Paradox of the Week: "My God wouldn't do that!"

Warning: This entry will be continued in multiple posts. 

One of the phrases I occasionally hear, mostly when speaking with other Christians, is “I can’t believe in a God like that.” For a second, I’ll ignore the audacious implications of such a statement, namely that my opinion of what I can or cannot comprehend has any bearing on the way the world is. In my thinking, my personal beliefs about right and wrong are neither binding nor ultimately relevant. This is purely because when it comes to morality, I (finite, created human that I am) am not the supreme arbiter of morality. You get one guess as to who is. The way I see it, I am compelled to believe in God as He has revealed Himself through His Son and His Word. I can't pick and choose. But...

I understand the premise of that statement. God does some things in the Bible that are difficult for us to rationalize with our compassionate minds. The sufferings of Job come to mind (despite his eventual reward for his faith). Another prominent one, specifically in the Old Testament, is the repeated call to act out genocide. Deeply and emotionally, this bothers many of us. Questions like “How can a loving God do that?” run through our mind. In some, it leads to the train of thought that yields the idea that YHWH (or Yahweh) of the Old Testament and God, the explicit Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the New Testament are, in some ways, different. So we then get to a trend within the faith where Christians generally spend more time with the New Testament than the Old. “After all,” we say, “It’s more accessible. We don’t have to deal with all those pesky genealogies, those laws that don’t apply to us or Elisha summoning bears to maul children. Whew! Dodged a bullet there!” The God of the New Testament is nice and forgiving and safe (we like to think) and the Old Testament God is wrathful, mean and unforgiving (we like to think). Well, that train of thought isn’t new. A bishop named Marcion, who did a lot of his thinking and writing in the early 2^nd century, took this train of thought to its logical conclusion: The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were different gods.

            In his strictly literal reading of the Old Testament, he saw a god who was just, limited in power and not necessarily good. In his reading of the New Testament, he saw a God, through Jesus, who was wholly good and all-powerful. The same controversy takes place in the minds of many Christians. “How can I really believe that God is good when I see all of these examples of bloody, violent God-sanctioned wrath in the Old Testament?” Marcion just cut out the Old Testament and a lot of what would soon become the New, denounced Judaism completely, formed his own Gospel based on the Gospel of Luke, and built his following from there. To him, Christianity as the New Covenant meant, quite literally, to hell with the Old. As a matter of fact, the “god of the Old Testament” was, according to Marcion, a “demiurge” or creator god with evil tendencies and anger issues, distinct from what he saw as the all-powerful good God. I, unfortunately, don’t have that kind of luxury of assumption with a few thousand years of orthodox Christianity behind me. So what I hope to point us toward is the fact that the God of the Old and New Testament is indeed the same and that He is both just and good and he operates within both wrath and grace. And not only is He like that now, but He has been this way since the beginning of time, or as recorded, the first few chapters of the Bible.  So tomorrow, we’re going to start at the beginning with God’s first explicit act of mercy toward mankind (Old Testament) and the most harrowing example of divine wrath (New Testament - not for the squeamish).  

            May God bless you and keep you!