The early church heretic Marcion was so convinced that God’s self-revelation in the Old Testament differed from his self-revelation in the New Testament that he posited two different Gods altogether: the God in the Old Testament, he argued, was a demiurge—still a god but not the Most High God. This God created the world and everything in it, sure, but wrath featured as his primary characteristic. This so-called Old Testament God was, to use modern terms, masochistic and delighted in punitive measures while allying himself with scoundrels (the scoundrels part is true). Jesus Christ, on the other hand, “was the new and separate revelation of an altogether higher God.” 1 Mercy and grace, not wrath and punishment, characterized Jesus. Marcion’s rending of the Trinity led to his rejection of the entire Old Testament and much of the New Testament canon as well—anything that spoke favorably of the Old Testament was anathema, for he saw Jesus as altogether separate from the Father as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Marcion’s view lies on the extreme end of the spectrum, but his faulty understanding of the Old Testament lurks in our individual and collective understanding of the Old Testament even today. Few would go so far as to openly reject the Old Testament as Marcion did, and yet many view God in the Old Testament as different from Jesus in the New. Or at least they view the message of the Old Testament as significantly different from the message of the New Testament. The Old Testament, the thinking goes, is full of death and destruction, doom and gloom, turn or burn, “God is gonna cut you down.” The New Testament, on the other hand, is nothing but rainbows and unicorns, God’s love, and open arms for the whole world.
Both characterizations are woefully inadequate, of course, but since I teach Old Testament for a living, let’s spend some time thinking through the common misunderstanding that the Old Testament is full of wrath and judgment, to the exclusion of God’s enormous love for his people. Our primary metaphor for this journey will be the God who sees. On the one hand, God sees for the purpose of comfort, advocacy, help, and the like. On the other hand, God sees for the purpose of bringing justice. How we experience God’s sight is a function of our own relationship with him, just as Paul affirmed about the gospel message he preached: “But thanks be to God, who always leads us in Christ’s triumphal procession and through us spreads the aroma of the knowledge of him in every place. For to God we are the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To some we are an aroma of death leading to death, but to others, an aroma of life leading to life” (2 Cor 2:15–16 CSB).
Though the path we take may be circuitous, I aim to show that God’s justice and mercy are indivisible from his nature; the one necessarily entails the other. Our inability or unwillingness to see the intertwining of God’s justice and mercy prevents us from rightly understanding God’s self-revelation in the Old Testament, which in turn contributes to the soft Marcionism that causes so many to neglect two-thirds of the Christian canon.
The God Who Sees an Egyptian Slave
I have a single vivid memory from the time before my dad left that to this day brings me comfort. My mom had let me pick out a toy Rambo knife (which also came with a faux jade necklace, for those who are wondering) from KB Toys at the then-thriving local mall. I ripped into the package on the way home, and when we got there I launched onto Lenny. Holding aside his beer so I didn’t spill it, Lenny’s face lit up with the delight only a child can bring a father. This memory is uniquely special because most memories of my dad entail a mix of despair and anger, with not a little befuddlement mixed in, particularly as I traverse with my sons the milestones that marked his life with me.
Hagar’s story has always touched me because of my experiences with Lenny. He was no Abraham, to be sure, but he did help me understand a (very) small part of what Hagar must have felt in that wilderness. Hagar was Sarai’s slave; she had even less agency than the typical woman in the ancient Near East, evidenced most clearly by her master exiling her not once but twice. In Genesis 16, where she first appears, Abram and Sarai don’t even deign to mention her name; she is simply “my slave” or “your slave,” depending on who’s talking. She has little say over how and by whom her body is used. Yahweh has promised Abram and Sarai an heir, but that heir has been slow in coming, so couple speed things along a bit. “Since the Lord has prevented me from bearing children,” Sarai tells her husband, “go to my slave; perhaps through her I can build a family” (Gen 16:2 CSB). Abram, who had given his own wife to another man in chapter 12 and would do so again in chapter 20, assents to his wife’s suggestion and sleeps with Hagar.
The relationship goes south quickly, and again Hagar finds herself with little say in what she does or what happens to her. The narrative is ambiguous about what actually happened between Sarai and Hagar or who is to blame for the deteriorating relationship. The narrator tells us that when Hagar became pregnant, “her mistress became contemptible to her” (Gen 16:4 CSB). Sarai places the blame on both Abram and Hagar. “You are responsible for my suffering!” she tells her husband, for “I put my slave in your arms, and when she saw that she was pregnant, I became contemptible to her” (Gen 16:5 CSB). Abram, who had rescued his nephew from certain destruction just a few chapters earlier, refuses to speak for—or even to—his enslaved lover and the mother of his child: “Your slave is in your hands; do whatever you want with her.” Sarai abuses Hagar, who flees her master.
These few verses are dark and difficult to process. Abram, whose trust in God was “credited to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6), comes across as calloused, uncaring, disengaged, name your negative adjective. The father of our faith falters quite a bit in these chapters recounting his journey with Yahweh, and yet the Lord doesn’t cut him down or destroy his life. That alone should give the soft Marcionites among us pause, and God’s interactions with Abram should be familiar to folks who’ve read the trials and travails of those twelve first-century Galileans. Does wrath and judgment characterize the God Abraham walked with?
They certainly don’t characterize Yahweh’s interactions with the pregnant and abused slave who has fled Abram’s house. In a marked contrast to how Abram and Sarai have interacted with “your slave” and “my slave,” the angel of Yahweh seeks out Hagar and calls her by name. He tells Hagar to return to Abram’s house and submit to Sarai’s authority, for as Richard Hess puts it, “it is better to be a foreigner in this family through which Yahweh is at work than to be at home in Egypt.” 2 The messenger from Yahweh then delivers a similar promise to Hagar as he had to Abram: “I will greatly multiply your offspring, and they will be too many to count” (Gen 16:10 CSB). Further, she should name the firstfruits of that promise Ishmael, “for the Lord has heard your cry of affliction” (Gen 16:11 CSB).
Yahweh saw Hagar. He sought her out. He called her by name. He heard her cries for help. He promised her innumerable descendants. And this slave, whose name Abram and Sarai refused to say, names God: “You are El-roi,” the God who sees (Gen 16:13 CSB).
The God Who Sees Slaves in Egypt
Several hundred years and a few dozen chapters later, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah find themselves as slaves in Egypt. They’d traveled there to escape famine in Canaan; they grew and prospered, to the extent that a new Pharaoh “who did not know Joseph” (Exod 1:8 CSB) started murdering Hebrew babies to forestall a Hebrew uprising. You know the stories of the valiant women, like Shiphrah, Puah, Miriam, and Moses’s mother, who feared God and defied the king. God calls Moses, who gets a head start on Yahweh’s plan by executing justice against an Egyptian he saw abusing a Hebrew man. The people don’t respond quite like Moses anticipated, so he flees to Midian, where he stayed for forty years, according to Stephen’s speech in Acts 7.
After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned because of their difficult labor, they cried out, and their cry for help because of the difficult labor ascended to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the Israelites, and God knew. (Exod 2:23–25 CSB)
God heard. God remembered. God saw. God knew. Next comes the burning bush and Moses’s return to Egypt, where he and Aaron confront Pharoah. After that first conversation with the Egyptian ruler, Yahweh tells Moses, “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh: because of a strong hand he will let them go, and because of a strong hand he will drive them from his land” (Exod 6:1 CSB). Before the first plague we learn that Pharaoh’s heart was hard, and it remained so. After the second plague Pharoah hardened his heart, and again after plagues four and seven. After plagues three and five we read that Pharoah’s heart remained hard. And after plagues six, eight, and nine Yahweh hardened Pharoah’s heart. Again before the tenth plague Yahweh hardened Pharaoh’s, and he hardened it one last time after the Israelites began their exodus, so that “I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord” (Exod 14:4). So God saw his people, and he delivered them from Egyptian slavery through the ten plagues, each one demonstrating his power and might, culminating in the horrifying tenth plague: the death of the firstborn.
Marcion, Alive and Well
I suspect that this exodus narrative of God’s justice is the sort that causes some to accuse God of being devoid of love and instead filled with wrath and vengeance, and that brings us back to where we began: Marcion’s attempts to toss out the Old Testament (and much of the New Testament). I know that anecdote is not the plural of data, but as I’ve taught Old Testament for more than a decade, I’ve heard that very sentiment expressed over and over. Why is God so angry in the Old Testament? So full of judgment? It’s even worse if you can get people talking about the prophets. In many modern readers’ eyes, those guys are just shy of mouth-foaming murderers intent on slaying (with their words and God’s axe) everyone in their path. How many pastors shy away from teaching through a prophetic book because of all the doom and gloom? Have you resisted teaching from, say, Micah because you didn’t want to alienate your congregation with all the talk about God’s displeasure and coming judgment?
Popular preacher and author Andy Stanley has vocalized what many folks are thinking: “When it comes to stumbling blocks to faith, the Old Testament is right up there at the top of the list.” In fact, he says, “It’s usually a contender for second place right behind pain and suffering.” 3 His solution to this problem, simply put, is to divorce the Christian faith from its Old Testament foundation, to “unhitch” it, as he infamously urged his congregation one Sunday morning. 4 The Old Testament God is just too embarrassing for our modern sensibilities, and we much prefer the kinder, gentler Jesus who “gets us,” who is less concerned with wrath and damnation than he is with love and acceptance. And in a sense, that’s right.
Orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, is God in the flesh, “very God of very God.” So we should expect to see in Jesus the same sort of things we see in Yahweh in the Old Testament. And indeed we do. Just like Yahweh saw Hagar and called her by name, so Jesus saw the Samaritan woman at the well and “told me everything I did” (John 4:29). And just like Yahweh rescued saw his people in Egypt, heard their cries, remembered his covenant with Abraham, and responded by bringing them out of Egypt in power and might, so the Second Person of the Trinity incarnated in flesh and delivered his people from slavery to sin and death.
Things get tricky, though, when we realize that Jesus also enacts and embodies judgement aspect of Yahweh’s rescue of Israel from Egypt. One need only read the book of Revelation to meet the rider on the white horse, “clothed in a robe dipped in blood” who “judges and makes war” and from whose “mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.” This one will “rule with an iron rod” (Rev 19:11–16). If Revelation seems too far afield from the Jesus we meet in the Gospels, the Jesus whom Marcion and his ancient and modern acolytes worship, then a perusal of the Gospels will make the same point. “If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words,” our Lord told his disciples, “shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.” To the scribes and Pharisees he said, “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matthew 23:34). After expressing his longing to embrace the people of Jerusalem, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it,” Jesus stated, “your house is forsaken” (Luke 13:34–35). So if we’re going to toss out the Old Testament God because we don’t like certain aspects of his nature, then we’re also going to have to excise some part of the New Testament depiction of Christ.
Indeed, God Sees
So the question before us, really, is what do we lose when toss out the “angry” Old Testament God (along with similar depictions of Jesus)? Put simply, we lose the God who sees. Sure, we’ll avoid uncomfortable conversations about God hardening Pharoah’s heart or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah or the exile of Judah for forsaking their covenant with Yahweh. But those we will replace with uncomfortable conversations about why God doesn’t care about his people, why he isn’t just, and why he allows evil and injustice to reign. We lose the hope of knowing that God sees us, and that lost hope will be felt most acutely by the people who I imagine take the most solace in reading of God’s justice against an evil, child-murdering Pharoah and his condescending to speak to an Egyptian slave. For I suspect that people who get most offended at God’s justice have themselves never been slaves, or saw their children murdered, or suffered from war, domestic violence, or sexual abuse. For the oppressed, like the Israelites who cried out in Egypt and Hagar who cried out in the desert, God’s justice is good news. It answers Abraham’s question when he was concerned that Yahweh would destroy righteous people in Sodom: “Won’t the Judge of the whole earth do what is just?” (Gen 18:25). And it allows us to rejoice with the psalmist: “There is a God who judges on earth!” (Ps 58:11 CSB).
I’ll end with this: the Old Testament clearly depicts God as judging his people and the nations with a fierce, burning wrath. He destroys the entire world with a flood, rains down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, and exiles his people, first those in Israel and later those in Judah. He makes good on his promises to bring judgment; that is, God keeps his word. His prophets use terrifying images of warfare and abject suffering to call God’s people back to covenant faithfulness—a call that ultimately is unheeded. God also establishes a way for his presence to be with his people, first in the tabernacle, then in the temple, and in the New Testament God incarnate walks among the people of Israel, and later the Holy Spirit descends and indwells all those who trust in the atoning work of Christ. Christ will return one day as a conquering King. That will be terrifying for some, but not for all. For the Father poured out his wrath on the Son on Calvary, and all who trust in Jesus will be rescued from God’s just justice. The gracious God who saw Hagar in her despair and the Israelites in their slavery also sees us, and he has acted on our behalf.
To him who loves us and has set us free from our sins by his blood, and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father—to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (Rev 1:5–6)
Dr. Russ Meek (Ph.D., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is an associate professor of Old Testament at Tennent. Russ writes widely for lay and academic audiences about the Old Testament’s relationship to the Christian life; you can read his work at russmeek.com.
1 Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (London: Penguin, 1986), 302.
2 John Goldingay, Genesis, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Pentateuch (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), 261.
3 Andy Stanley, Irresistible: Reclaiming the New that Jesus Unleashed for the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 280.
4 Andy Stanley, “Aftermath, Part 3: Not Difficult,” sermon preached at North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, GA, April 29, 2018, https://podcastaddict.com/north-point-community-church/episode/68239630. The sermon is also on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pShxFTNRCWI.