What is the Orthodox teaching on how to reconcile the judgemental God of the Old Testament to forgiving God in the person of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.
Please provide some links to articles, or better yet, some books to purchase.
Thanks!
God in the Bible
God in the Bible
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They say that I am bad news. They say "Stay Away."
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Seraphim Reeves
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As far as articles go, I'd recommend reading the following if you have not already...
The River of Fire by Dr.Alexandre Kalimiros
Does God do things in the Old Testament which appear harsh? Yes...but to imagine this is somehow different than the New Testament, I think, requires an incomplete reading of the Bible. According to the Acts of the Apostles, God strikes dead a couple who lied to St.Peter about their contribution to the Church (the earliest Christians living in a quasi-monastic community, in which everything was made common property.) In the Apocalypse, we read about great chastisements which will come upon the world in the last days. According to the Gospels, the devestation which came upon the Jews and Jerusalem (in 70 A.D. at the hands of the Romans), was also by the leave of God, a sentence against their (the Jews) infidelity...that to me doesn't sound very different than what happened back in the "Old Testament days" when God allowed pagan nations to have victories over the Jews (including expelling them from the Holy Land) for similar reasons.
Of course pointing this out only demonstrates that the portrayal of God in the Old Testament is really not contradictory (or particularly different) than what one finds in the New Testament. However, showing this "sameness" may only cause someone to conclude "ok, well I guess that means the 'God of both Testaments' is cruel and harsh".
Two things should be kept in mind though...
1) There is no equivelence between God taking a life, and your or I taking a life - they are not ours to begin with, yet all belongs to God.
2) God does things for reasons which are not always clear...where we may perceive cruelty or tragedy, there actually may be an incredible mercy we cannot see. For example, let's say a pious little boy drowns. This may seem incredibly unfair, even cruel...but what if God knew that this man child, should he grow to adulthood, would have encountered temptations which he (for whatever reason) would have chosen to go along with, and end up damning his soul? If such were the case, then it is not an injustice at all, but an incredible act of generosity on God's part (considering that the later evil would have been freely chosen by this soul when he got older) to allow for this boy to pass away in his youth, while his heart is still clean and his love for God and the Divine Services is in tact. Of course, we never know any of these things when tragedy strikes - this is why we have faith that God is good, and all happens the best way it can (given human free will.)
Further thoughts...
When I looked up the word translated "justice" in the King James version of the Bible, using Strong's Concordance, I discovered it's a translation of the Hebrew word tsedaqah (Strong's #06666), which has an "active" meaning lost in the English. It involves the doing of something, in particular, righteousness. The root of tsedaqah is tsadaq (Strong's #06663) which is (interestingly enough) the Jews still use to denote a "saint" (tsadaq), refering to the state of "being righteous."
The "justice" which Christ came to fulfill for our salvation, is not the placating of an angry deity, but the "fulfillment of all righteousness" - He came to be a perfectly just, righteous man, where we have shown only incredible failure. According to the book of Genesis, it is the first sin which begat our current state - the physical flows from the spiritual. Fittingly, the perfect righteousness of a man then, could overcome death. The Biblical vision is one which takes for granted that the spiritual is fundamental to, and if possible "more real", than what one perceives sensually. This is why rather than a sign of shame, the Cross is a sign of victory - the symbol of a death freely accepted which was unable to imprison, such as it does to the rest of us if we were to lean upon our own strength.
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Justin Kissel
Greetings, Tom. Sometimes (when reading the Old Testament, and particularly the first five books) I too have difficulties. Normally what I do in those situations is go and review Revelation, which is as vengeful and wrath-filled as any book in the Bible. Then, if that doesn't work, I go to passages in the Gospel where Jesus condemns entire cities and says they will have a worse condemnation than even cities like Sodom. This can be followed by going to passages such as when Ananias and Sapphira were killed for lying. And if even that doesn't work, I read the holy Fathers and the Church until I get over it, since the fathers are the best interpreters of Scripture and can always keep us on the royal path. The books or articles I would suggest, then, are the ones in which the early Christians fought against the Marcionite heresy. Surely there relevant information in such sources. Here is a good place to start. 