Currently, I find myself living in two biblical worlds. Scriptures one puts me decidedly in the Old Testament while Scriptures three flips the page and throws me into the New Testament causing me to consider the parallelisms and divergences of these two halves of Holy writing we call our Bible. I would like to bring to attention the character of God in the Old in comparison with the character of God in the New.
The God we read in Genesis and Exodus is a decidedly different character than that of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the Old Testament we meet a deity surrounded by mystery. It seems as if Old Testament God has a bit of a problem with violence and thus a problem relating to his creation on a human level. When we read of this God I can not help but think that the God we worship today must not be the same guy...or at least if it is he got some serious counseling in the middle ages. The God of the Old Testament invokes fear and awe. One can not look upon his face or bear to be in his presence. The world of this God is inhabited by giants, mysterious appearances of food, disappearances of the pious, slavery, fire raining down for the sky, and water wiping out the world. Who wouldn't be afraid?
But then I go to the Gospel and I read of God incarnate. Though Jesus is mysterious, powerful, and a little bit frightening he is also a man. A man that can relate to the plight of humanity in a way that the God of Noah, Moses, and Abraham could not because this time around God didn't just make humans...he was human. He had friends and relatives. He slept, ate, and wept. He was that guy from Nazareth who knew how to make chairs. This all elementary stuff but reading the Old and New Testaments parallel has brought to light the necessity and outright brilliance of the incarnation.
While we tend to fear the God of Old and revere the God of the New I say we should remember that they are one in the same...both deserving of love...and fear.
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