The Old Testament

   I am an Old Testament girl. I love the Old Testament. I always have. The majority (probably 80%) of my devotional time is spent in the Old Testament and almost all of my personal revelation is on passages in the Old Testament. This has been the case since I was a little girl, and as I have grown older I have become amazed at how many Christians don't love the Old Testament. They love the God of the New Testament, they love Jesus, but they read the Old Testament and see an angry God. They try and separate the God of the Old and the God of the New. But you can not separate the two, for they are the same God. If we start trying to pick and choose the sides of God we like and are ok with, we dethrone God and idolize our false ideas of who we think God should be. We start putting ourselves in place of God. We start setting ourselves up as god when we dictate what He can and cannot be. When we decide things like God can be loving, we will believe in that God, but God can't be angry, we don't believe in that God. God can be forgiving and merciful, we like that God. But no, God can't be a holy God that won't tolerate sin, we don't like that God. But they do not realize you cannot separate the two. God cannot be a forgiving God, unless He is a holy God who cannot tolerate sin. Why? Because if God isn't a holy God who cannot tolerate sin, there would have been no need for Him to die in our place so that He may forgive us and be merciful to us. There would be no need to forgive or way to be merciful to us.

   If you find yourself struggling to see a loving God in the Old Testament, here is what I would have you to do. Read the Old Testament (start with Ezekiel 16), not through the lens of an angry God or a God that enjoys suffering, rather through the eyes of a Holy, Jealous, Loving Husband, whose wife not only betrayed Him and became a prostitute but abused their precious children. Yet He wants nothing else but for her to come back to Him. Yea, begging, pleading with her at times to return to Him. And yet burning with Holy Jealousy for her and for the justice of their children. Through all this He promises to have her again, if only she shall return to Him with her whole heart. See a loving God yet? I do. The God of the New Testament who would die for us, is the same God that burns with passion in the Old. They are one and the same. Do not separate the two, for without the first you can not have the latter. Without knowing the first you can not understand the latter.