HOW NOT TO MISUNDERSTAND GOD’S SEVERE LOVE by Sara Heitmann for Core Christianity
Some people have misunderstood God by believing that Jesus is more kind, and his teachings more compassionate, than the God of the Old Testament, whom they see as full of wrath and vengeance.
One does not need to look far, however, to find expressions of God’s compassion in the Old Testament or Jesus’s terrifying judgment in the Gospels. In Hosea 11:8, in the midst of warnings of judgment and exile, God pauses to say, “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” On the other hand, Jesus’s words to the religious leaders of Israel were quite harsh: “For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:27).
Further, the church has always believed that Jesus was the very same God of the Old Testament, come in human flesh. As the Nicene creed puts it, he who is “one substance with the Father” also “for us and for our salvation . . . became man.” One finds in the Bible not a vindictive God and a gentle Jesus, but one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, from whose character come both judgment and grace. This is the character God himself described when Moses asked to see his glory: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex 34:6–7). The author Sheldon Vanauken grasped this paradox. In his autobiographical work, A Severe Mercy, he described the figure of Jesus that arose as he and his wife read the New Testament the first time: “that strange combination of unbearable sternness and heartbreaking tenderness.”
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This is a paradox—an unexpected juxtaposition of opposites, in this case sternness and tenderness—but a paradox is not a contradiction. It is something more like a teaching tool. It is not irrational nonsense, but, as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said concerning metaphor, “a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”[1] Paradoxes have the power to break down the way we define and understand things and give us the eyes to see new angles of them that we would not otherwise have seen.[2]
