Have you ever read through a series of novels or watched a series of films, and noticed how much the main character changes over time?
Think about Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter. While certain core aspects of their character – honesty, love, resilience, courage – might remain consistent throughout, it’s obvious that they grow and develop as the series or trilogy goes on.
Luke goes from a bored thrill-seeking farm boy to a rash untrained Jedi apprentice to a wise compassionate Jedi Knight who saves the galaxy and redeems his own father.
Frodo goes from a naive stay-at-home young hobbit to a somewhat unprepared adventurer to a hero whose willpower is ALMOST strong enough to destroy unaided the One Ring.
Harry goes from a downtrodden orphan to a courageous defender of his friends and his principles to a hero who’s willing to die to save those he loves.
It’s the hero’s journey, a staple of literature for centuries at least. The nobody who faces hardship and horror to become a legend.
We almost expect to see it. To a certain extent, it’s true of Jesus: the humble backwater town carpenter with both royal and divine origin, who learned obedience from the hardships of life and eventually died giving everyone on earth the chance to be saved from eternal death.
It is not true, however, of God himself.
Are you sure about that?
People who are familiar with the Bible’s narrative might point out that God does appear to behave differently as it progresses.
One example might be the idea that in the Old Testament, God seems to be a god of wrath and judgement, whereas in the New Testament, he’s a god of mercy and love.
Some people in and around the early church even went to the extent of suggesting that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were not in fact the same being. The former was an incompetent demi-god who constantly misunderstood and made a mess of things, while the latter is the true God.
Even today you can encounter people who simply ignore the Old Testament’s presentation of God, and sometimes even large portions of the New’s, claiming only to be interested in what Jesus said.
To some people, the idea of a god of anger and judgement is anathema. God is love – accepting, tolerant and affirming.
This is of course an entirely secular view, not a Biblical one.
Yet for such people, anything in the Biblical text which goes against that image of God is simply rejected.
Obviously not everybody takes it that far. Some people – perhaps without even realising it – assume that God changes his ways at different times. For example, by the time Jesus arrives on the scene at the beginning of the New Testament, God seems much more willing to forgive and accept than he ever was before.
Whereas in the Old Testament God gave his people the Law of Moses, which laid down incredibly strict rules about almost every aspect of life, with severe punishments for breaking some of them, including the death penalty for such seemingly trivial offences as working on the Sabbath day, insulting one’s parents, sex outside marriage or worshipping gods other than Yahweh.
In the New Testament, by contrast, this law was no longer required. Jesus obeyed it perfectly, rendering it fulfilled, so that God’s people are no longer bound by it. Instead we look to Jesus’ teaching and example for the yardstick by which to live our lives, and we can have confidence that failure will not mean immediate death but rather an opportunity to repent and be forgiven.
Why did God change his approach? Why was his attitude to humans different when Jesus appeared?
Did he really change? Or did we change?
Perhaps the reason God’s approach seems to develop from one form to another throughout the Biblical narrative is not because he was growing and evolving, but because we were. As humanity’s experiences with and knowledge of God grew over the centuries, so too did our ability to understand things from God’s point of view.
The apostles wrote that Christians who are spiritually immature can only be fed milk (like babies) while those who have learned of God and have sufficient maturity can be given meat (like adults). See for example 1 Corinthians 3:2 and Hebrews 5:11-14.
Perhaps this same principle can be applied to God’s people throughout the Old Testament as well. Nothing in the Old Testament was ever intended to be God’s final word on a matter
For example, Paul’s letters teach that the Old Testament law was never what saved people, no matter how hard they tried to keep it. You can never earn God’s love or eternal life by successfully keeping the rules. The purpose of that law was to teach people that they were sinners who couldn’t save themselves and whose only hope lay in God’s forgiveness.
Paul described the law as a ‘tutor’ or ‘schoolmaster’ to bring them to Jesus, although neither of those words fully captures what he was trying to get across. It’s more likely he meant a family servant whose job it was to ensure the children got to school and didn’t slack off while they were there.
What I’m going to suggest is that throughout the Bible narrative, God presented himself and his intentions in a way that people at the time would understand.
That’s why the earlier parts of the Old Testament don’t explicitly say God is the only God who exists. The people who first read it just weren’t ready to grasp that concept. Gods were everywhere. Every aspect of the natural world had a god who was in control of it. They only understood Yahweh as the most powerful of all the gods.
That’s why, for example, the ten plagues of Egypt were presented as a fight between Yahweh God of Israel and the gods of the Egyptian pantheon, including Pharaoh himself.
At the time the crucial detail was not whether these other gods existed, but simply that Yahweh had complete and total control over the things that were supposedly their domain.
The idea of true monotheism, of God being the ONLY god in existence, may not have been fully grasped until the exile in Babylon, towards the end of the Old Testament narrative.
Another example would be the way the New Testament presents physical disabilities and mental illnesses (i.e. maladies which had no obvious physical explanation) as if they were caused by demons or unclean spirits residing within the mind or body of the sufferer. This was what people at the time believed and so the New Testament writers didn’t see the need to correct it. Why? Because what really mattered was getting across that Jesus had complete and total power over all of these ailments, regardless of their cause.
And so, if God seems within the pages of the Old Testament to be very different from how he appears in the New Testament (or elsewhere in the Old), this may be the reason why. When we read through the Bible narrative we’re effectively seeing a series of snapshots of God’s most important interactions with his people. If he looks different between the snapshots, it’s not because he changed. It’s because their understanding had grown since the last one was taken.
As an analogy, think about the way you saw your parents when you were 5 or 6 years old. Now compare it with the way you saw them when you were 25 or 26 years old (if you’ve got that far!). Chances are the difference between the two is night and day. And while your parents no doubt changed somewhat in those 20 years, they almost certainly didn’t change nearly as much as you did.
The way you see your parents as a child will be different from how you see them as a teen, and different again from how you see them as a young adult. And different yet again from how you see them when you become a parent yourself. And the way your parents present themselves towards you will likewise change as you get older and become more capable of understanding things from their perspective.
Why mightn’t the same be true of God?
Implications
This is something to keep in mind when considering how to preach – in other words, how to present God to the society or culture in which you live. The way you preach should always be tailored to the people to whom you’re speaking.
Do they already know something about God? Have they read the Bible before? Do they already hold to a different faith?
What are their biggest questions or barriers to faith? How ready are they to hear the whole truth of God’s message? Or are they only able to digest the simplest things at first? If so, what are those simplest things, and what should be left until they’re ready?
Another question to consider is this: how ready are you to present God in a way that goes against expected cultural norms wherever you are?
For example, what Biblical teachings might get you in trouble? Same sex relationships? Refusal to engage in military service? Simply being a Christian at all?
There’s always a temptation to change the message to suit what the surrounding culture wants to hear. Western culture in particular expects Christian teaching to change and adapt to suit secular values.
Again the question is: how do we present the gospel such that it remains faithful to God’s principles but also so that it’s able to meet people where they are and then guide them into deeper understanding as and when they’re willing and able to do so?
God doesn’t change. His message doesn’t change. But the way in which we guide each individual person to it will almost certainly involve a different starting place and a different way of navigating those eternal truths until they are sufficiently grasped.
Nihilist to Christian 