Why is the Old Testament God so different from Jesus Christ?
VideoTranscript
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In the ancient world of Canaan, under the shadow of imposing temple structures, a horrific scene would unfold regularly. Parents would bring their young children, sometimes just a few weeks old, to the temple of Molech. The bronze statue of the deity stood tall with outstretched arms positioned over a fiery pit. As flutes and drums played loudly to drown out the sounds of the suffering babies, the children will be placed in those metal arms, heated by the fire below, and sacrificed in hopes of gaining prosperity, fertility, or military victory. Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of urns containing the charred remains of these children at sites throughout the ancient near east. A stark and heartbreaking testimony to this widespread practice. I want you to imagine for a moment that you're witnessing this scene.
Not as a modern person with our sensibilities, but as someone living in that time who has been raised to believe that this is normal. You're standing in the crowd as a young couple brings their infant to the temple. The priests are chanting, the music is playing, and smoke rises from the altar. Now, pause that mental image. What would happen today if someone was found guilty of such actions? What would our legal system do? Life imprisonment, the death penalty, and what would you want to see done to someone who deliberately sacrificed their own child?
I imagine most of us would want the fullest extent of justice to be served, wouldn't we? Now, I want to ask you something even more challenging. How do you think God felt watching these scenes play out day after day, year after year, generation after generation? If you were God, what would you have done? Would you have immediately destroyed everyone participating? Would you have sent warning after warning, hoping they would change? How long would you have waited before intervening to stop the slaughter of thousands and thousands of innocent children?
Many people wonder why God seems so different in the Old Testament compared to the New Testament. In the Old Testament, we see commands to drive out the Canaanites, to destroy their places of worship, and at times to engage in warfare that can seem shockingly violent to our modern sensibilities. Then we turn to the New Testament and we hear Jesus say, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." and Matthew 5:44. What changed? Was God's character somehow different? The short answer is this.
God wasn't different, but the circumstances were profoundly different. It's easy for us to sit in our comfortable homes, in our secure cities, where peace and prosperity unknown in the ancient world are common place, and judge God for his actions in the past. We read these passages with modern eyes, shaped by centuries of ethical development, human rights advances, and the luxury of peaceful societies with established rule of law. But once you know what God was dealing with and who he was protecting his people from, your view begins to change. Yes, God is love as 1 John 4:8 tells us, but love sometimes requires extreme measures to protect someone we love. Think about it this way. Let's say you started watching a video from the middle of the video and in it you saw one man brutally attacking another unrelentingly.
Well, you'd probably assume the attacker is evil, a terrible person. But if you saw the video from the beginning and realized that the attacker was protecting his family, including small children, from a killer who had broken into their home with violent intent, your perspective would completely change. You wouldn't enjoy the violence. Might still turn your stomach, but you would get it. You would understand. Context matters, doesn't it? The world of the Old Testament was dramatically different from the world of the New Testament and ways that required different approaches.
Let me paint a picture of what was happening in Canaan when the Israelites arrived oh so long ago. The land was filled with citystates where child sacrifice wasn't just accepted, it was institutionalized. Archaeological evidence confirms what the Bible tells us. Thousands of children routinely sacrificed to gods like Moolik and Baal in horrific ways. In Deuteronomy 12:31, God describes these practices, saying of the Canaanites, "They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods." I want you to consider something that might make you uncomfortable. Imagine you're living in ancient Canaan and you discover that your neighbors have just sacrificed their 2-year-old daughter to Baal because they believe it will bring rain for their crops.
This isn't a rare occurrence. It happens regularly in your community. What would you do? Would you just accept it as a cultural practice, the norm of the day? Would you speak out against it? Would you try to rescue future victims? Now imagine you're not just a bystander, but someone with authority.
If you had the power to stop these sacrifices, even if it required force, would you use it? How far would you go to protect innocent children from being burned alive? And how do you think God, who calls himself a father, felt witnessing thousands of children being sacrificed year after year after year? Also, women in these societies were often treated as property. Young girls were forced into temple prostitution as part of religious worship. Sexual exploitation wasn't just common, it was considered sacred. Violence was endemic with constant warfare between competing cities and tribes.
In Canaanite religion, the gods themselves were portrayed as capricious, violent, and engaged in sexual immorality. This wasn't just a different culture with a few questionable practices. This was a deeply embedded system of horrific evil that had persisted for centuries. And yet God gave these nations time to change. In Genesis 15:16, God told Abraham that his descendants won't possess the land for four generations because the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. God patiently waited over 400 years, giving these societies time to reform before judgment came. Think about that.
400 years he gave them to get their act together. 400 years. But how long would you have given them if you had the authority to step in back then? Most of us wouldn't give them 400 days or even four months or four weeks, let alone 400 years. What does that tell you about God's disdain for violence until absolutely necessary? The commands to drive out or destroy the Canaanites weren't arbitrary or motivated by ethnic hatred. They were about stopping horrific practices and protecting the Israelites from being corrupted by them.
God knew that if these practices remained, they would spread. And history proved them right. Whenever the Israelites failed to remove those influences, they ended up adopting the very same practices. We read in Psalm 106, they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They worshiped their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to false gods. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan.
Now fast forward about a thousand years to the time of Jesus. What had changed in the world? By the first century, the Roman Empire had established a different kind of order. While still very violent by our standards, it represented a significant advancement over the past. Child sacrifice was completely abolished throughout the Mediterranean world. The Romans themselves, accustomed to violence, were horrified by reports of it in the remaining Carthaginian colonies. Basic legal protections existed, even if they were imperfectly applied.
Women had gradually gained more rights, especially under Roman law. But let's not romanticize Roman society either. If you were transported back to first century Rome, you would be horrified by many practices considered normal back then. Unwanted infants were routinely exposed, abandoned outdoors to die of exposure or be taken by strangers. Gladatorial combat was entertainment. Slavery was universal and often brutal. Crucifixion was a public spectacle.
Imagine walking through a Roman city and seeing a human being nailed to a cross by the roadside, suffering for days before death. What would you do? walk past in a virtu as most Romans did? Or what if you saw a newborn baby abandoned on a trash heap because the father decided not to accept it into the family? If you were in charge, would you have abolished these practices? And how do you think God felt seeing these things happen every day? Even though it was far from perfect, the extreme practices that required extreme intervention in the Canaanite period had largely been eliminated.
Human sacrifice was outlawed. The social order, while still harsh, provided enough stability that different methods could now be effective. The world had changed, not completely, but enough that God could work differently in it. Jesus could now introduce a message focused on internal transformation that would gradually change society from within. The gospel could spread along Roman roads protected by Roman peace. the Pax Romana written in the common Greek language. God's timing was perfect as Galatians 4:4 tells us.
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his son. Does this mean God changed? Not at all. Throughout the Old Testament, we see the same God of love and mercy. When Abraham pleaded for Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18, God agreed he would spare the entire city for just 10 righteous people. In Ezekiel 33:11, God declared, "I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live." The prophet Micah summarized what God desired.
He has shown you, oh mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8. And in the New Testament, we see the same God of justice. Jesus spoke more about judgment than anyone else in the Bible. In Revelation, we read about God's final judgment on evil.
The difference isn't God's character. It's his methods based on the circumstances and what humanity was ready for. Think about how parents raise children. With toddlers, you might use firm boundaries, timeouts, and direct intervention to keep them safe. You physically pick them up and move them away from a hot stove because they can't understand the danger they're facing. But with teenagers, you reason. You discuss and you allow them to experience natural consequences of their actions to teach them.
The parent hasn't changed. The approach has adapted to the child's development. Now, I want you to think about your own parenting or how you were parenting. Have you ever had to physically restrain a child who was about to run into traffic? In that moment, did the child understand why you were being harsh or violent by grabbing them forcefully? They may have cried or felt you were being mean or yelled or whatever, but in reality, your forceful action was the most loving response possible in that situation.
Now imagine if humanity was like that child running toward traffic, but instead of scraped knees, the consequence was generations of child sacrifice, sexual exploitation, and violence that would spread to consume countless lives. If you were God, what would you have done? Would you have used force to stop it? Would doing so make you a violent God or a loving one? Now, consider how far we've come today. We are shocked by things that wouldn't even have raised an eyebrow in Jesus' time. When we read about crucifixion or the exposure of unwanted infants in the Roman world, we are horrified because our sensibilities have been shaped by centuries of Christian influence.
The very fact that we're troubled by Old Testament violence shows how much our moral intuitions have been developed by the trajectory God set in motion. Think about this. 2,000 years from now, what normal practices of our time might people look back on with horror? Think about all the headlines you've read. Will they judge us harshly for things we accept as ordinary? And might they question why God doesn't intervene more directly in our world? The pattern continues, doesn't it?
We shouldn't forget that our modern notions of human rights, equality, and the value of every human life grew directly from the seeds planted in scripture. The declaration that all humans are made in God's image in Genesis 1:27 was revolutionary, nothing short of it. The command to love your neighbor as yourself in Leviticus 19:18, which Jesus highlighted, gradually transformed how entire societies operated. God's ultimate goal has always been peace and flourishing for humanity. Isaiah 2:4 describes a future where nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. But God works within the circumstances that human free will has created, meeting us where we are to bring us where we need to be.
God didn't change. We did, partly because of his patient work in human history. And we're still changing. We're still growing into the vision God has for humanity. We haven't arrived yet. So, what does this mean for us today? First, it means we should approach scripture with humility, recognizing that we're reading across a vast cultural divide.
Before we jump to judgment about why God commanded or allowed certain things, we should seek to understand the historical and cultural context. As Proverbs 18:13 reminds us, to answer before listening, that is folly and shame. Second, we should recognize God's patience with humanity's development. Peter tells us, "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." Second Peter 3:9.
God could have scrapped the whole human project many times over, but instead has worked through the mess of human history to gradually bring us forward. And we have come a long way. Third, we should consider what this means for how we engage with our own culture. We're called to be salt and light, as Jesus tells us in Matthew 5, agents of positive change. But we do this primarily through love, service, and persuasion. Not force, not now. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:20, "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us."
Fourth, we should examine our own hearts. It's easy to judge ancient Canaanites or even to judge God's actions toward them. But Jesus reminds us to deal with the log in our own eye first in Matthew 7:5. Our society still has its own forms of child sacrifice through abortion, child trafficking, neglect, systems that devalue the vulnerable. We still have our own idols, too. Money, power, pleasure, self. We may not bow to golden statues, but we often put other things in God's rightful place.
Now, let me challenge you to consider something difficult. If God appeared to you today and said he wanted to judge our nation for the ways we harm children and worship false gods, how would you respond? Would you argue that we're not that bad? Would you plead for mercy? Would you agree that judgment is deserved? It's easy to stand at a distance and judge God's actions in history. But what if he asked you to justify the moral standards of our time?
How would you respond? And what about future generations? What if your great great grandchildren look back at how you lived and wonder how you could have participated in systems that they find morally reprehensible? Would you want them to try to understand your context before judging you? Shouldn't we extend the same courtesy to God when we read about his actions in ancient contexts that we barely understand?
I find it remarkable that even in his most severe judgments, God always preserved a way forward for everyone. Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute, recognized Israel's God as the true God and was not only spared, but became an ancestor of Jesus Christ himself. Ruth, a Moabitete woman from a nation with a terrible history, became another of Christ's ancestors. Even in the darkest times, God maintained an open door for anyone who would turn to him. This reminds me of the story of a small village in Albany, New York. In 1979, a Cambodian refugee family arrived there, having escaped a genocidal Cime Rouge regime. They had witnessed unspeakable horrors.
Family members executed, children starved, communities destroyed. A local church took them in, helping them find housing, learn English, and start a new life. Now, I wonder if you were watching the Cambodian genocide unfold, what would you have done if you were God? Would you have supernaturally stopped it? Would you have struck down the perpetrators? And if you did, where would you have drawn the line? Which evils would you stop?
And which would you allow? These questions have zero easy answers, but they remind us of the complexity God faces in dealing with human freedom and human evil. That's the God we serve, one who certainly judges evil, but always offers redemption. The God who said through Ezekiel, "Why will you die, people of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares his sovereign Lord. Repent and live." Ezekiel 18:31-32.
Understanding God's actions in the historical context doesn't excuse evil and it does not minimize the difficulty of certain biblical passages. I'm not asking you not to have a problem with some things, but it does help us see the consistent character of God working through vastly different historical circumstances to accomplish his ultimate purpose, the redemption of humanity and the restoration of all things. Jesus reveals God's heart most clearly of all. In John 14:9, he said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the father." In Jesus, we see God's justice and mercy perfectly balanced. We see his hatred of sin and his love for sinners. We see his willingness to bear the cost of reconciliation himself.
This is why Paul could write in Colossians 1:19 and 20, "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross." God's goal has always been reconciliation, restoration, and peace. Sometimes that required strong intervention against deeply entrenched evil. Sometimes it works through gentle persuasion and personal transformation, but the heart behind it has never changed. So the next time you encounter a difficult passage in the Old Testament, don't rush to judge God. Pause and consider what circumstances God was addressing. I want you to try something that might help when you're reading those difficult passages.
First, read the passage carefully and note what troubles you. It's okay to feel troubled. Then before forming judgment, ask yourself these questions. What evil was God confronting here? What was at stake if he didn't act? What would I have done in God's position? What context am I missing that might help explain this action?
When we approach scripture with humility rather than rushing to judgment, we often find that what initially appeared harsh may have been the most merciful option available given the circumstances. Just as a surgeon scalpel cuts to heal, God sometimes has to take severe measures to prevent greater suffering. His methods have adapted to changing human circumstances and they continue to adapt today. But his character remains the same. I the Lord do not change as Malachi 3:6 declares. And Hebrews 13:8 affirms, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. The God who commanded judgment in the Old Testament is the same God who died on the cross for his enemies in the New Testament.
The means changed, but the heart remained consistent. Let's be grateful that we live in a time where God's redemptive work has progressed so far that the good news of Jesus can spread through love rather than through the elimination of harmful practices and people. Let's be grateful that we move beyond the brutality of the ancient world. And let's remember that we still have a long way to go before God's kingdom comes in its fullness. When you're judging others, point back at yourself because we got a lot wrong in this world, too. In Romans 8, Paul wrote, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sunship, the redemption of our bodies.
For in this hope, we were saved. We live in the already, but not yet. Already experiencing God's redemptive work, but not yet seeing it completed. We're still in the middle of the story, but we know how it ends with the beautiful vision in Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and will be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes.
There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away. Now, I want to ask one final question to reflect on this. What would you do if you had God's perspective? If you could see all of human history at once, past, present, and future, and if you knew exactly what needed to happen for evil to be defeated and good to ultimately triumph, what difficult decisions might you make? If you knew that temporary judgment now would prevent millions of children from suffering later, would you act? If you knew that allowing certain evils to continue for a time would eventually lead to greater good, would you wait? The truth is we don't have God's perspective.
Isaiah 55:8-9 reminds us, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Perhaps the wisest approach is to admit our limitations and trust the God who sees what we cannot.
When you're troubled by some difficult passage in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, that's always where what I hear about from people, consider this. Every detail that God took into consideration for each of his actions isn't written down for us to examine. And even if they were, our limited human abilities couldn't possibly fathom all the long-term consequences of not taking the action God chose to take. So the question is, knowing how little you really understand of the culture and circumstances of the past, will you give God the benefit of the doubt or not? The choice is yours. Let this be our prayer. Aba, Father, give us wisdom as we read your word.
Help us to understand the context of your actions throughout history and grant us humility when we encounter passages that challenge us. Forgive us for the times we've judged you without understanding and teach us to trust your heart even when we cannot trace your hand. Thank you for your patient work in human history, gradually leading us toward your perfect vision for humanity. Thank you that you didn't abandon us to our worst impulses, but have consistently interveneed to save us from ourselves. Help us to be agents of your redemptive work in our own time and place, addressing the evils of our day with both truth and love. Give us your perspective on the injustices of our world and show us how to respond as you would. And fill us with hope of your kingdom coming in fullness with no more tears, pain, or death in Jesus name.
Amen. [Music]
