Is the loving God of the New Testament the same as the angry God of the Old Testament? - Sharon Edmundson

Today I'm going to look at the question is the loving God of the New Testament, the same as the angry God of the Old Testament? If you're not familiar with the Bible, I'll give you a bit of background to this question. The Bible is made up of different books that are divided into two sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament contains 39 books written by a variety of people over several centuries and covers a timeframe from the creation of the world until about 400 years before Jesus walked the earth is a man. The books include history, law, poetry, and prophecy. The New Testament is made up of 27 books which include four eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, and some letters that were written by early Christians to the new churches that formed.

So what's the problem? In the Old Testament, there are many passages where God appears to be angry and punishes people for what they've done. To give you an example, in the book of Numbers, there's a verse that says this, the Lord's anger burned against Israel. And he made them wander in the wilderness 40 years until the whole generation of those who done evil in His sight was gone. And then in the New Testament, we see verses such as, For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life. And this one, the one who doesn't love, has yet to know God, for God is love.

That verse doesn't limit God to being loving, it says he actually is love. So sometimes people read these things and ask, is the God of the Old Testament actually the same as the god of the New Testament? I'm going to look at that question. As we look up our next passage in the book of Mark, which is one of the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life. The answer to that question is our destination point. But on the way we're going to stop and look at a few other things, including how Jesus handles the most stressful event of his life? And answer prayer and the question are love and anger connected. Up until today's passage, Jesus has been teaching people and performing fantastic miracles. This week, we see him as he's about to be arrested, taken to court and killed by crucifixion. And he knows that this is about to happen. To say he's in a very stressful situation is an understatement. I don't expect that any of us have been in that exact situation. But most of us have had very stressful, stressful situations at some point in our lives.

What do you do when you're in stressful situations? How do you cope?

Why not write your answers to that question in the comments, I asked a few people to tell me what they do to cope when they're in difficult situations. And I asked for both things that we might consider spiritual things that we might not consider spiritual. So let's see what they said.

How Do You Cope With Stress?

When I'm really stressed, I tend to talk to Matt or another friend or I write down my thoughts and I pray. I also like to distract myself by watching TV or by reading. So let's see what Jesus did in his situation. How did he deal with it?

Then Jesus went to his disciple with his disciples to a place called gethsemane And he said to them, sit here while I go over there and pray. He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him. And he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, stay here and keep watch with me. Going a little further, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, my father, if it's possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will.

So in this moment of trouble, Jesus asked for the support of his friends, and out of those friends, he has a smaller inner circle of friends who is really real with, you can hear the anguish in his voice, as he says to his closest friends, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

Now, I've never been as stressed as Jesus must have been at that point. But I have had many times when I've been extremely stressed. During one particular time, I remember trying to go for a walk in a country park near where I lived, and only managing to get from the car, to just outside the park, the car park, and then I had to sit and wait until I had enough energy to get back in the car and go home.

So with Jesus after his talk to his friends, he then pours out His heart to God. As Christians, we believe that there is one God, but he's made up of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is a difficult concept to get our heads around. Because we don't really have an equivalent to this in the physical world. We believe that Jesus is God the Son in human form. And I find it encouraging that Jesus does not, does not only seemingly spiritual things, of like pouring out his heart to God, the Father, in other words, praying, but also the much more down to earth thing of getting help from his mates. The Bible sees us not just as spiritual beings, but as physical, emotional, and social beings. Jesus, the only perfect human who have existed is turning to his mates for support.

Bizarrely, I also find it encouraging that Jesus didn't get his prayer answered the way he wanted. He asked if there was any other way to get the same result without going through all the pain. And God the Father said, No. Have you ever not had a prayer answered the way you wanted? You're in good company.

The Christian life isn't about God being a fairy godmother and everything going smoothly, there is so much more depth to it than that. Anyway, let's see what Jesus mates did to support him. Then he returned his disciples and found them sleeping. Simon, he said to Peter, are you asleep? Can you keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation? The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. It would seem his friends didn't do so well at supporting him. If you're wondering why Jesus called Peter Simon, it's because he was known by both names. Maybe if Jesus gives them another chance, they'll do better. Once more, he went away and prayed the same thing. When he came back, he again found them sleeping because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him. So no improvement there, then I bet they didn't know what to say to him. How about one more chance? returning the third time he said to them, are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come look, the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Rise. Let us go. Here comes my betrayer. To get back to today's question I want to focus in on verses 38 and 39, where Jesus says to his friends that his soul was overwhelmed to the point of death. And he asked God to take this cup from him. Up until now, Jesus has looked pretty in control. Now he turns to God and pleads. Is there any way I can get out of this? There's a sense of horror about what is going to happen.

And as Tim Keller points out in his book, Kings Cross Jesus doesn't act like other heroes from ancient accounts or even accounts of how first Christian martyrs died. They all seem to face death bravely and calmly. But here we have our hero trying to get out of his situation. Tim Keller asked the question, why have many of Jesus' followers died better than him? He believes it was because Jesus was facing something the other martyrs didn't. Not just physical death, but something much worse that made physical death seems small. What's at the heart of This? Jesus said, Take this cup from me. In he Hebrew Scripture cup is a metaphor for the anger God has taught human evil. His divine justice poured out on injustice. Before this, God, the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit had lived in perfect love and unity with each other. Now Jesus is experiencing a taste of what it's going to be like to be cut off from all of that, when he's crucified, to be cut off from all that love and light and wonderfulness that he'd had and to take all our guilt onto himself, to be surrounded by pure evil, he began to be filled with the horror of it all. Far from being a God of anger only in the Old Testament, the whole of the New Testament is focused on God's anger being poured out on Jesus on our behalf, and the benefit that that has brought us. We don't like the idea of a God of anger, we like the idea of a God of love. The problem is, if you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God too. Loving people get angry, not in spite of their love, but because of it. If you see people Destroying Themselves, or others lives, and you don't get angry, maybe you don't care enough, the more loving you are, the more ferociously angry you'll be. Whenever at whatever harms Your Beloved. So if God is loving and good, he has to be angry or evil. Listen to a guy called Miroslav Volf., it's a long quote, but I think it gets the point across really well.

And this is not child abuse, as some would suggest, because when we say that Jesus is the Son of God, it's not in the way that we have sons. Jesus is God and equal to God the Father but has a different role and has always existed. Jesus said this about his life. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.

So going back to the topic of God's anger, his anger about the things that hurt and destroy us, shows how much he loves us.

God loves you and me so much and hates what destroys us so much, that he's prepared to go through so much agony himself in order for His justice to be served. A God that just lets us do whatever we want, and doesn't mind isn't a loving God at all. He doesn't care enough to get angry about what's wrong. This is the God that Christians worship. A God who loves us passionately and values, each of us enough to be angry when we hurt ourselves and other people. He is a God who is so desperate for us that he's prepared to come to Earth as one of us, and let us kill him in a horrendous way. So that justice is served for our crimes, but in a way that leaves a door open for us to have a relationship with Him. And yet he doesn't force a relationship he gently invites us to know his love but leaves the choice with us. This is amazing.

Just as we see God's anger in the Old and the New Testament, we also see his love, the reason for his anger in the Old and the New Testament, here's a verse about his love from the Old Testament. For the mountains may depart, and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you. And my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you. And although this love means that he gets angry about the wrong and injustice in the world, he is slow to get angry, like this verse from the Old Testament says, The Lord is slow to anger. Sorry, the Lord is compassionate, and gracious, slow to anger, are bouncing in love. If you're not currently a Christ follower, I wonder what things are stopping you from following this God? People have many reasons. For some, it may be that actually they want to live life their own way and decide what is right and wrong for themselves and don't want to be answerable to some higher power higher God. Maybe you've had a bad experience with christians. For others. It may be that this all sounds great, but there is the question, is this actually true? And this is a totally valid question. The Bible it says, says, self says, and if Christ is not alive, you are still lost in your sins and your faith is fantasy. It would also mean that those believers in Christ who've passed away have simply perished. If the only benefit of our hope in Christ is limited to this life on Earth, we deserve to be pitied more than all others. In other words, if Jesus didn't really die, and wasn't really raised to life, again, Christianity is based on a lie. And it's just fantasy, and you should pity Christians. But if Jesus did really rise from the dead, and is who He says He is, then that has implications for everyone. I don't have time to look at that question now. But we're going to be looking at that in a few weeks when we get to the story of the resurrection of Jesus. So keep tuned in.

DISCUSSION

Sally Burch

Sharon did a brilliant job. Thank you, Sharon. Not an easy topic to talk about. But I thought you really brought out some some interesting ideas there for us to talk about. So it was really really good. Thank you.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, absolutely. If you want to know more about the stuff she was talking about, do check out Tim Keller's book called Kings Cross, which is a phenomenal read. Let me tell you and definitely worth being on your bookshelf if you're not already read it. So do check that out. It's called Kings Cross. So your husband actually made his video debut in that talk.

Sally Burch

He did. Brilliant. Nice one J. Yes. Good. And he did say that he is a verbal processor. Oh my goodness. He is a verbal processor. Very different from that point of view. He likes to talk and talk and talk through things. And I'm quite the opposite. I do a lot of sort of internal processing. Before I kind of actually say how I feel or that I'm worrying about something. Quite different there Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

So how does that work in the Birch household then?

Sally Burch

It works pretty well. It does work pretty well. And I'm a good listener.

Matt Edmundson

That's a good job really, isn't it? It's just a good job. Yeah. And is he patient with you waiting on you to sort of say how you are?

Sally Burch

Yeah, I think so. And then he's got better over the years at kind of, you know, prodding me to actually sometimes that's not a good thing. You know, keeping that all internalised in your own head isn't a good is a good thing. Sometimes you need to actually, you know, talk about those things and get it out there and hear someone else's perspective, especially if you're worrying about something, when you often when you actually speak it out loud, the power of that worry is less even just in doing that. And that's, that's kind of really helpful. So yeah, it works well.

Matt Edmundson

it does. I remember when we were first married, and I used to stress a lot about money. I mean, I know some people have written this. And I know Matt wrote this in the comments, I stressed a lot about money, cuz we didn't have any back then we had debts. That's what we had, we had debts, we had negative money. That's what we had. And one of the things that I did that I realised was very helpful to me was just actually to write down what the actual current financial situation was for us. Because when I wrote it down, I had it in very definite figures, it was in black and white, I could understand it Do you know what I mean? Whereas if I didn't write it down, then it was it was ideas in the back of my head that weren't concrete, and I'd worry about it more. And then I remember just writing on a piece of paper, and if I'd stress about it, I'd be like, right, I'm just gonna read that piece of paper. And then I'm gonna meditate and think about, you know, the promises of God in this situation.

Sally Burch

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, I like that idea. I mean, because that's, that's the whole point, really, isn't it? Matt? I think it's kind of it's about doing something practical. It's very sort of flippant to say, Oh, you know, don't worry about it. God's in control, it will be okay. That's a kind of a flippant thing that actually practically, although that might be true in a lot of ways. We need to kind of know how to deal with things, actually, practically, and talking to other people about them, writing them down, thinking them through praying about them. If you're someone that prays or asking somebody else to pray for you. Those are all really important things as well. I really liked the different takes on that in the in the little videos there. That was really helpful.

Matt Edmundson

They were really, really good. I liked how Sharon's has put it in the comments. Yes, I'm married Matt and his debts. Yeah, let's just pointed out it was made about debt into our marriage.

Sally Burch

You brought a lot to the marriage there Matt.

Matt Edmundson

I did. I didn't bring much. I just brought debts. That's what I brought.

Sally Burch

Yeah, I mean, money, money worries are a massive thing, aren't they, for all of us. And I think, you know, most of us have faced that at some point in their lives. And I I grew up in a family with not very much money at all, but I've always seen through my mum's kind of, through how she behaved as well, that kind of knowing that God's faithfulness was in that the times that we didn't have money, maybe a 10 pound note, you know, pushed under the bottom of the door, or through the letterbox or that kind of thing. So I've seen God's faithfulness in that. But yeah, that can be something that we really stress and worry about. And we need to get help in that situation. We need to tell somebody else we need to talk to other people and, and share those worries.

Matt Edmundson

We do. And here's the thing about money. The more you have, the bigger the stress you get. That's my general consensus on life. I used to have this job whereby I knew a lot of very wealthy people. And when I say wealthy, I mean, the times top 10 Rich List, most of them I had in my mobile phone. At one point, I flown on their private jets, I stayed in their private houses, you know, their ski chalets and had private chefs cook for me know, lots of stories, I could tell you, but I can tell you one thing that's true about all the billionaires that I know, they have much bigger stress to deal with an I do. And the amount of money they have kind of kind of was this inverse rule, it kind of made me think, actually, it'd be great to have money. But I don't think it's gonna solve everything. It certainly doesn't seem to solve everything for these guys. And that was one of the things that I learned from that. And actually, you know, there's a wonderful piece of scripture in Hebrews, Where the writer of Hebrews, we think it's Paul, we're not quite sure. We think it's Paul wrote. He said, Don't don't worry about money, be kind of content with what you've got, because God has said he'll never leave you nor forsake you. In other words, wherever you're at financially, whatever's going on God is with you. And more than that, he is your provider. But like you say, it's, it's it's very easy to say that it's very difficult when it's the middle of the night and you're stressed to the hilt, right?

Sally Burch

Yeah, absolutely. And I think probably, as well, with everything that's happened over the whole COVID situation with people perhaps, you know, losing their jobs or being furloughed or certainly, you know, think you've got your own business and things that money has maybe been an issue and if you need help, and if you are in debt, and you need help, and maybe getting in touch via our website, and we'll be able to point you in the direction where you can get help for that. So yes, there is trusting in God for for that, but also there is kind of practical help that we can give you as well.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, what do you think about this whole idea of God being angry? I mean, it's, it's not something we talk a lot about in the church, there's so much talk on God being angry, but why would you think?

Sally Burch

I think if we'd have kind of said this a few years ago, I would have really struggled with that idea because it doesn't, doesn't sit, you know, I just, it's the God of love. God is a God of love. And that's what really sort of speaks to me. And if you sort of, say, anger as well, I'd have always sort of thought, Oh, you know, I feel very uncomfortable with that. But actually, it's Sharon's point isn't, and this is what I've come to understand over the last few years that you you have to get angry about some things, you there has to be anger in the world. And I've talked about this with my kids at school, you know, that actually, anger can be a really positive thing. It can be a good thing as an amazing Disney film called inside out, don't know if you've seen that Matt? Yeah. And we're so you know, we kind of worry about those, what we would consider negative emotions. And we sort of think I don't want to talk about those don't acknowledge those. But actually, they play a really, really important part in our lives. And yeah, yeah, of course, we want to, we want to know that the God that we that we follow is angry about the things that we're angry about is angry about the injustice in the world is angry about, you know, even the news this week. There's the awful things that have happened in the news this week that God is angry about that as well. I think that's really important. And it's taken me a while to actually understand that and Sharon, just put it so brilliantly there.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, I think I think you're right. I think it's such a good response. A good way to think about it. Yes, God is angry, just as we get angry about various different things. And so yeah, wow. Wow. All all great stuff. So have you guys got any questions that we've not covered in the comments? I'm just going to scroll down here a little bit. We're going to come to Nicolas questions in just a second. So Matts pro here, re- more money, stress. I don't agree. Fair play. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is a black and white rule that more money equals more stress, because it can be again, I hope I'm not coming across as flippant here. And I think money is very important, because Jesus talked a lot about money talks about money more than any other topic. And actually, he has some very interesting things to say about money. And we do need it. We do need that provision. And he's on the case. And so do you know billionaires? Yes. Well, I did. I knew a few. I don't, I wouldn't say that. I know them now.

Sally Burch

You offended them all with his comments about their money.

Matt Edmundson

They're all stressed out, wasn't that bothered. There's a really, there's a really interesting, but I'll tell you this quick story. There's a guy I know. He's passed away now. And I loved him dearly. He was very kind to me, and very generous. And, and one day, he said to me, because when you've got that amount of money, there's a lot of people around you who who are what we call Yes, men, do you know what I mean? They say Yes, a lot. When you say something, you say Yes, a lot. And he said to me said, Matt, you don't seem or he called me Mattie. Mattie. You don't seem that bothered by my money. And I said to him, I said, Well, I won't tell you his name. But I said, I'm not I'm not that bothered about your money. And I'll tell you why. And he said, Why is that? I said, Well, you're gonna think I'm a little bit nuts. But the Bible says the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous. I said, You're the sinner. I'm righteous. It's all mine anyway. And we just we had a real laugh about this. And and we got like house on fire ever since. So? Yeah. He is lovely guy miss him a lot. Anyway.

Sally Burch

James put a question in there about what about when we feel angry with God? That's a really good question, isn't it?

Matt Edmundson

That's a topic in its own right, right there.

Sally Burch

Yeah, I think we need a whole kind of afternoon just to chat about that one. But I think just to kind of say, yeah, God can handle that. It's okay to be angry with God. I think that the things happen in our lives, things happen in the world. And you know, God can take that definitely. What do you think, Matt?

Matt Edmundson

I think it's a great answer. I think there are a lot of things which are confusing in the Christian faith. Like Travis's put here in the comments, like, Why doesn't God deal with the bad guys now? And it's like, Why are certain things happening? And we, and we get, and we can get angry about those kinds of things. And I think we can have questions towards God. And I think God's big enough to cope with them. And I think actually wrestling with those is super important. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're not like someone you know, you can say to me, some guy wrote in one of the comments, you know, why would you? Why would you wrestle with this whole idea of God being angry and loving? Why, are you a Christian? It's like, Well, I have to wrestle with these questions of bad stuff in the world, whether I'm a Christian or whether I don't I have, my belief system has it has to have an answer for this. Does that make sense? So yeah, I have to be able to understand why the world is evil, or why the world contains evil, irrespective of whether I'm a Christian or whether I'm not an AI I have to know that and understand that. So I think it is important to wrestle with these things, that they're not easy topics. They're not easy questions. And there's there's not always easy. You can't go. You can't tell me it's easy because Jesus in that garden was sweating blood. And this was the most righteous man. I mean, if anyone knew how to pray, it was Jesus. But, he was so stressed. He was sweating blood. So it's not easy, do you know what I mean? And it's kind of like, I get it. I totally get it. But it's good to wrestle with it.

Sally Burch

Yep I agree. Brilliant.

Matt Edmundson

That's the first time.