This one comes out of a great conversation I had with a wonderful Christian friend of mine this past week about the Bible and our views of God.

One of the things I get to do as a pastor and as a Jesus Follower is work really hard on healing my own images of God and helping other people heal their images of God too.

Here is one that my friend and I ended up talking about. It is one that I have wrestled with in the past and he seemed quite passionate about. 

So here it is. There is an inaccurate and spiritually unhealthy view of the Bible and the God of the Old Testament that goes something like this – the Old Testament God is characteristically and perhaps categorically different than the God of the New Testament.  The God of the Old Testament is vengeful, hateful, mean, unforgiving, easily angered, egotistical, frightening, and holds impossible grudges against everyone. The New Testament God however, as represented in Jesus, is loving, good, kind, merciful, patient, accepting, and humble.  In this line of thought it is sometimes believed that the New Testament God, Jesus, came and died to save us from the Old Testament God.

This isn’t a new perspective.  The first time I know of it cropping up in the church was almost two thousand years ago in the late second and early third century where it was known as the Marcion Heresy.  There is so much that is wrong, damaging, and distancing with this view of God and the Bible.  It overlooks the overall narrative of scripture, key movements, and a ton of specific verses.  It gets the New Testament, the Old Testament, God, and Jesus wrong in basic, fundamental ways. 

I might write more about this one in the future but for now I just want to talk about the “Old Testament God” and His intolerable Mercy.

You read that right – God’s intolerable mercy. 

You see, one of the biggest issues that Old Testament people had with God was not that God was too harsh, but too merciful.  They believed that their unique God cared deeply about people and what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, justice and injustice.  They believed that all the oppressive bad things they saw in the world around them mattered to God, angered God, and broke God’s heart and at some point God as the ultimate King and Judge of all things was going to set things straight.  Their faith in God and God’s justice is one of the biggest things that held them together and gave them hope in the midst of the direst of circumstances. 

However, the thing that really frustrated them was the breadth of God’s patience and mercy with those who worked evil in the world.  To be fair, they loved and celebrated God’s mercy when it was given to them (e.g. Psalm 103:8-14) but often really struggled with watching the wicked prosper (e.g. Psalm 44, 74).  The book of Jonah is a wonderful short story about a man wrestling with God’s intolerable mercy for a horribly oppressive group of people that he hated; likely for good reasons. 

It’s hard to read the saga of the Israelite nation found in the books of Kings and Chronicles without hearing the unspoken question – unspoken in those books at least – of “How long will God let this go on?”  How long will God allow the Israelites to survive and flourish when they are committing the same sins as the people God had driven out before them – grinding down the poor, the widows, and the orphans, exploiting the weak, ritualistically sacrificing children to obtain favors from false gods, maintaining a justice system that is only a tool for the rich and powerful, normalizing every kind of immorality, and on and on, year after year after year.  If you understand what you’re reading and what is going on in these books, it’s hard to make it to the end without getting impatient with God’s mercy and impatient for God’s justice. 

I could keep going on for longer than you probably want to read, but the simple point for the day is that there is one God of both the Old and New Testament and that God is incredibly merciful – sometimes frustratingly, intolerably so.