Warrior or Teddy Bear - Reconciling the God of the Old and New Testaments.

What are the aspects of God’s nature that you struggle with the most? And how does that make you feel?

I confess I tend to be sceptical when anyone says that they have never struggled to get their head around the great I am . If we are really honest I suspect even the most Spirit-filled Christians have are likely to have wrestled with some aspect of God as revealed in the Bible.

One of the things that many of us struggle with, for example, is reconciling the character of God as described in the Old and the New Testaments.

I remember my grandfather telling me about his upbringing in the Welsh non-conformist church in Llanelli. He was completely terrified as a youngster by the fire and brimstone preacher who spoke eloquently and passionately about the wrath of God as described in lurid detail in the Old Testament. The God he grew up with was one who was quick to anger, jealous and would punish the sins of a people down through many generations.

This was the God who destroyed his creation with a great flood, who ordered the extermination of the people of Canaan and banished his chosen people into exile and slavery. The God whose sense of justice was sometimes hard to swallow.

In the 21st century, we seem to have gone to the opposite extreme and prefer to focus almost exclusively on the God of the New Testament who loved us so much he gave his only son to die for us. There is nothing wrong with this – we are told God IS love - but we have to beware of turning God into some kind of celestial teddy bear, all warm and fuzzy!

I have been to services in some churches that are more like therapy sessions than a time for worshipping the Almighty I am, the Alpha and the Omega.

Admittedly, the lectionary tends to steer away from some of the gorier episodes of the Old Testament. I am very grateful that I have never had to preach on 1 Samuel 15:3 in which God tells Saul: ‘Now go and attack the Amalekites and totally destroy them and all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

It can be quite hard to reconcile this terrifying and apparently genocidal deity with the God who seeks to shelter his under his wing. In fact it is sometimes tempting to sometimes think of the Old Testament God and the New Testament God – almost as if they are separate divine entities; an Old Testament God who seemed to be rather inexplicably blood thirsty in his fearsome Majesty, and a warmer and more benign New Testament God.

However it is in the person of Jesus that these two faces of God are reconciled. Jesus was the incarnation of God’s boundless love and mercy, but the Victorians – did a great disservice to us in the way they portrayed and thought about Jesus Christ – as expressed in some of our hymns today. Jesus was meek but he was not mild. He was gentle but we also know that he was capable of great emotions; great love but also grief and anger which he expressed so memorably when the turned over the tables in the temple in the week before his death.

And we have to remember that he was considered such a threat to the established order that his own people colluded with their enemy occupying power to ensure that he be executed in the most terrible way.

This was not a mild man or deity.

This division in our thinking between this terrifying wrathful God and the Celestial Care Bear God is also a misunderstanding of Jesus’ mission – something Jesus himself made very clear when he said to his disciples. That ‘he did not come to replace the Law but to fulfil it,’ and this unbroken narrative plays out in Jesus last week’s on earth.

One of the most decisive moments of reconciliation is Jesus’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor. In the gospel of Luke we are told that as Jesus stood on the top of the mountain two men came and spoke to him: Moses who represented the law handed down to the Israelites by God on another mountain top on the Sinai desert and Elijah who represented the time of the prophets and the prophecy that God so loved the world that he would give his only son to die for us.

Together they talk about Jesus’s ‘departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem’ (v. 9:31) – his terrible death by crucifixion. But the word used for ‘departure’ in Greek is exodus, the word which is used to refer to great act of God’s deliverance, when he freed his people from foreign slavery and oppression in Egypt, leading them miraculously to safety through his instrument Moses – reminding us of God’s ongoing deliverance achieved throughout history. And as the light of God shines on the mountain top through Jesus, we are reminded of the light that shone from the face of Moses after he had communed with God on the mountain top in Sinai.

What this gathering on the peak, represents is the various stages of God’s unbroken meta narrative as recorded in both the Old and New Testaments. And it is the person of Christ that our understanding of God of the Old Testament and the New Testaments come together.

Jesus said that whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but have the light of life. This does not mean that we will always fully comprehend his ways. If the disciples sometimes struggled to grasp his meaning what hope do we have of full understanding Christ?

We may also not always like his ways which were sometimes hard; there may be times when we would prefer that our deeds remain in darkness and fear God’s light shining on them. And we may still have many questions – some of which may never be answered in this lifetime, but we, like the disciples are children of the light. We are called to walk in the light and to be God’s light in the world.

We will never be able to do this based on our own inadequate understanding of God – whose nature will always exceed our ability to completely comprehend, in this life at least. The only way we can do this is by being in close and continual relationship with God in Christ.

We have to come to him on our own mountain tops. We have to commune with him, to talk to him as a friend as Moses did, to be with him as Peter, James and John were. And to do this again and again and again in prayer if we are to abide in his light, and he in us. And then and only then can we mere mortals too reflect his true glory and be his light in the world.

Kate Nicholas’s best-selling memoir Sea Changed (shortlisted as Christian Biography of the Year 2017) and her latest book Sea Changed: A Companion Guide – Living a Transformed Life are available at Christian bookstores and Waterstones throughout the UK and online at eden.co.uk and Amazon worldwide. Her recent TV series Living a Transformed Life can be viewed on demand on www.tbnuk.org or at www.katenicholas.co.uk.