The Old Testament contains a lot of death and killing: God wipes out humanity, the ground swallows people, God commands the Israelites to destroy nations. Some of the Bible’s accounts can sound pretty ruthless.
In the New Testament, we don’t see this. It’s not that the New Testament subject matter is any less serious—Jesus speaks in no uncertain terms about the gravity of sin and its eternal consequences—but we don’t see God taking immediate action in the same way.
While this striking difference can be a curiosity for Christians, it’s a spiritual deal breaker for many skeptics. They often claim that the God of the Old Testament is downright evil and can’t possibly be reconciled with the more “loving” God portrayed in the New Testament. A morally good God, they say, would never act in the ways the Old Testament says, so the Bible must be fiction.
How can we help our kids navigate such claims? While much could be said, we’ll focus on one particularly important subject: how what we learned about God’s justness can help us make sense of his supposed harshness in the Old Testament.
Context for Understanding God in the Old Testament
The most important starting point for this discussion is the fact that God’s character is presented in a consistent way throughout Scripture. If we look back at chapters 13, 14, and 15, we’ll see verses in both the Old and the New Testament that speak to every one of God’s attributes. If we think God seems different in the Old and New Testaments, it’s not because God actually changed. This, of course, doesn’t say anything about whether the God of the Bible is evil, but it does focus our discussion on his actions rather than on his supposed character change.
Once we know God is just (see chap. 15) and that his justness has never changed, the question becomes whether his actions in the Old Testament can reasonably be seen as an outworking of that justness or if they’re something else altogether. To answer that question, we can look at passages to see if the Bible specifies that God’s actions were, indeed, a response to sin.
That said, we have to be realistic about how much we can understand. We can reasonably establish whether God’s actions were a judgment, but we can’t necessarily establish God’s reasons for the timing, method, or extent of his judgment. We may sometimes think God’s judgment seems extreme, but we can’t possibly have his full perspective. If we know that (1) he’s perfectly just and (2) he was acting in response to sin, it follows that he must have acted rightly. With this in mind, let’s look at five commonly questioned passages.
Five Old Testament Passages Often Questioned
1. Noah’s Great Flood
In Genesis 1:31, God looked upon his creation and said it was “very good.” By Genesis 6, however, we read that the Earth had become terrible: the human race was wicked (v. 5); the thoughts of the human heart were all evil, all the time (v. 5); the Earth was filled with violence (v. 11); and all the people on Earth had “corrupted their ways” (v. 12).
The Bible identifies just one righteous man among all: Noah. In response to humanity’s wickedness, God sent a great flood, but first he provided a way for Noah to be saved. He told him to build an ark, onto which Noah could take his family and all the animals that God commanded. God eventually flooded the Earth, destroying “every living thing” (Gen. 7:21) except those on Noah’s ark.1
In this first passage, we can clearly see that the flood was God’s response to sin—a case of God’s judgment on his wicked creation.
2. The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
In Genesis 18:20–33, the Lord told Abraham that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had sinned exceedingly. Judgment was near. Abraham pleaded with God for mercy on Sodom and Gomorrah, however, because that’s where his nephew Lot and Lot’s family lived. He asked God, “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? . . . Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (vv. 23–25). The Lord replied that he would spare the entire area if there were fifty righteous people. Abraham then asked what would happen if there were only forty-five righteous people. Again, the Lord said he would spare the area. Abraham proceeded to ask what would happen if only forty, thirty, twenty, or ten righteous people were found. Each time, the Lord said he would spare Sodom and Gomorrah. Ultimately, God saved Lot and his family, then “overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities” (Gen. 19:25).
There’s no doubt from this account that God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was a response to sin—a case of God’s judgment.
After Joseph’s family moved to Egypt to escape famine, their descendants became “so numerous that the land was filled with them” (Exod. 1:7). Their increasing numbers concerned the Egyptian king, so he forced them into harsh slavery to prevent them from gaining power. The Egyptians made their lives “bitter” and worked them “ruthlessly” (Exod. 1:14). Pharaoh even ordered all Israelite male infants to be thrown into the Nile River (Exod. 1:22).
God responded to this sinful oppression of his people by commanding Moses and Aaron to confront Pharaoh and to tell him to let the Israelites go. Pharaoh repeatedly refused to release them, so God sent ten plagues upon Egypt. The plagues culminated in the killing of every firstborn Egyptian child (Exod. 11:4–6). In response, Pharaoh finally let the Israelites go.
Once again, it’s clear that God sent the plagues as a judgment on the nation of Egypt in response to sin.
4. The Destruction of the Canaanites
In Genesis 12:1–3, God promised Abraham that he would bless all the families of the Earth through his descendants. As a result, Abraham was to become the ancestral father of God’s chosen people, the Israelites, and ultimately of Jesus himself. Part of this blessing included the Israelites’ eventual inheritance of the land of Canaan (Gen. 15:18–21).
When the time came for the Israelites to inherit the land, it was occupied by the Canaanite people, who were extremely depraved—guilty of multiple abominations, including child sacrifice, bestiality, idolatry, witchcraft, and sorcery (Lev. 18:20–30; Deut. 18:9–14). God didn’t want the Israelites to settle among a wicked people. He wanted the Israelites to be physically, morally, and theologically set apart so they would be in a position to carry his message forward hundreds of years—to the time of the Savior. Otherwise, Israel could be permanently led astray.
The time for fulfillment of God’s land promise to Abraham ultimately converged with the time when God was ready to execute judgment upon that land’s inhabitants. He commanded the Israelites to “completely destroy them” (Deut. 20:17).
When we understand God’s command in view of history, we see he wasn’t ordering an indiscriminate massacre. He was executing a judgment on the Canaanites’ sinfulness.2
5. The Destruction of the Amalekites
The Amalekites repeatedly fought the Israelites. They first attacked them at Rephidim (Exod. 17:8), an attack recounted in Deuteronomy 25:17–19:
Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the LORD your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.
The Amalekites later battled the Israelites on multiple occasions by joining forces with the Canaanites (Num. 14:45), the Moabites (Judg. 3:13), and the Midianites (Judg. 6:3). Eventually, God commanded King Saul to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. . . . Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Sam. 15:3). The Amalekites who escaped King Saul’s attacks harassed the Israelites for hundreds of years.
Yet again, God’s command to destroy a people group did not pop up out of nowhere. The context was the Amalekites’ hatred for the Israelites and their attacks over hundreds of years. Their sinfulness eventually brought God’s judgment upon them.
What we’ve seen from this quick overview is that God’s judgment was the background for each of these biblical passages that skeptics find so questionable. Again, we can’t necessarily explain the timing, method, or extent of his judgment, but we don’t have the full perspective of God.
As a final note, while we can morally justify God’s actions in the Old Testament, that alone doesn’t tell us why we don’t continue to see such actions in the New Testament. The answer for the change largely lies in John 3:17: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” Jesus ushered in a new period of salvation and forgiveness of sins for those who accept it. We now await God’s final act of judgment, which will occur at the end of time.
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