God is love. Unfortunately, for some, this entails an inherent Marcionism. Simplistically, this entails the notion that the God of the Old Testament is not the same God we encounter in the New Testament in Jesus Christ. Often people cannot imagine how the “God of war and wrath” in the Old Testament could ever correspond with the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ in the New Covenant. But I would simply say that without the God of the Old Testament the God of the New Testament makes absolutely no sense. Jesus came as the Prophet, Priest, King (triplex munus); Jesus came in fulfillment of the Aaronic and Levitic priesthood framework; He came as the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world, as the second and greater Adam, as the seed of the woman who bruises His heel while crushing the serpent’s head. God’s wrath is really just an instance of His triune love. God is a jealous God who loves His creation more than He loves Himself (this is a rhetorical hyperbole). As such, when God sees His very good creation in a ruptured relationship with Him, He will not countenance such brokenness. His wrath is conditioned by who He eternally is as Father-Son-Holy Spirit love (which is simply a Self-givenness, one for the other, one in the other, which coinheres in the Divine Monarxia [Godhead]). He created humanity in His image, who is the Christ for us (cf. Col. 1.15); He created humanity in Christ’s humanity to be in an eternally ascendant and thus elevated and koinonial relationship with Him. The nothingness and concupiscence of sin broke that, and as a result He became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’).
God is love. He loves all of humanity in His vicarious humanity which stood in the gap between He and us because no one else could or would. Jesus, as the Baptizer exclaimed, is indeed the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’ As the author to the Hebrews (Paul) says: “there no longer remains any other sacrifice for sin.” Christ is God’s first human, the firstborn, the first fruits of God for the world/us. This is how we know God’s wrath is first an instance of His love for us, in that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’ God’s wrath cannot ever be thought away from or apart from His conditioning triune love. When ‘our theologies’ fall into that trap we end up with a distorted and nomist view of God, wherein God becomes simply the Judge, and not the Judge judged for us (pro nobis).
Because of this realization I can look out at the world and feel compassion, as if looking longingly at sheep without the Shepherd. My heart genuinely breaks for people who don’t have Christ; as Paul said “I wish all were like me, yet without these chains.” God desires to show His love in actualized ways wherein all of humanity might indeed ‘taste and see that God is good.’ God’s justice is coming, and yet has always already come in the cross of Jesus Christ. The very foundation of the cross is in fact the cruciformed (cross-shaped) triune life of the eternal God. If we don’t approach a reading of the Old Testament from this crossshaped lens we might fall prey to the siren call of the culture writ large as best represented in the thought and activity of Marcion (the heretic).
Athanasian Reformed 