Did God change between the Old and the New Testaments?Audio

Related PostsGod and the CanaanitesA sermon which discusses what the "greatest good" is (among other things) TranscriptDid God change between the Old and the New Testaments? Or perhaps said differently, why was God so angry in the Old Testament and why is he so loving in the New? This question has troubled many a person for a long time. In fact, long throughout history there have been individuals who said there was actually a different God described in the Old Testament and a different God described in the New. Marcion, who lived in the second century may have been the first to actually put forth this idea that the God of the Old and the New Testaments are different.How should we respond? I don’t want to present too compelling of a case that glosses over some important details, so I'm actually going to, hopefully, make the problem seem more defined than it already is and perhaps even seem a little worse, though that’s not my end goal. I think God is actually more angry/wrathful in the New Testament, so to speak, than people realize. I think God is actually more loving in the Old Testament than people realize.Sometimes what's behind this question is that we look at the Old Testament, which is about 70% of the material in our Bible, and we see God striking people dead, God telling a group of people that he has singled out to be his people that they should go kill this other group of people or we see God commanding Abraham to kill Isaac or all of these different things. We look at the wars and the carnage and the bloodshed and we think, "Gosh, the God behind that is angry. He likes blood. He likes killing people." The problem is that we come to the New Testament, that 30%, and we see Jesus just talking about love and all of these different things. We think surely these 2 ideas are incompatible.The first thing I want to present is that the Old Testament comprises about 3,000 to 4,000 years. There is a lot of history there. When we look at the New Testament, we've got 100 years or less of time span described. Comparing them that way isn't exactly all things equal. The ground is not level. More than that, God is actually more loving in the Old Testament than we like to remember.First, we see God repeatedly forgiving Israel. They stray from him. He does punish them, but he accepts them back. He provides for them. He protects them. This is not often considered in this current type of Old-New Testament God discussion. What about the New Testament? Why is God only seen to be loving there? I think it's noteworthy that Jesus talked more about hell than heaven. He talks more about a place of eternal conscious torment than he does of eternal conscious joy.Now that might be cloaked in the fact that he's not striking people dead, but nonetheless, if you weigh the severity of the things talked about in the New Testament, they aren't nearly as happy-go-lucky as people like to say, because what he said is: If you don’t affirm that I'm the one and only true God and trust in me for the forgiveness of your sin, you will die because God's wrath will remain on you, like he says in John 3. The wrath of God is already on everyone. It is Jesus who leads to its removal.When we look at the New Testament, if we accurately understand what's being said, it's more severe than the Old Testament. And I think this speaks to how we're kind of conditioned in our cultural setting. We think that punishment or suffering in the here and now is worse than future punishment, but that’s not the case. Just a logical survey of the situation would tell you that being punished forever is worse than being punished right now in a singular point in time. What Jesus speaks of is the fact the everyone apart from the cons…