judgment begins in mercy, continues in mercy, and ends, as the world God made will end, in mercy, according to God’s gracious promise.
God’s love and righteousness are two sides of the same coin.
Andrew +
