You will have noticed that many people see how God appears in the Old Testament as being profoundly different from how He appears in the New Testament. People see Him as being wrathful and smiting in the Old Testament and a nice, kind daddy in the New. If they do then they miss the character of God completely: they have not read the Holy Scriptures correctly.
Do we?
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If everyone was open to the Holy Spirit, we would not need the Bible: we could rely on His influence to show us the Truth in all things. Human beings, however, have a bit of a gift for going astray. We die because we sin and we sin because we die.
The Bible is there for us to tell us about God and that's how we need to read it. It tells us the Truth about God and that means we need to treat it with respect. The World treats the Bible like any other book and applies modern forms of criticism often to try and show that it is just another book. But we also look at Our Lord Jesus Christ and we see how He quotes from the Old Testament readily and interprets it so that we see how to behave.
In the Old Testament, God tells us not to kill and, in the New, God shows us how we can kill a person just by hating them. In the Old Testament, God tells us to be faithful to our spouses and, in the New, God shows us how we can be unfaithful just by thinking wicked thoughts. Jesus is the lens through which we read the Old Testament and His Life is the way we encounter God.
The Old Testament is the hope of those who live before the birth of Jesus. The New Testament is the hope of those who await His return. The moment we start seeing them as different or not being as God-breathed then we lose the coherence of God's message to us.
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The Church has been given the Scriptures as a gift by which it can present what she has always believed in every place and by all who seek to worship Our Lord in His Truth.
The Bible is hard to understand at times but so is life itself. The sheer complexity of comedy and tragedy that makes up our fallen condition is mirrored in the holy texts. The temptation is to see the Bible as a book of answers, or as a compendium of solutions to our difficulties. Yes, it does show us the Truth but we can only see that Truth if we are surrounded by people on whom God has imprinted His image rather than in the pages of a book.
We are not to worship the Bible as we do God but we are to respect it and allow its words to reveal God's word. In the end, it will be utterly unnecessary because the Word will return and we shall see Him as He really is as we all stand before His throne together as one Church.
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