Note: Not looking for comments from atheists or agnostics about how God is all a fable and all that… just looking for Bible discussion.
I’m sure everyone’s noticed this too, but one of the characteristics of God is that he is slow to anger and quick to forgive, but it really seems dealing with God in the Old Testament is like walking on eggshells. Touch the ark of the covenant, instant death. Complain about eating the same food day in and day out after the Israelite leave Egypt, God is angry (I think anyone would grumble at this too). But in the New Testament God seems less interested in punishment and are quick to forgive compared to the new testament.
Are bronze age culture really brutal in that if you complain even a little bit, they would stone you?
I think you forgot Ananias and Sapphira, as this supposedly happened during NT times. Here God quite visibly uses the stick, not the carrot.
This passage has quite certainly helped many churches get (or perhaps bilk) quite a bit of extra money from people, if they know how to work the fear angle to its maximum with the right sermon beforehand, that is.
I don’t think God is different, but Jesus Christ has been revealed, and now it depends on reacting to him instead of whatever ways of trying to know God before. And there’s much discussion that he’s the way, truth, and life, etc, and other methods don’t cut it.
I’ve grown up with Christianity and go to church all the time and I still feel that this 2000 year old sacrifice is strange and more like walking on eggshells near God than anything in the old testament.
Are you thinking of any specific time in the old testament where complaining seems reasonable but it’s punished like rebellion? There were many times when open rebellion were punished, though, and some tolerated honest complaining like Psalm 79, “How long, Lord? Will you be angry forever?”
I’m referring to Numbers chapter 11 where the people are complaining about wandering in the desert, eating manna every single day (I think anyone would grumble at this), and while God has given what was asked (so much pigeons that they grow tired of eating pigeon meat), other times when God told them to attack the promised land and the land was full of giants, they cowered out so God punished them.
The thing that rattles me more is how new testament christians were persecuted or killed frequently. The desert sounds safe by comparison. Also the later christians weren’t rebelling at all.
Yeah, it’s a funny one. They do seem to be completely different Gods. @depot 's explanation gets partway there, but personally I don’t have any sensible resolution for the problem.
The only halfway-logical explanation I can come up with is as follows: the times of the OT were lawless and brutal, and the Jews were a brutalized people. They acted much like their neighbours did, and “God ordered us to do it” was a catch-all excuse. The reality was that they were just another godless tribe among many, and in fact a great deal of the OT deals with their godlessness. It could be that the OT is a largely just a record of the Jews being lawless and brutal, interspersed with a few racial memories of more enlightened moments of divine guidance.
The Romans, even with their own brutality and social problems, imposed a certain level of civilisation and order on otherwise dysfunctional cultures. The time that Jesus was born into was radically different - his people were no longer nomads in the desert or peasants hewing out a subsistence living from the soil, but a lot closer to what we’d recognise as a modern, urban culture.
Not really. It is still be a very significant example of an unforgiving God in the NT that needs some explanation, depending on the NT God you’re arguing for (the OP was actually pretty ambiguous about this, but it can’t necessarily just be counterbalanced with examples of a kind OT god.)
We can’t forget that there are different literary styles throughout the whole Bible, and you can find different genres even between the Gospels.
OT uses much more hyperboles and poetic language than NT.
I think this can explain some of the differences, too.
I don’t see this parable of the vineyard as being irrationally unjust, not anything close to say, Abraham and the divine demand to sacrifice Issac. The vineyard tale simply depicts a social injustice – the absentee landowner taking the fruits of the poor tenants’ labor. That he and his own should fall and perish is an end of the owner’s making. So, this parable simply illustrates the extremely unjust social estate of the ancient era. Between the Romans and their wealthy compatriots, ordinary Hebrew people were powerless. Jesus wanted this society to grow up. He was a sort of precursor of modern Jewish people like Karl Marx in a funny way, lol…
Old Testament tales are meant to inspire faith in the invisible old man in the sky, a man who does not need to explain or justify his whims. Quite the opposite of the young rebel Jesus, who was supposedly a living man, not a hidden god only available to Moses and a few other select prophets…
(What about the New Testament parable of the buried coin? Instead of using his money industriously, the peasant tries saving it, but consequently, he is punished… Seems rather a tale told in appeasement of the Pharisees and less like the spirit of Jesus. Unless it’s an argument for chance-taking or hard work?)
I am not a Christian, but grew up in this context, like most north Americans. I am fascinated by the residual effects and interpretations of ancient writing on our contemporary world…
Several of his parables contain multiple levels of insight about economics, human nature, and society. This particular one is, like the vineyard parable, mostly an observation on the nature of the world. It is and always has been a truism that “to he who has, more will be given, and he who has not - even what he has will be taken away”, and there are some interesting theoretical discussions on why things work that way.
Aside from the theological point, Jesus was surely also suggesting that your best plan for survival is to aim to be the person who has, rather than the person who has not. The guy who buried his coin in the ground was basically just lazy. His master had given him an opportunity, and he’d just wasted it. In fact there’s nothing in the story to suggest that the master had forbidden the servants to make profits for themselves from the “venture capital” he gave them.
This is not a “greed is good” argument, but Jesus was no Marxist either.
