Is God actually different in the Old and New Testaments — or have we been reading two completely different books without noticing the contradiction?

• L

  Liam3w ago

  The God who drowned the entire human race except eight people is the SAME God who says He is love. Either reconcile that honestly or admit you have a problem. I'll wait.

  187Reply
• I

  Iris3w ago

  I came to faith through the Old Testament actually. Not despite it. I was an atheist who started reading the Psalms because I was grieving my daughter and I didn't know what else to do. Something about the rawness — the 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me' — felt more real than anything I'd experienced in a sanitized church service. I didn't find a monster. I found someone who knew sorrow at a level I'd never imagined God could. That's not the God people are describing in this thread.

  164Reply
• IL

  Iris L.3w ago

  I think a lot of Western Christians specifically have created the 'nice NT God' because it's comfortable. A God of wrath is inconvenient. A God who judges nations is inconvenient. A God who might actually require something from us is inconvenient. So we made Him a cosmic therapist who validates our choices and sends comforting memes. That's not theology. That's consumerism.

  158Reply
• E

  Elena3w ago

  This question gets asked every generation and every generation the answer is the same: read your whole Bible. God doesn't change. Malachi 3:6. 'I the Lord do not change.' The Old Testament is full of mercy and the New Testament is full of judgment. You just have to actually read it instead of collecting highlight reels.

  143Reply
• A

  Avery3w ago

  Marcion was a heretic and that's not a close call. The church wasn't being politically convenient when they rejected him — they were being faithful to what Jesus Himself said. 'Do not think I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.' Jesus quotes the OT constantly. If the OT God is a monster, Jesus is quoting a monster. You can't have it both ways.

  134Reply
• O

  Omar3w ago

  The bears mauling children thing in 2 Kings 2 has genuinely never stopped bothering me. I've heard every explanation. The boys were probably older, they were threatening Elisha, it was a mob, it was covenant judgment. None of it fully lands for me. I'm a Christian. I believe in this God. But I also think we should be allowed to say 'this passage is hard and I don't fully understand it' without being accused of apostasy.

  131Reply
• R

  Ravi3w ago

  Here's the take nobody wants: maybe BOTH Testaments have hard passages, and the problem is that we want a God we can fully comprehend and morally evaluate. We want to be the judge of God. And the entire Bible, cover to cover, is God saying 'no — I am the judge of you.' That applies to the parts we like AND the parts that make us uncomfortable. Consistent God. Consistently beyond us.

  122Reply
• R

  Ravi3w ago

  Honestly the New Testament has plenty of terrifying content people gloss over. Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead for lying to Peter. In Acts 5. That's the FIRST CHURCH. The apostolic age. People just don't talk about it because it shatters the 'OT = wrath, NT = grace' bumper sticker theology.

  121Reply
• ML

  Marco L.3w ago

  The slippery slope argument is genuinely terrible apologetics and we have to stop using it. Doubt that leads to faith is in every major book of the Bible. Job. Psalms. Lamentations. Thomas. You're not protecting anyone from apostasy by demanding intellectual submission — you're just making people pretend.

  118Reply
• ZK

  Zara K.3w ago

  Look at Exodus 34:6-7. This is God describing Himself: 'The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished.' Both. In. One. Breath. In the OLD Testament. The contradiction you're seeing is in your reading, not in the text.

  117Reply
• TS

  Theo S.3w ago

  I grew up in a household where the Old Testament God was basically used as a threat. 'Do this or God will get you.' I spent twenty years terrified of a deity I couldn't love. It wasn't until I really studied the Psalms — the tenderness, the lament, the intimacy — that I realized maybe I'd been handed a caricature. The OT God weeps over Israel. Hosea is one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever written. We did something very wrong with how we taught this.

  112Reply
• L

  Leo3w ago

  Revelation 19. Jesus comes back on a white horse and His robe is dipped in blood and He's slaughtering nations with a sword coming out of His mouth. That's the New Testament. The Lamb is also the Lion. Anyone who thinks the NT erased divine judgment has not actually read the book of Revelation.

  109Reply
• R9

  Ravi 923w ago

  The question itself contains a bias. It assumes wrath and love are incompatible in a divine being. But every good parent on earth experiences both simultaneously toward their child. The wrath OF love, not wrath AGAINST love. Maybe God is just what every human relationship is trying to approximate, and we're shocked when we see it at full intensity.

  108Reply
• J

  Jordan3w ago

  ^ This. Intellectual honesty is not apostasy. Pretending hard texts aren't hard is not faith. It's performance.

  107Reply
• N

  Nina3w ago

  My seminary professor put it this way: 'In the Old Testament, wrath is foregrounded and mercy is the surprise. In the New Testament, mercy is foregrounded and wrath is the surprise. But both are always present.' I've never heard a better summary. Same God, different emphases for different moments in redemptive history.

  103Reply
• QT

  Quinn T.3w ago

  That argument — 'God can do anything and it's good because He's God' — has been used to justify every atrocity ever committed in His name. 'God told us to.' It's not foundational. It's a blank check.

  99Reply
• S

  Sam3w ago

  What gets me is Jesus Himself brings the hammer down in Matthew 23. 'You brood of vipers! How will you escape the condemnation of hell?' That's Jesus talking. The gentle shepherd. If you want to say the OT God is scary and the NT Jesus is sweet you have never read the woes of Matthew 23 with your full attention.

  97Reply
• Y

  Yuki3w ago

  Ok but the cross itself is kind of my problem. An innocent person is tortured to death so God's wrath can be satisfied. How is that different from the wrath-monster narrative? The wrath didn't go away in the NT. It was just redirected onto Jesus. I'm not saying I don't believe it — I do — I'm saying we should at least be honest that the NT God isn't some fluffy grandfather figure either.

  96Reply
• AT

  Avery T.3w ago

  I teach Scripture at a Christian high school. This is probably the question students ask more than any other — more than evolution, more than sexuality, more than politics. And the worst thing I can do is give them a pat answer. The best thing I can do is help them see that faithful people have wrestled with this honestly for thousands of years and kept believing. That itself is evidence of something.

  94Reply
• S

  Sam3w ago

  Okay but if your parenting style involved drowning most of your children and then saying you love the ones left over, we'd call Child Protective Services. The parenting analogy only stretches so far.

  93Reply
• T

  Taylor3w ago

  Hosea. Jeremiah 31. Isaiah 54. The Old Testament is absolutely dripping with divine love and tenderness. The problem isn't the text. The problem is Sunday school only taught us the plagues and the battles and then we grew up thinking that's all there is.

  92Reply
• L

  Liam3w ago

  The tension is real and I don't think it disappears with a clever argument. The fact that smart, faithful people have wrestled with this for millennia should tell us something. I hold both in tension. Wrath and love. Justice and mercy. Not because I've resolved it but because both are clearly present. Living in the tension is part of what faith requires.

  91Reply
• M

  Marco3w ago

  I don't have words for that comment except thank you. Praying for you and your daughter.

  89Reply
• L

  Leo3w ago

  The issue is progressive revelation, not contradiction. God didn't change — our UNDERSTANDING of Him deepened. You don't look at your own childhood understanding of your father and say 'wow, turns out he's two completely different people.' You grew. Your comprehension grew. Same thing happened over the course of redemptive history.

  88Reply
• RM

  Riley M.3w ago

  Living in the tension sounds mature until you apply it to literally anything else. If I told you a person was both loving and genocidal you wouldn't say 'hold the tension.' You'd call it a character flaw. We extend God a grace in our reasoning we'd never extend to anyone else.

  88Reply
• E2

  Elena 213w ago

  This is actually the best comment in the thread. Exodus 34:6-7 is quoted more times inside the OT itself than almost any other passage. It's the Bible's own self-description of God's character. Wrath and love aren't opposites there — they're two sides of the same holy nature.

  86Reply
• Q

  Quinn3w ago

  Hard disagree with that. My grandmother never wrestled with it once and she had the most Christlike life I've ever witnessed. Simple faith isn't naive faith. Not everyone processes God through intellectual questioning and that's not a deficiency.

  85Reply
• LL

  Leo L.3w ago

  Here's my honest answer: I think God is consistent but human AUTHORS changed. The ancient Near Eastern context shaped how Israelite scribes understood and described God. A tribal people at war understood God partly through their tribal, warlike experience. That doesn't mean God commanded everything described — it means the inspired text also contains the human response to divine encounter, and some of that response is culturally limited. This isn't liberalism. It's taking inspiration seriously as a PROCESS, not just a dictation.

  83Reply
• Z

  Zara3w ago

  Revelation can be real and sufficient for salvation without being exhaustive and fully comprehensible in every detail. I can give you directions that get you to my house without explaining every engineering decision behind the road you're driving on.

  81Reply
• KK

  Kofi K.3w ago

  Marcion figured this out in the second century. Two gods. Church called it heresy. But honestly sometimes I understand why he went there.

  78Reply
• TS

  Theo S.3w ago

  bro said 'divine simplicity' in a forum thread and expected people to just nod along

  77Reply
• QK

  Quinn K.3w ago

  Ananias and Sapphira is the passage that convinced me there's no tidy division. The same God who killed Uzzah for touching the ark killed a couple in the early church for financial dishonesty. If anything, the standard got stricter after Pentecost, not easier.

  76Reply
• Z

  Zara3w ago

  Bottom line for me: same God, full stop. I'm not going to build my theology around my discomfort. God doesn't owe me an explanation I find emotionally satisfying. That's not faith — that's a transaction. Either He's God or He isn't. And if He is, I'm not the one in a position to audit His track record.

  76Reply
• T

  Theo3w ago

  The difference is that God is God and we are not. The creature cannot apply its own moral framework to the Creator without begging the question entirely. If God defines justice, then what God does IS just by definition — not because we evaluated it and agreed, but because He is the standard. I know that sounds circular to a skeptic. It's not circular; it's foundational.

  74Reply
• I

  Iris3w ago

  genuinely cannot respect any Christian who hasn't at least wrestled with this question. if your faith has never felt the weight of it you haven't been paying attention.

  73Reply
• D2

  Drew 213w ago

  Progressive revelation is a real concept but it gets used as a magic wand to make any inconvenient passage disappear. 'Oh that one was just our earlier, less complete understanding.' At some point you have to ask: if the understanding was THAT incomplete, why does God hold people responsible for obeying it?

  71Reply
• LR

  Leo R.3w ago

  If you think God is 'beyond us' you should explain why He went to such enormous effort to communicate to us in writing if the communication inevitably produces things we can't understand. Either the revelation reveals or it doesn't. You can't have it both ways.

  68Reply
• E

  Elena3w ago

  So God didn't actually command the genocide of the Canaanites, the Israelites just thought He did? And God let that misunderstanding stay in His 'inspired' Scripture? This view creates more problems than it solves.

  67Reply
• TL

  Theo L.3w ago

  It's actually a valid concept whether you've heard it or not. Look up classical theism. This isn't obscure — it's the mainstream position from Augustine through Aquinas through Reformed theology. The mockery is easy. The engagement is harder.

  64Reply
• RB

  Riley B.3w ago

  not to mention flipping tables in the temple. Jesus was not a pushover.

  62Reply
• S

  Sam3w ago

  y'all ever notice how the people who say god is the same in both testaments have never actually read leviticus start to finish

  61Reply
• ZL

  Zara L.3w ago

  Respectfully I think this 'honesty' approach is a slippery slope. First you admit you don't understand one passage. Then two. Then 'maybe God isn't real or good.' I've seen it happen too many times. Hold fast to what you know when you hit what you don't understand. That's not intellectual cowardice — that's faith working properly.

  58Reply
• Z2

  Zara 213w ago

  The theological answer that actually holds up historically is divine simplicity and immutability. God's attributes don't exist in tension with each other — they are one in the divine essence. His love IS His wrath against sin, properly understood. You can't separate them. The apparent contradiction is a product of reading God through our emotional categories instead of theological ones.

  56Reply
• M

  Morgan3w ago

  thank you!! everyone acts like John 3:16 is the entire new testament

  54Reply
• CR

  Casey R.3w ago

  i mean if your best defense is 'well he ALSO said he was merciful right before commanding something horrifying' that's not really the flex you think it is

  47Reply
• S

  Sam3w ago

  ouch that last one hit different

  43Reply

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