Is the God of the Old Testament the same God as the Father of Jesus — or have we stitched together two completely different deities?

• QL

  Quinn L.1w ago

  my grandma used to say the OT shows you what we deserve and the NT shows you what God decided to do about it anyway. she never went to seminary. she just read her Bible every morning for 60 years. sometimes I think she understood it better than the academics.

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• NR

  Noah R.5d ago

  Sometimes personal testimony IS the most honest answer to a question theology can't fully resolve. I've sat with this for 40 years. I've read the texts. I've read the scholars. I've read the critics. I do not have a clean systematic answer. What I have is a lived encounter with Someone who matches what Jesus said about God — who meets me in the dark, who doesn't abandon, who is somehow simultaneously more holy than I can imagine and more loving than I deserve. Call that faith. Fine. But don't call it nothing.

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• QK

  Quinn K.6d ago

  I grew up in a church that basically used the God of the OT to justify a lot of harsh, controlling, borderline abusive behavior toward women and children. 'God is holy and wrathful and demands obedience.' When I finally started reading the Gospels seriously — like really just reading Jesus — I felt like I'd found a different person. I know theologically it's supposed to be the same but experientially, in terms of what those two testaments did to me and to people I love, they might as well have been different gods. I don't know how to reconcile that.

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• JL

  Jordan L.1w ago

  Same God. Full stop. The people who say otherwise have never actually read the Old Testament carefully. There's mercy, forgiveness, and covenant love on literally every page. And there's judgment in the New Testament too — Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead in Acts 5. We just selectively remember the parts that fit our preferred version of each Testament.

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• N

  Noah1w ago

  Hosea 11 is beautiful. But I can't reconcile it with 1 Samuel 15:3. 'Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants...' That's not a tension. That's a chasm. I believe in God. I believe Jesus is Lord. I genuinely do not have a clean answer for that verse and I'm suspicious of anyone who does.

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• S

  Sam1w ago

  Marcion wasn't a heretic because he noticed the tension. He was a heretic because his solution — rip out the OT entirely — was catastrophically wrong. You can't understand the cross without the Passover. You can't understand grace without the law. You can't understand the resurrection without the prophets. The OT and NT are not two religions. They are act one and act two of the same drama.

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• S

  Sam6d ago

  ^ okay but you're basically saying 'the text doesn't mean what it clearly says.' that's the same move liberals make with creation and conservatives are furious about it. you can't have it both ways.

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• M

  Maya5d ago

  I'm a Jewish believer — Messianic — and this debate always fascinates me because from my perspective the discontinuity people perceive usually comes from not actually knowing the OT in its own context and language. The hesed, the rachum, the chanan — lovingkindness, compassion, graciousness — those words are everywhere in Torah. Exodus 34 literally has God define His own character as 'compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.' That's not a different God from Jesus. That's the same heart.

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• M

  Maya6d ago

  Nope. Hard disagree with the whole premise of the question. Jesus himself quoted the OT constantly — law, psalms, prophets. He said He came not to abolish but to fulfill. If Jesus didn't think the OT God was his Father, he did a remarkable job hiding it. People who want to soften God into a cosmic grandfather should read Revelation 19 where Jesus comes back on a white horse literally soaked in the blood of his enemies. The NT Jesus is not who the culture thinks He is.

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• CR

  Casey R.5d ago

  Ultimately I land here: the question 'is this the same God' is asking whether God changed OR whether human perception of God deepened. I believe the second. The full character of God — both judgment and mercy, both holiness and love — was always there. The OT emphasizes certain things for a particular people at a particular moment. Jesus doesn't revise God. He reveals God. There's a massive difference. The God who said 'I have loved you with an everlasting love' in Jeremiah 31 is the same God who said 'God so loved the world' in John 3. I staked my life on that.

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• T

  Taylor1w ago

  Progressive revelation is a useful concept but people use it like a magic wand to make every difficult passage disappear. 'Oh God commanded that? Progressive revelation.' At some point you have to wrestle with what the text actually says instead of reaching for the theological Febreze.

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• Q

  Quinn6d ago

  Genuine question for the people saying 'same God, progressive revelation': at what point does the revelation stop progressing? Because some of the most awful things in church history were done by people who thought they were following the God of the OT. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The blessing of slavery. If 'it was different back then' is a valid explanation for the OT, what stops someone from using it to justify anything?

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• M

  Morgan5d ago

  If you disagree that these are the same God, explain why you're okay with Jesus' own testimony about himself. John 8:58 — 'Before Abraham was, I AM.' He is literally claiming the divine name from Exodus. He is claiming continuity with the burning bush. You cannot take Jesus seriously and simultaneously claim He's revealing a brand new God that has nothing to do with what came before.

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• Y

  Yuki6d ago

  ^ This right here is why this question matters. It's not abstract. The way people answer this shapes how they treat other people. A theology that makes God primarily wrathful, demanding, and violent WILL produce churches that are wrathful, demanding, and violent. That's not a slippery slope, that's just history.

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• JR

  Jordan R.1w ago

  okay but can we be honest for one second. telling joshua to kill every man woman and child in canaan and then jesus saying love your enemies is not a small tension. its not nothing. i believe its the same god but i'm not gonna pretend the difficulty isn't real. that's intellectual cowardice.

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• P

  Priya6d ago

  That's basically neo-orthodoxy and if you follow it to its conclusion you've introduced serious doubt about the reliability of ALL scripture, not just the uncomfortable bits. Once you say 'well the people who wrote it might have been wrong about what God said' — that's not a small move. That's the foundation cracking.

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• R

  Ravi1w ago

  The Canaanite conquest is always exhibit A in this argument and I think people consistently miss important context. (1) Archeological evidence for the extent of the conquest is actually contested. (2) The genre of that literature includes hyperbolic military language common to the ancient Near East — 'utterly destroyed' is a phrase that appears in texts where the same people groups show up alive later. (3) The theological point was about covenant faithfulness, not a template for modern warfare. None of this makes it easy but 'God commanded genocide' flattens a complex ancient text.

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• R

  Riley6d ago

  ^ yes thank you. the american evangelical jesus is basically a bearded life coach who wants you to be happy and never says anything uncomfortable. the actual biblical Jesus called people vipers, made a whip and drove people out of the temple, and told a guy to let his dead father bury himself. same energy as the OT God? maybe more than people want to admit.

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• L

  Leo5d ago

  ^ I really appreciate this perspective. We Gentile Christians have almost no idea what we inherited or what we flattened in the translation. Reading the OT through Greek and then English and then American evangelical culture is like looking at the sun through five layers of frosted glass and thinking you've seen the sun.

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• R

  Reese1w ago

  I spent three years in seminary specifically studying this question. The Hebrew concept of God — Yahweh's hesed, his covenant faithfulness — runs unbroken from Genesis straight through to Revelation. The wrath we see in the OT is the same holiness Paul describes in Romans. The love we see in Jesus is anticipated in Hosea, in the Psalms, in Isaiah 53 written 700 years before Calvary. Anyone who thinks these are different gods hasn't read Hosea 11 where God is weeping over Israel like a heartbroken parent.

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• N

  Noah6d ago

  That's a serious pastoral issue but it's a bad argument for theology. People misuse Jesus too — plenty of abusers quote the NT. 'Wives submit to your husbands.' 'Children obey your parents.' The problem isn't which Testament, the problem is abusive people weaponizing whichever text serves them. We don't solve abuse by throwing out half the Bible.

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• Y

  Yuki6d ago

  The answer to your question is: Jesus stops it. He is the final and complete word (Hebrews 1:1-2). Once the Son speaks, no one gets to go back to Joshua as their model. The canon is closed. The revelation is complete. That's not a loophole — it's the whole point.

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• I

  Iris6d ago

  I've had this debate with my brother-in-law about fifteen times and it always ends with him saying the God of the OT was 'just a tribal deity the Israelites invented' and me sputtering. What gets me is he's not wrong that the text PORTRAYS a deity who acts with nationalist partiality. The question is whether that perception was limited OR whether that's the totality of what God is. I believe it's the former. The whole arc of the story is God expanding outward — to the nations, to all creation. But I get why someone reads the early books and sees something smaller and scarier.

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• E

  Elena5d ago

  i went to a liberal seminary and I'll be honest, a lot of my professors essentially had a functional Marcionism going on. they just never called it that. the OT was anthropology and folk religion, the NT was the real revelation. I left more confused than when I arrived. the evangelical churches I grew up in got something right that my professors missed — the whole Bible is one thing. they were just sometimes clumsy about the hard parts.

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• NK

  Noah K.1w ago

  Boyd's cruciform hermeneutic is interesting but it feels like he ends up saying 'God didn't actually mean/do those things' which has its own massive problems for biblical authority. You can't just reinterpret the hard texts into something comfortable. That's not exegesis, that's therapy.

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• D

  Diego6d ago

  Can we talk about the fact that Marcion's position isn't completely bonkers even if his solution was? I'm not saying he was right. I'm saying the early church had a REASON they had to explicitly condemn his teaching at multiple councils — because it was compelling enough that people were buying it. Pretending this is some easy question with an obvious answer is exactly what makes Christianity look like it can't handle scrutiny.

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  Drew1w ago

  This is literally the oldest objection in the book. I've heard atheists use this one for years. The answer is: progressive revelation. God didn't change. Our understanding of Him deepened. A father who says 'don't touch the stove' to a toddler and then explains gas combustion to the same kid at 16 hasn't contradicted himself.

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• DT

  Diego T.6d ago

  That's a fair challenge but it's not the same move. Genre recognition is legitimate hermeneutics. The question is always: what KIND of text is this and what did the original audience understand? Applying that to military victory accounts is not the same as allegorizing the resurrection.

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• O

  Omar6d ago

  Ok but Jesus also wept. He stopped a stoning. He touched lepers. He ate with people everyone else considered trash. The fact that He also had righteous anger doesn't erase any of that. Trying to make Jesus as scary as the harshest OT passages feels like overcorrection.

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• T2

  Theo 211w ago

  Greg Boyd wrote a whole book on this (Cross Vision / The Crucifixion of the Warrior God) and his argument is basically that we need to read all the violent OT passages through the lens of the cross — that Jesus crucified IS the definitive revelation of God and everything else gets interpreted through that. I don't agree with all of it but at least he's actually engaging the problem instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

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• S9

  Sam 926d ago

  I want to push back on framing this as 'two different Gods' when what it might actually be is our limited human moral perception changing, not God. We look back at Victorian England and see things they were blind to morally. Future generations will look back at us with horror about things we're blind to right now. Maybe 'God commanded that' sometimes means 'people genuinely believed God commanded that and recorded it as divine command' — which is a human limitation, not a divine contradiction.

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  Iris1w ago

  With respect to your grandma — and I mean that — a sweet sentiment doesn't resolve a serious philosophical and historical problem. Either God commanded ethnic cleansing or He didn't. If He did, we have to account for that morally. If He didn't, we have to account for why the text says He did. 'The OT shows what we deserve' doesn't actually answer either of those questions.

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• DS

  Diego S.6d ago

  Marcion was compelling in the 2nd century the same way a lot of wrong things are compelling. Gnosticism was compelling. Arianism was compelling. Persuasive doesn't mean correct. The church held the canon together for reasons, and those reasons were exegetical and theological, not just political.

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• MT

  Marco T.5d ago

  Your brother-in-law is right that there's ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) context that makes early Israelite religion look like henotheism — acknowledgment of other gods while prioritizing one. But the prophets, especially Isaiah, pushed hard toward strict monotheism ('I am God and there is no other') and that's the trajectory that culminates in Jesus. The Bible is honest about this development within Israel's own understanding. That's not a bug, it might be a feature.

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• A

  Avery5d ago

  Beautiful sentiment but 'I staked my life on it' is not an argument. Lots of people staked their lives on things that turned out to be wrong. The question deserves rigorous engagement, not just personal testimony.

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• JT

  Jordan T.5d ago

  That's a strong point from John 8. But Marcion wouldn't necessarily disagree with that reading — he might say the 'I AM' reveals the higher, true God who was hidden behind the inferior creator God the Jews worshipped. That's twisted, yes. But 'Jesus claimed continuity' doesn't automatically resolve the discontinuity question, it just moves it.

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