What the Old Testament Means to Us. . No. 10

WHAT IS GOD LIKE?

There is one passage in the Old Testament that says more about the nature of God than most any other passage in all the Bible: “The Lord, the Lord God, is merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty” (Ex. 34:6-7).

That the authors of the OT caught this vision of God is evident in the fact that this passage is quoted ten times in other parts of the OT. The Hebrews were slow coming to such a lofty view of God as a loving, merciful, forgiving being full of goodness and truth. That a lower view of God competed with this higher view is seen in what the same passage goes on to say, which tends to mar the higher view: “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”

Here in America we have some states that are passing laws holding parents accountable for the ill deeds of their children. It is a reasonable point of view. But our citizenry would not tolerate the idea of punishing children for the sins of their parents. And yet the God of the OT, at certain stages in Hebrew history, is depicted as one who perpetrates such injustice by taking vengeance on the children for the sins of their parents, even to the fourth generation. We can only conclude, in the light of our greater revelation, that the real God of heaven that we know in the person of Jesus Christ is not that kind of God. He does not punish innocent people!

But the problem of a brutal, unjust God goes deeper than that. It is difficult for the Christian to see how the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ would will to kill the firstborn of every Egyptian household (Ex. 11:4-6), or how He would stalk Moses, seeking to kill him, only to be appeased when the bloody foreskin of Moses’ son was cast before him (Ex. 4:24-16). It also appears out of character that God would want the innocent women and children of Israel’s enemies murdered, including “infant and nursing child”, as in the instance of the Amalekites (1 Sam. 15:3). In this tribal, primitive view God is further depicted as “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8) and as bartering with Abraham, who like a good Jew bargains with God over the number it will take to spare Sodom from destruction (Gen. 18:23-32).

In the New Testament we are exposed to the God who so loves the world that He gives His own son to die for our sins, and in the Cross we see the suffering love of God. It isn’t in the person of Christ that God becomes that kind of God, but in Christ the God of heaven is revealing the kind of God He has always been. God was the same loving God in the OT that He was at the Cross. It was not yet the time for Him to reveal Himself as such, even if now and again in the OT we have brief glimpses of the God who will be fully revealed in Christ. The passage we referred to at the outset gets close to the God of the Cross: He is gracious, longsuffering, abounding in goodness.

In some of the prophets we get more than a glimpse of this God of suffering love. Hosea was such a prophet, and that may be why he was quoted again and again by our Lord in the New Testament. There was one great truth in Hosea, all in a single line, that Jesus urged the Pharisees to “Go and learn what this means” (Mt. 9:13). He quotes the same line again in Mt. 12:7, indicating that if the Pharisees knew only that one great truth theirs would be a different religion. The one line was “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” That single line, taken from Hosea 6:6, tells us in capsule form what God is like. It is not only one of the great lines in the OT but of all the Bible. Mercy is what God wants!

And what a truth it is! It is a good example of how one simple but profound truth, stated in a few words, can change a person’s life. The heart of almost all religious systems is sacrifice. Modern Christianity is no exception. We presume that what God wants is our submission to this regulation and to that ordinance. And so we have our rituals and ceremonies, doing this and doing that, whether genuflections, lighting candles, prayers, readings, and all the rest. And all such things may well have their place. But this is not really what God wants. He wants us to show mercy, for in this way we are like our Creator, who is the God of mercy. While there is a place for sacrifice in God’s order, the sacrifice must come from a life full of mercy. Another prophet gave us another great one-liner, which says the same thing: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

That one line from the OT tells us what God is like. He desires mercy! What a liberating truth! If that is what God loves and desires, is that not what we should tender Him, a life committed to showing mercy?

The prophet Hosea does not give us the litany of gloom and doom of a wicked people found in some other prophetic literature. This prophet sounds a new note of tender compassion and forgiveness of a wayward people. The prophet had a disastrous marriage, with his wife becoming a harlot. While the prophet threatened his wife for her unfaithfulness, he could not keep from loving her. He forgave her and took her back. God is like that, Hosea is saying, in that He keeps on forgiving His people who “play the harlot” in their idolatry.

Hosea gives us a touching scene of what God is like in 2:19-20: “I will betroth you to me forever; yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy. I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.” Here Israel is depicted as the Bride of God, and God is the husband of an erring wife. In 2:16 the prophet even says that the people were no longer to call God their Master but “My Husband.” Since Hosea was a favorite part of Scripture to Jesus, he must have absorbed these words and made them part of his own view of what God is like. This was passed on to the church, which in the NT is referred to as the Bride of Christ. The church has long sung that great line, “From heaven he came and sought her to be His holy bride.” It is noteworthy that this concept goes back to an eighth-century prophet of Israel.

Hosea goes on to change his metaphor and picture God as a loving father who cannot give up His son (into captivity) even when for the sake of discipline He has to do so. The father’s tenderness and compassion is as gripping as anywhere in the Bible. He loved Israel when he was but a child and called him out of Egypt (11:1). He taught him to walk, taking him by His arms, and He healed him (11:2). He drew him with gentle cords and with hands of love, like a child being held close by cord and halter (11:4).

What the prophet says next bears on the incredible, for he pictures God as the caring father who “stooped and fed” His hungry child. The great God of heaven, whom the people called the Most fligh, stoops to help His people who are nonetheless unfaithful. Even when they sacrifice to false gods, He stoops down to nourish them!

We have the God of suffering love that we see in the Cross when Hosea goes on to describe God as loving his people so much that He can’t bear to punish them even when He must. “How can I give you up, how can I turn you over?,” God says in His trauma, “My heart churns within Me, My sympathy is stirred” (11:6)

Over and again God is depicted in the OT as having consummate love for His people, as much so as in the NT, apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ himself, who came as the very personification of God’s love. But in the OT God is depicted as a broken hearted father (Is. 1:2), as a consoling mother (Is. 66:13), as an attentive shepherd (Ps. 23). There are still other rich metaphors that tell what God is like: a rock (Dt. 34:2), a protector (Gen. 31:49), a help (Ps. 115:9), a shade (Ps. 121:5), a fountain (Jer. 2:13), dew (Hos. 14:5), light (Ps. 27:1), shield (Gen 15:1), king (Ps. 44:4).

There is clearly a moral progression in Israel’s understanding of God. It is not, of course, that God changed and became more moral and just (even merciful) through the centuries. The Hebrews were first a nomadic tribe with very primitive mores. God had to deal with them in their own context. It is understandable that they would come to view “the God of our fathers” as in competition with the gods of their neighbors and enemies. Other nations had a priesthood and offered sacrifices to their gods, so the Hebrews had a priesthood and offered sacrifices to Yahweh. They practiced circumcision and the Hebrews practiced circumcision. They had washings (baptism) the Hebrews had washings.

But in all these things God was revealing His true nature, so that in time a higher view of God developed. It is a long way from a God who strikes down Uzzah for a false move and the God of the prophet Hosea who bends down from heaven to show mercy to a people equally as sinful as Uzzah. God has always been the same loving, forgiving God that we see in the suffering Christ on the Cross. But a people must first go through kindergarten and the grades before they are ready for college. If Moses saw the back of God, when God placed His hands over his eyes as He passed before Him (Ex 33:22-23), Isaiah saw the Lord in the temple “high and lifted. up” (Is. 6:1). To Moses God was like a friend, to Isaiah He was “the King, the Lord of hosts.”

Alexander Campbell liked to illustrate this progression and the attending dispensations in terms of ever-increasing light. First there was only starlight, the age of the patriarchs, but still there was enough light that the likes of Enoch could walk with God. With more revelation came the Mosaic dispensation, which Campbell likened to moonlight, during which time God schools His people for greater things. This age was also the age of the prophets through whom God reveals Himself as never before, as in Isaiah who tells of greater light yet to come.

At the close of the Mosaic and prophetic age was the voice of Malachi who tells of the coming harbinger in the spirit of Elijah who will prepare the way for the Lord. That prophet, standing between the dispensations, speaks of “The Sun of Righteous-ness will rise with healing in its wings, and they shall go forth like calves let out of the stall, happy and free.” So moonlight gives way to twilight in the coming of John the Baptist who tells of the approaching kingdom of God. And at last the sunlight age in the coming of him who is the light of the world, “the Sun of Righteousness.”

So, that is what God is like, Light, but before there can be the full-orbed glory of the sun there must be only the flickering of distant stars. Moses and the prophets brought more light, moon light. With John, who staggered in the presence of One whose shoes he was not worthy to stoop down and untie, came twilight—“The kingdom of God is at hand.” The Sun of Righteousness was rising in the distant eastern hills.

Adam heard God walking in the garden. Jacob wrestled with Him all night. Elijah heard him in a still small voice. The Israelites saw him in a pillar of fire. Isaiah saw His glory in the temple. But at last the light penetrated the darkness as never before and the darkness could not apprehend it. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,” (Jn. 1:14) was the testimony that pointed to the full measure of light.

Jesus Christ, the light of the world, is what God is like, and that light began to shine, first dimly and then with increasing luminosity, in the Old Testament.—the Editor

All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ—David Livingstone