The God of the Old Testament = The God of the New Testament
There is no greater source to know God than the Bible. It is His written, living Word that reveals Him to us. Through the Bible, we discover the truth of who God is and what He is like. And yet, countless believers start on the wrong foot in their pursuit to know God because of the way they view the Bible. Many see God’s Word as two separate books—the Old Testament and the New Testament—and this often affects how they view God as if He changes from one account to the other. They may not admit this out loud, but they think it when they characterize Him as mostly judgmental in the Old Testament and mostly loving in the New Testament. I have struggled with this at times, and I know most believers have as well.
God is the same in the Old Testament as in the New Testament. But we can miss this—and distort our view of God—when we fail to see the Bible as one complete book. Some of you reading this book have had a new revelation about the Old Testament, or the Tanakh, and that is wonderful. But did you also know that we cannot fully understand the B’rit Hadashah, or the New Testament if we do not read it through the lens of the Tanakh?
In other words, we must understand the New Testament in light of the Old Testament. We cannot interpret the New Testament in a vacuum or treat the Bible as if it begins with Matthew 1. The New Testament was meant to be viewed through the lens of the Old Testament.
In addition, the B’rit Hadashah was never written to be detached from the Tanakh. If we want to interpret the Bible correctly, then we must interpret it as a whole, starting with Genesis and continuing all the way through the last chapter of Revelation. This is why Jesus frequently quoted from the Tanakh, validating its authenticity as the Word of God. The apostles and early church writers constantly referenced the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament for the same reason.
For example, the Book of Matthew begins with a genealogy of Yeshua, traced back to Abraham. Matthew’s genealogy is not just a long, boring list of names; those names are the actual, historic links between the Old and New Testaments. In God’s eyes, they are one book— His written Word, the Old and New Testament, stitched together. And what is the main thread that binds them? Yeshua HaMashiach. He even said in John 5:46, “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote of Me.”
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