Chris Hilken - Morality of God in the Old Testament - Part 3 | 455
Dad Tired
Jerrad Lopes
4.9 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Many wrestle with the image of God in the Old Testament—how can the same God who loves and weeps in the New Testament also command war and destruction? In this episode, Chris Hilkin tackles one of the hardest questions in the Bible: is the God of the Old Testament morally good?
Chris walks through five biblical and historical reasons why the conquest narratives aren’t what modern readers often assume. You'll hear how ancient war language, the slow process of displacement, divine justice, and God's mercy all help make sense of these difficult passages—and why rejecting God on moral grounds requires a much deeper look at history and Scripture.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why “utter destruction” often used hyperbolic war language, not literal commands
- How God’s judgment differs from human genocide or racism
- The role of divine justice in protecting future generations from corruption
- Why God has the moral authority to give and take life
- How to answer questions about Old Testament violenceÂ
 Scriptures References:
Deuteronomy 7, 20; Joshua 6, 10; Judges 1–2
1 Samuel 15; Exodus 23; Job 1:21; Romans 13
Revelation 7.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Two, one, go. |
| 0:02.0 | Hey, Dad, Tired, we are continuing a conversation about the question that kind of permeates a lot of minds, particularly if you're new to Christianity, |
| 0:23.5 | or you haven't studied it much, and you might get caught up with someone asking you a question |
| 0:28.3 | about the morality of God in the Old Testament. The conversation kind of goes like this. Well, |
| 0:33.7 | Jesus seems to be kind of this cool, peace-loving guy, and if he is the same in nature as the God of the Old Testament, what happened between the Old and the New Testament? |
| 0:43.6 | Did God chill out a little bit? |
| 0:46.1 | Or you've got Jesus, like, walking around and kissing babies and raising people from the dead and being kind and gentle and crying with people who are losing loved ones. And the Bible |
| 0:55.8 | tells us that he and the father are the same, that they are one in their nature, they're one in |
| 1:00.6 | their character. And so it kind of leads to the question, what do you do then with this Old Testament |
| 1:05.6 | God who commits the killing of whole people groups that permits polygamy, that permits these things. |
| 1:13.1 | And that's kind of the oversimplified version of it, as we're told it. |
| 1:17.4 | And it was something that tripped me up early on in Christianity. |
| 1:20.0 | But what I recognized is even a cursory understanding of much of the conversation led to a way of recognizing and rectifying this idea |
| 1:31.9 | of God being different in the Old New Testament. Today we're going to tackle, we talked about |
| 1:36.5 | slavery a couple weeks back, and today we're talking about the moments that Richard Dawkins |
| 1:41.7 | would say that God is an ethnic cleanser, or Christopher Hitchens |
| 1:45.7 | and the God delusion accuses God of being the God of the Old Testament of being someone who's |
| 1:51.8 | racist and intent on wiping out whole people groups. Now, on the most basic level, some of the |
| 1:58.8 | ridiculousness of this just has to do with what we talked about previously, |
| 2:02.7 | which is the analogia scriptura or the scriptura analogia, which is an analogy of scripture. |
| 2:08.6 | What does that tell us? |
| 2:09.6 | That tells us people hopping up of different ethnicities or of different skin colors or anything else like that, the idea that that was somehow outside of God's design |
... |
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