For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
– John 1:16-17
At our church, we have been going through a sermon series which address difficult questions posed by our congregation. People offered their questions, and then the most popular were collected to be discussed in Sunday worship.
One of the questions was “why is the God in the Old Testament so different from God in the New Testament?” It’s a pretty common question, even as far back as the very beginning of Christianity.
People read the thousand plus years of Jewish history, poetry, and theology contained in the Old Testament taking away a message of judgment and fear. People are sinful, God is angry, and the only way to avoid destruction was to appease God with animal sacrifice.
Meanwhile. they skip over the predictions of judgment and future violence contained in the New Testament auguring that Jesus’ loving sacrifice appease God’s anger once in for all, so no more animals have to die.
One of the fallacies that supports this view is that the people of the ancient Judaism believed they could achieve God’s forgiveness and salvation by obeying the commands of the Law. Following this line of thinking, Jews of the Old Testament believed forgiveness from God is a mechanistic process by which animal sacrifice guaranteed forgiveness when the Law was transgressed. Thus, in the OT people were made righteous through countless animal sacrifices and in the NT people were made righteous by Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice if only a person has faith in him.
One problem with this theory is that it assumes that God is vengeful and full of wrath while Jesus is a gentle sheep or cares for us. Another problem is that it assumes that in the past God forgave people because they followed the law, but now God forgives people because they have faith. These two ideas not only muddy the consistency between God in the OT and God in the NT, but also split the character of the Godhead divorcing Jesus from God.
The Law was never meant as a mechanistic means of forgiveness for Jewish people. People did not believe that preforming sacrifices and offering prayers made them righteous. Rather, these laws made them ritualistically clean and able to be a part of the community. The ancient Jew who tried to achieve righteousness through his or her own efforts by obeying the Law without having faith in God was considered a self-righteous fool. Rather, the purpose of the Law (and Jesus’ amplification of it) is to show us how far we have fallen into sin and to motivate us to throw ourselves on God’s mercy.
Jewish people The God in the OT operated through Grace just as much as God in the NT. Which is why I love this verse from John 1. We, as God’s people, have received “grace upon grace.” That is the Grace was given by God in the Old Testament and by God in the New Testament. That is the Grace which comes to us because of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. A Grace which is extended by the Holy Spirit to all who accept regardless of circumstance or context.
Our God is a God of Grace for all people.
Kena Hawkins Newkirk 