For years, I thought of Yahweh in the Old Testament as parallel with the Father in the New. Like Jesus is a newcomer in the story. That’s wrong, and dangerous. It leads to a twisted caricature, as if the Father is the grumpy old warmonger in the Old Testament, and Jesus is the son who went off to Berkeley and came home with all sorts of radical ideas about grace and love and tolerance and basically said, “Come on, Dad, let’s not kill everybody. How about I die for them instead?” This is a gross misreading of the story the Scriptures tell. Jesus is the long-awaited human coming of Yahweh, the
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