Hebrews 13:8 ESV “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

A little while ago I penned a Post- “Go Away I never knew you” portraying Jesus in a somewhat harsh manner, revealing him at his worst moments, more recently I wrote  “Tempted in every way-a step too far” revealing the person of Jesus in a manner that may be a step too far.

Behind the writing of ” Go Away…” was the thought that if Jesus is God and God changes not then how can the God portrayed in the first Covenant be the same as the one who inaugerated  the Second Covenant.

In my writing of ” A step…” I explored what it really means for Jesus to have been tempted in every way that we are, without sinning. We have a Man’s man tempted to the nth degree in every way imaginable. That he might know what to be human means that he might defend us before his Heavenly Father.

This human is God who changes not “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”  Malachi 3:6 ESV

But which god is this god?

The god who condemned the entire world to death by suffocation and drowing, men, women, children, all creatures above and on the waters – the god who would kill hundred’s of thousands of the innocent to prove a point. That god that saved the Noah family from said flood, then set a Rainbow in the sky as the sign he would never destroy humanity by flood again. ( I know we have debunked the Flood Story such that very few people died in the inundation because the Flood was confined to a very small area.)

This is what I wrote about the god of the Old Testament then “If we were to progress through all the ‘bad God’ episodes in the Scripture then we would discover a god who appears to order or countenance all manner of Ethnocide, genocide, war, infanticide, murder, rape and onward. That is the reason behind the references to “Stories’ here, they were written for reasons mostly having nothing to do with God but  humans, Historians and Priests, justifying the terrible acts they had performed in His Name.“

If it is the god above, and the record is literally true then we have a Jesus who just has to be exactly the same since God Changes Not. Did my Go Away I never knew you, reveal a Jesus closer to this god than we like? Or harsher than we want to believe Jesus could be?

Psalm 137:9, written, presumably in Babylon records 9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” A baby hater? One who hated Babylon to the degree that they would also commit infanticide to rid the world of any trace of babylon? Who believed God would be happy with this event? Literal or not this was not ordered by God nor even countenanced as a way for the Jews to rid themselves of their captors.

On the other hand the following words are supposed to come from the mouth of God

1 Samuel 15:2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'” (NIV) also in verses 8, 9, 15, 18, 20 and 21.

1 Samuel 15:2,f speaks of the collateral damage evident in war, in that without parents children, babies cannot survive therefore it was a mercy to kill them. Livestock will not survive if there is nobody to tend them.

Considering that  previously I made the statement that Israel had drawn God into their History such that the incident with the Amalekites stands, for them, as an historical event, in which God has given tactics of War to the nation of Israel in exchange for  the Promise that “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.”

Firstly Saul has become king because the Israelites desired a King like the nations surrounding them. The Lord Rejects Saul as King. ( 10 Then the word of the Lord came to Samuel: 11“I regret that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions.” Samuel was angry, and he cried out to the Lord all that night.) because Saul did not obey the LORD because he allowed king Agag to live, also the livestock, in short anything he considered worthy was saved And in this way did Saul disobey God. Saul did his own thing and then tried to convince God that he had, in fact, obeyed the lORD.

O.K, then what had the Amalekites done to Israel, how exactly were they ‘Waylaid”? For this we must return to the Torah to Exodus.

Exodus 17:10-14 It was after Moses had drawn water from the rock that they came to Rephidim and were waylaid by the Amalekites. The Hebrew army, with supernatural and human assistance defeated the  Amalekite army. 

14Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.”

So this is why the Lord  gave such orders to Saul that the entire People might be annihilated rather that, as previously, just their army. And as per above Saul failed.

So what we have veiled beneath this terrifying statement are Military tactics which would have brought about the Lord’s promise in Exodus.

Then As we move through the Scriptures,  beyond the Torah, into the Prophets and Psalms we discover a God who is every bit as caring and loving as Jesus will be.

The Call of Isaiah 6:8ff NIV

….8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,

“Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”9 He said, “Go and tell this people:

“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
10 Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull
and close their eyes.[a]
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”
11 Then I said, “For how long, Lord?”

And he answered:

“Until the cities lie ruined
and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted
and the fields ruined and ravaged,
12 until the Lord has sent everyone far away
and the land is utterly forsaken.
13 And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”

Hebrews 13:8 ESV “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Yes, there are Seven Woes to the Scribes and Pharisees, Matthew 23 NIV

“‘so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long,” Matthew 23:3–5

Then there are passages such as John 14-15 ff 14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God[a]; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Without boring all with the nitty gritty of the opposing statements made by the god of the Old Testament and the god of the new – I have to conclude that when we take the trouble to look at context we can see, if we want to that there is only one God who never changes. But expresses things in different ways depending on where God is.

Hebrews 13:8 ESV “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Yes Christ Our Lord is God

Andrew