"How do you reconcile the loving God of the Old Testament with the harsh God of the New Testament?"

David Lamb has written the book God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?, examining and challenging the notion that the Old Testament concept of God is different than that of the New Testament. On the Matt Friedeman Show, Lamb briefly addressed some of the difficult questions concerning God and the Old Testament.


Do you consider negative images of God a valid reading?

I think there is some validity to it.

There are some people running around called the New Atheists who just look at the problematic texts.

I think sometimes evangelical Christians can do the opposite. We can look at Psalm 23, Jeremiah 29:11.

To really get the full picture we need to look at the passages we love and the texts that we're less used to.

Give us an example of the text, I guess the one that comes up the most.

The one that probably comes up the most is the Canaanites.

It's just problematic on a number of levels.

When people ask me about the Canaanites, I don't want to brush it aside.

I think there are some good questions about why God commands the Canaanites to be wiped out.

We need to look at the context of what's going on in that situation.

Basically the Canaanites were being punished for their wickedness.

The other thing we need to say is that the Israelites who had been oppressed in Egypt needed a homeland.

One of the things we see is that every person or group who shows hospitality to Israel coming out of Egypt is shown mercy back.

I think there's a deep message of how God is at work, bringing in all nations and people like bringing in Rahab to accomplish His purposes.

What kind of things were the Canaanites doing?

They were idolaters...child sacrifice was something else they committed. They were also not hospitable to the Israelites.

The Israelites were about as weak as you could imagine. The Canaanites came after them and tried to pick off the weak from the back.

A lot of people think there's a difference. How do you answer that?

I open my book by asking the question, "How do you reconcile the loving God of the Old Testament with the harsh God of the New Testament?"

If you pick and choose certain texts, you make Jesus look sugar-coated.

Sometimes God gets angry in the Old Testament and sometimes Jesus gets angry in the New Testament.

The thing I see really clearly in the Old Testament is that God gets angry, but he is slow to anger and abounding in love.

The main thing that characterizes God in both the Old and New Testaments is love.

This God of the Bible seems to be sexist. Your comeback to that?

We've gotta start with the book of Genesis. A lot of our understanding of God, humanity, people, sin starts right there.

The first thing we need to remember about women is that they were made in the image of God.

I think that's the very first that that's gotta be emphasized. Both men and women are made in the image of God.

The man and the woman were alone, they were naked, they were unashamed.

God brought these two together...I think that's a wonderful example of marriage.