This Is Not That: Scripture
Why the Bible Feels Harder Than Jesus
So far, we’ve looked at the Church Jesus actually started—and how fear and control slowly reshaped it. Now we go upstream, to the deeper issue underneath it all: how we learned to read the Bible.
Because most people were taught to read Scripture in a way that forces them to hold two pictures of God at the same time. One looks like Jesus—close, forgiving, willing to suffer rather than punish. The other looks angry, quick to destroy, and dangerous to approach.
So people try to live with both.
God is loving… but also terrifying.
God is close… but only if you stay in line.
God is gracious… but not without conditions.
And the result isn’t deeper faith. It’s low-grade fear. One that makes it really hard to reimagine how to be the Church—right where you are.
Because if the God behind Jesus is also the God behind holy violence and divine threats—then peace is never something you receive or pass on. It’s something you manage.
That tension isn’t academic. It’s personal.
It’s why people say they believe God is loving—but still live guarded, anxious, and unsure of where they stand.
So here’s the question most Christians were never allowed to ask out loud: Did Jesus actually show us who God really is—or just the “nice side” of Him?
The Claim Christianity Actually Makes
Christian faith stands or falls on a single, shocking claim:
“No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known” (John 1:18).
That sentence doesn’t mean: “Jesus helped explain God a little better.” It means: until Jesus, “no-one” had actually seen God clearly at all (John 1:18).
That includes Abraham.
That includes Moses.
That includes the prophets.
They were faithful in some ways—but they were also humans. And humans are prone to fear, projection, and self-protection.
The writer of Hebrews says the same thing, even more directly:
“In the past God spoke through the prophets in many times and in many ways, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son… the exact representation of His being” (Hebrews 1:1–3).
Many ways → One way
Partial → Exact
Fragmented → Clear
In short: Jesus isn’t one chapter in a long story about God. He’s the moment the fog finally lifts.
Which means the real question isn’t: “How do we make Jesus fit with every vengeful picture of God?” It’s: “How do we read the Bible once Jesus shows us what God is really like?
That is not liberal theology.
That is New Testament theology.
Why the Bible Contains Troubling Pictures of God
The Bible does not hide humanity’s fear and misunderstood projections of God. In fact, it preserves them.
Why?
Because the Bible is not a book that dropped from heaven fully formed. It is the story of God meeting humanity where they are in their delusion—and slowly, painfully, patiently undoing their blindness.
Jesus Himself tells us this.
When asked why Moses allowed people to divorce—something clearly contrary to God’s heart—Jesus answers:
“Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning” (Matthew 19:8).
That sentence matters more than we realize—because it means:
Some commands reflect human hardness, not God’s desire.
Some laws are concessions, not revelations of who God actually is.
Scripture contains both accommodation and correction.
In short, Jesus is saying: God did not reveal Himself all at once. He lets us be wrong long enough to discover how wrong we are.
With that in mind, the Old Testament doesn’t read like a clean theology textbook. It reads like humanity trying to make sense of God while still deeply afraid. Here are a few stories that show why.
The Holy of Holies
You’ve likely heard this story: “The priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year with a rope tied around his ankle—in case God struck him dead for approaching Him incorrectly.”
Here’s the first important clarification: that detail is not in the Bible. It comes from later Jewish tradition—not from Leviticus.
And that alone tells us something important. Because it reveals how people imagined God, not how God described Himself.
The tabernacle system is full of layers—courts, veils, boundaries, rituals. But notice the direction of movement: humans build structures with barriers toward God, not the other way around.
God participates in that system—not because it reflects His heart, but because He meets people inside their delusion, the same way Jesus said Moses did with allowing divorce. Accommodation, not endorsement.
Then Jesus arrives—and does the opposite. At His death: “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51). This veil was a physical symbol of a spiritual misunderstanding—one God allowed to stand until its meaning could finally be exposed.
And it matters where this veil hung.
By Jesus’ day, this wasn’t the tabernacle anymore—it was the Temple. A brick-and-mortar structure conceived by King David and built by Solomon to replace the tent God had given them.
And here’s the irony: God never asked for a Temple.
When David first proposed it, God’s response—through Samuel—was simple: I never asked you to build me a house (2 Samuel 7:5–7). So the Temple wasn’t born from God’s desire, but from humanity’s desire for control—for a fixed place, a managed presence.
Which is why Hebrews says the way to experience God’s presence was “not yet disclosed” as long as that veil-based system remained in place (Hebrews 9:8).
And the cross is where that belief finally comes undone.
Jesus didn’t die so God could finally love us up close. He died at the hands of humanity’s devotion to religion instead of God—exposing our delusion so we could see that He always has been (John 1:10; Acts 17:27–28; Ephesians 4:6).
Touching the Ark and Dying (Uzzah)
In 2 Samuel 6, Uzzah touches the Ark of the Covenant to steady it—and dies instantly. It’s a story that is often used to argue that God’s holiness is inherently lethal, like an allergy to sin.
But notice what’s happening in the story. David is transporting the Ark incorrectly, using pagan, Philistine methods instead of Israel’s own instructions (compare 2 Samuel 6 with Numbers 4:15).
More importantly, the Ark represents:
Law without mercy
Presence without clarity
Power without understanding
It is holiness mediated through fear.
Now compare that with Jesus, God in the flesh—who touches:
Lepers (Mark 1:41)
Corpses (Luke 7:14)
Bleeding women (Mark 5:34)
And instead of death spreading outward—life spreads inward.
So if touching God once killed, but touching Jesus heals and raises the dead, then the danger was never God. It was how God was being imagined and approached.
Jesus does not make God safer. He reveals God was never unsafe.
Jericho and Divine Violence
The conquest of Jericho remains one of the most difficult texts for modern readers: “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21).
These words are surely disturbing. But they must be read within their historical and theological context.
Ancient Near Eastern warfare accounts routinely employed hyperbolic total-destruction language to signify decisive victory. Which is why archeologists have shown this language was not fitting to the actual historical account of Jerricho—which was a military outpost.
Later, Scripture itself, acknowledges that many of these cities were not wiped out completely as was reported (cf. Joshua 13:1; Judges 1).
So how did we get to this account?
Because Israel understood God through the same survival lens as every surrounding nation did at the time: victory meant divine favor; defeat meant divine displeasure.
A worldview that God, in Jesus, directly challenges.
When James and John ask if they should call down fire on a Samaritan village for refusing Him a place to stay, Jesus rebukes them:
“You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy people’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:55–56).
Jesus does not say, “wrong timing.” He says, “wrong spirit.” Meaning: that impulse never came from God.
When faced with Rome—the real Jericho of His day—Jesus chooses crucifixion, not conquest. Because if Jericho revealed God’s final word, then Jesus contradicts God.
But if Jericho reflects how Israel interpreted God in survival mode, than Jesus reveals God outside of survival mode altogether.
The Unifying Thread
Every one of these stories shares a common feature:
God is interpreted through fear
Holiness is mistaken for danger
Distance is confused with divinity
Then Jesus arrives and says, in effect: “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father” (John 14:9).
And what do we see?
Presence before purity
Forgiveness before repentance
Death absorbed, not inflicted
This is why any true interpretation of who Jesus is ends with one sounding conclusion: Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us. He came to change our minds about God.
That’s not soft grace. That’s orthodox, cruciform Christianity.
Which is why this series is not denying the Old Testament. It’s helping you read the whole Bible according to what Jesus is actually revealing.
Because if something in Scripture makes God look unlike Jesus, then we trust Jesus over what we think. Not because we’re moving toward a progressive understanding—but because we're Christians.