🦁Wrestling with the Old Testament
Finding Mercy in the Midst of Wrath
A few months ago, I sat across from a young man who told me he was walking away from the faith. He had grown up in church, knew all the Bible stories, but when he finally took the time to really study Scripture for himself, something shattered inside him.
The God he met in the Old Testament felt completely different from the Jesus he had been taught to love. That cognitive dissonance wrecked his faith. He couldn’t reconcile the God of judgment and war with the God of love and sacrifice.
And honestly? I get it.
This is something I’ve wrestled with deeply in my own studies. If we’re honest, most of us have had moments of discomfort reading certain passages in the Old Testament… stories of conquest, judgment, and seemingly harsh commands from God. It’s easy to understand why someone might read those and ask, How is this the same God who walked in flesh and said, ‘Love your enemies’ and ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’?
But what if we’ve been missing something?
The Thread of Redemption
For years, I’ve been studying this question, and I’ve come to see a narrative thread that weaves through every act of divine wrath and judgment in the Old Testament… a thread that ultimately leads to the cross!!
The way I see it, every difficult passage in Scripture isn’t just an isolated moment of violence or judgment. It’s a moment in a much larger story, one that is relentlessly moving toward Jesus.
The mercy of God was always at work, even in the hardest moments of the Old Testament. He was creating a path where, one day, Christ would come and die so that no one else would have to.
This is why I’ve been called, by some of my friends, a practical theologian. That basically means I care deeply about making theology something that isn’t just academic, but something that actually helps people make sense of God in the real world!
And one of the best ways I’ve found to do that is through analogies: simple ways to attempt to understand deep, divine mysteries.
The Cake Analogy
One analogy that has helped a lot of people (and even made its way into my theology class) is this:
Imagine you’re baking a cake. The goal is to get it to the table, finished and beautiful, so it can be enjoyed. But to get there, you go through different phases:
Phase 1: It’s chaos. You’re cracking eggs, beating batter, making a mess. It’s violent, but it’s necessary.
Phase 2: Heat. The cake has to go into the oven to transform. If you take it out too soon, it’s ruined.
Phase 3: Decoration. The rough edges get smoothed out, and beauty starts to take shape.
Phase 4: The cake is ready—it’s served, shared, enjoyed.
Now imagine if you took Phase 1 (cracking eggs, making a mess) and tried to do it in Phase 4, after the cake is already made. It would be horrifying. It would ruin everything.
This is what happens when we try to apply God’s early work in history (when He was forming a people, protecting a covenant, and working within a deeply broken world) to the finished work of Jesus. The violence of the Old Testament was part of the process, not the final product! The story had to move forward so that, in Jesus, God could finally say, It is finished.
This is why Christians are not called to go out and conquer other nations violently. We conquer the world through self-secrifical love, like our savior!
If you want to explore this more (and the Biblical/eschatalogical implications of each phase), I’m sharing the full recording of my theology class on this topic. You can watch it here.
Going Deeper: My Seminary Papers
For those of you who want to go even deeper, I’m also including two seminary papers I wrote that helped shape my thinking on this. Just click on either to download the PDF!
Divine Violence, The Morality of Yahweh, and Christian Ethics – A deep dive into whether God's ethics remain the same from Old to New Testament.
Wrath and Mercy: Yahweh’s Character Through Scripture – A study on how stories of wrath in Scripture actually lead us to the cross.
It was a joy to do this work under the guidance of Dr. Gerry Breshears and Prof Christ Mathewson at Western Seminary.
I would love to hear your thoughts… whether encouragement or alternate perspectives! Let’s wrestle with this together.
Thanks for reading,
Aaron Salvato
P.S. If this kind of teaching resonates with you, I’d love for you to consider supporting my ministry so I can continue creating resources like this for people who are struggling with these questions. You can become a monthly partner here. And if you haven’t already, make sure to check out my podcast, where I dive into topics like this regularly!