Isn't the God of the Old Testament Cruel and Violent?

This is a fair and weighty question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a dismissive one. Let’s begin by naming the deepest error it can lead to—one the early Church faced and firmly rejected. A teacher named Marcion argued exactly this: that the God of the Old Testament was a different, lesser, angrier deity than the loving Father of Jesus. The Church condemned this as heresy, because it is not true. There is one God throughout the Bible, and Jesus—who is that God in the flesh—affirmed the Old Testament Scriptures as his Father’s Word.

The caricature dissolves on closer reading. The Old Testament overflows with God’s tenderness: he reveals his own name as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Exodus 34:6); he pleads, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11). And the New Testament is not free of judgment: Jesus spoke of hell more than anyone, and the book of Revelation is full of divine wrath against evil. Both Testaments show the same God—rich in mercy and serious about sin. We have simply trained ourselves to notice the mercy in one and the severity in the other.

What about the hardest passages—the judgments and the commanded conflicts? A few things help without pretending the difficulty away. God’s judgments in the Old Testament are consistently portrayed as justice against entrenched, horrific evil (including child sacrifice), not arbitrary cruelty—and often after long patience; God waited generations “for the iniquity of the Amorites” to reach its full measure (Genesis 15:16). These were specific, limited historical acts of judgment against particular nations at a particular time, not a standing template for how God’s people treat outsiders. And the same God who judged also relentlessly showed mercy, spared the repentant, and welcomed outsiders like Rahab and Ruth into his own family.

Above all, remember where the story is going. If you want to know how far God’s love reaches, look at the cross—where the God some call harsh took his own judgment upon himself rather than let us bear it. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). That is the same God, from Genesis to Revelation.