Shortly after the birth of the early church, a heretic named Marcion pitted God’s Old Testament laws against Christ’s New Testament teachings by claiming that there were two gods. He taught that the heavenly Father sent Jesus to spread compassion and mercy in opposition to the harsh laws of the vengeful tribal god of the Jews. This same Old Testament god also created the world but was not as powerful as the heavenly Father of the New Testament. Many faithful Christians rejected Marcion’s ideas, and although the movement continued for a few more centuries, it eventually died out. However, similar notions that God is angry in the Old Testament but nice in the New Testament still exist today.
In previous reflections, we’ve explored the Bible’s teachings that God’s love includes judgment and justice and that God cares about the smallest details of his creation. These teachings combine to address another popular lie similar to Marcion’s: “God has grown softer on sin.” Our ever-insistent sinful nature reasons that even if God judged people in the past by sending plagues, wars, and famines, perhaps his apparent silence now means that his hatred for sin has died down. Like Adam and Eve who tried in vain to hide among the trees in the garden, it’s easy to for us assume that our modern world with its anonymous online profiles and cultural agnosticism has somehow hidden us from God’s judgment. Society’s attitudes about the dangers of sin are reflected in recent surveys: A majority of Americans perceive nonmarital sex to be either morally acceptable (38%) or not a moral issue (18%). Likewise, nearly 15% of Americans who express an otherwise biblical worldview perceive nonmarital sex as either morally acceptable or not a moral issue.
Why do people believe this? Some Christians would say that the church needs to bring back fire-and-brimstone sermons with a heavier emphasis on godly living. Perhaps this approach would curb outward sins for a while, but it ultimately buries believers under guilt and failure and never saves anyone. Failure after failure without the hope of the gospel can often lead to denial that sin is a problem at all—back to square one. The heart of the problem lies in perceptions of who God is.
When we view God in the Old Testament as wrathful and harsh, we miss his acts of love toward the Israelites and even other nations. In the Old Testament, we see God comforting Hagar the runaway Egyptian slave, saving the Israelites from their enemies, showing mercy to the city of Nineveh when his own prophet refused to, and promising a Savior from sin. When we view God in the New Testament as loving or we consider Jesus kinder than the Father, we miss Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees, his call to leave everything including family to follow him, the deaths of Ananias and Saphira for lying, and John’s visions of Christ’s return to judge. God’s kindness in the Old Testament and holiness in the New Testament show that he has not changed between the pages, just as he says in Numbers 23:19, “God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind.”
This truth is all the more important because it affects how people view the gospel itself. Riding on the coattails of “God has grown softer on sin” is its quieter accomplice, “I can sin because God will forgive me anyway.” Even in acknowledging that God’s attitude about sin hasn’t changed, Christians are also tempted to reason that since Jesus paid for their sin and they’ll be perfect in heaven, godly living isn’t important. The apostle Paul puts this lie into perspective:
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? . . . What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:1,2, 21-23).
In other words, if sin brings death and destruction, then how can anyone want to return to that lifestyle? The fact that God has never grown soft on sin tells us that he cares about saving us from its damaging effects as demonstrated through Jesus’ death on the cross for us. It is there that the Old and New Testament converge into one breathtaking display of God’s love for us and his hatred for sin. Because Jesus bore the penalty we deserve for our sin, we are no longer slaves to it. God has graciously removed your sin “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12). Even though God feels the same way about sin as he always has, he is patiently waiting and withholding judgment so that more people can hear the gospel and be motivated and empowered to turn from sin (2 Peter 3:9). God’s current silence encourages us to reach out to others and show them his holiness and mercy—in both testaments.
Recommended Resources:
- One God, Two Covenants?: Discovering the Heart of the Old Testament from the Bible Discovery series
- On Being a Christian: A Personal Confession
- Sanctification: Alive in Christ from the People’s Bible Teachings series
- From Dirty to Dancing: God’s Grace for Those Struggling with Pornography