The Old Testament does not portray God as an uncaring dispenser of grim condemnation. Yes, he is holy, just, and unwavering in his commitment to punish sin, as he is in the New Testament. But the God of the Old Testament is also a God of love who offers a promise of hope, even toward his enemies. He is the “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6). Love is not a uniquely Christian thing; it is a biblical thing.
Love
The Old Testament enjoins love in many places. For instance, what Jesus will eventually call the greatest command is first given to Israel: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5). The second command that follows from the first comes from the Old Testament as well: “Love him [a foreigner living among you] as yourself” (Lev. 19:34).
And the pattern for how Israel should love is how God himself loves: “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19).
Since God loves his enemies, his people must do the same. Proverbs 24 commands, “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice” (v. 17).
And Proverbs 25 teaches, “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (v. 21).
The God of the Old Testament is a God of love.
Forbearance
When we consider the whole sweep of Old Testament history and observe God’s patience toward those who have declared themselves his enemies through disobedience, we see a God of unspeakable love and forbearance. He did not have to let human history continue after the fall in the garden. He did not have to persevere with the wayward nation of Israel. Yet we watch his grace, love, mercy, and patience on an epic scale—stretched out across the history of a people.
It almost looks as if God planned to use history to reveal his glory to his people. And in fact, he did.
Hope
Understanding the Old Testament, as I said, requires understanding its promise of hope. What hope? We have talked plenty about God’s commitment to holiness and the failure of his people to live up to the requirements of holiness. And we have considered God’s promise to punish the wicked (in Exodus 34). So what hope could sinners have?
Their hope was not in their history. The history of the Old Testament proved them (and us) to be moral and spiritual failures.
Nor was their hope finally in the sacrificial system. As the psalmist said, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,”1 at least not without something even more basic.
How then could the hope held out in Exodus 34:6–7 be true? How could God “forgive wickedness” and still “not leave the guilty unpunished”?
If the answer was not in the Old Testament people themselves or in their own history, it was in God and his promise, particularly in God’s promised person. As we have seen, blood must be shed in order to assuage the righteous wrath of God against sin. Justice demands that sin be paid for either by the guilty party himself or herself or by an innocent substitute who bears the suffering and death on behalf of the guilty party. Furthermore, the punishment of a substitute requires some sort of relation between the guilty one and the one being offered as the sacrifice. But where would a perfect substitute be found?
A Messiah
Sources from the first century suggest that messianic hope and expectation were prominent at the time of Jesus’ birth. People did not wonder if the Messiah would come. They took it for granted that their only hope lay with a specially anointed one of God—the Messiah. Why? The Old Testament is filled with the promise of a coming person. God’s people waited for the prophet God promised to Moses (Deut. 18:15–19). They waited for the king and, perhaps, the suffering servant (Isa. 9:6; 11:1–5; 53). They waited for the son of man coming on the clouds seen by Daniel (Dan. 7:13).
These promises point toward the answer to the Old Testament riddle. And these promises are the hope of the Old Testament. More than anything else, in fact, the Old Testament teaches us that these promises offer us our only hope.
The fulfillment of these hopes, however, would not come in the Old Testament, but in the new, which we turn to now.
1 Ps. 40:6. The psalmist, among other Old Testament writers, seemed to share the insight of the New Testament writer to the Hebrews, who wrote, “The law . . . can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb. 10:1–4).