Biblical Interpretation and Progressive Revelation

Some people have the false idea that the God of the Old Testament is not the same God as the one in the New Testament. Or, they might say that God changed His nature between the Old and the New Testaments and so the Old Testament is no longer relevant to us for understanding God. But God says, “I, the Lord, do not change” (Mal 3:6), and the New Testament repeats this truth saying, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). God is immutable, which means that He does not change. His nature remains consistent throughout the ages. But how can this be, when it seems like Jesus is so loving and gracious in the New Testament but in the Old Testament we constantly read of God’s anger, wrath, and judgements?

When speaking to His disciples, Jesus said to them: “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him” (Jn 14:7). Then Philip says to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” And Jesus says, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” (v. 8-10). Jesus was saying that the Father and Jesus are both One God. Whatever the Father wants, the Son also wants and whatever the Son, wants, the Father wants. It seems as though Philip was suffering from the same problem that many of us do today, trying to reconcile our understanding of how God is revealed in the Old Testament with who Jesus revealed Himself to be in the New Testament.

Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Jesus “is the radiance of His [God’s] glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” And then John writes that the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, has explained who God is (Jn 1:17), “For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.” That is, Jesus has explained and revealed who God is because He is God’s perfect representative. Therefore, if we know Jesus, we know the Father, and if we know the Father, we know Jesus. Throughout the centuries, God spoke and made Himself known through the prophets using various methods of communication like dreams, visions, and parables, etc. but in these last days, He has spoken to us through His Son, Jesus (Heb 1:1-2). There is something really great and wonderful about this. That is not to say that God has done away with prophecy, dreams, and visions. This only means that now we have such a greater clarity through Jesus, God Himself coming down to earth, actually showing us who God is through His actions and through His speech. There was no intermediary between God and the people to interpret a prophetic message. Jesus was and is God. The incarnation of Jesus and Him walking on the earth was God’s message to us about the exact nature/character of this God.

The Lord explained His very nature in the Old Testament, saying, “The Lord, the Lord God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness and truth” (Ex 34:6). But that message wasn’t fully received. People didn’t fully understand that side of God. And so what God did was, He sent Jesus down to earth to make that message loud and clear. The laws God gave to Israel were for their benefit to help them live, thrive, and prosper. The Psalmists in Psalm 119 understood the goodness of God’s laws, praising and thanking God for them, and delighting in obedience to God. However, many other people didn’t see it that way. Keeping the law was a means to know God and grow in our relationship with Him but people like the Pharisees started to make everything about the law so much so that they invented new laws for extra measure and safety. Instead of a relationship with God being the end goal, pietism was the end goal. People were keeping laws for the sake of the law rather than using the law as it was intended. The Pharisees were completely disconnected from God’s heart. For example, Jesus often healed people on the Sabbath but the Pharisees were upset with that because no one is supposed to work on the Sabbath. So Jesus gives some clarity into God’s heart in the reason behind the law by saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27). Jesus said to the Pharisees, “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (Mt 12:7-8). The purpose of the Sabbath was to keep Israel devoted to God by meditating on His goodness so that their hearts wouldn’t turn cold and then turn away from God. It was a wise law for their benefit so that Israel would continue loving God but the Pharisees turned it into some strict law and turned their brains off by saying it’s evil to help people on the Sabbath because that would be work. But that is nonsense. When Jesus was on the earth, He gave us clarity about His laws since the law’s purpose seemed to be so misunderstood. So, Jesus made it really simply and summed up all of the laws into this: love God and love people (Mt 22:34-40). Jesus explained to us that God is all about love and then He demonstrated the fullness of His love by dying on the cross for those who were His enemies, for wretched sinners to save us from sin and death. When given the opportunity to stone a woman who was caught in adultery, Jesus didn’t do it. He didn’t exact the law’s penalty but rather, He forgave the woman of her sins and let her go and told her to sin no more. This God is about reconciliation and restoration. The penalty of the law doesn’t need to be dealt just because that’s what the law says. When there is restoration and remediation, there is no need for punishment. Reflecting on the Old Testament then, God’s judgements were to purify His people. They were to lead people away from sin and death and to lead them to life and a relationship with the One true God. This is who God has been all along. God has always been for us. The very God who commands us to love one another is the God who infinitely loves us.

When Jesus came, what He did was shine a light on the Old Testament to show us who God really is and who He has always been. For that reason, the proper way to examine the Old Testament is not by looking at it alone and neither is it by comparing it equally side to side with the New Testament. The proper way to see the Old Testament is through the clarity and revealed nature of God that we see in the New Testament through Jesus Christ. Jesus explains God to us and so we take our understanding of Jesus and filter the Old Testament through that lens. It’s like the Old Testament is foggy vision but then Jesus is the glasses to see clearly. This is what progressive revelation is about. It’s not about replacing the God of the Old Testament or replacing the theology in the Old Testament but about bringing into focus what we didn’t see before.

The liberal theologians would say that in the Old Testament, people’s theology about such things as God and the devil evolved over time. But that is a dangerous thing to say because now you’re taking away the authority and inspiration of Scripture when you say that to the point that nothing said in the Old Testament can be trusted as true regarding who God is. This isn’t progressive revelation but evolutionary revelation. I completely reject the idea. It is through such a concept as evolutionary revelation that people come to the conclusion that God doesn’t judge anyone and His justice is only remedial and purgative. The prophets then lose all their authority as truth-tellers and so they must all have been false prophets. But that is ridiculous. However, those would have to be the logical conclusions of such a bad theology.

But let’s entertain those thoughts for a little while. For the sake of argument, let’s say that evolutionary revelation is true, how do we interpret the words of all the authors of the Old Testament? Well, I suppose the Psalms would be the first to question because there are many different authors and we don’t know who they all were, if they were prophets, or anything like that. So, how can we be sure what they’re saying is true? Even in the book of Job, Job’s friends were inaccurate about the things they said and God rebuked them for it. On top of all that, though revelation from God is infallible, people’s interpretation of it isn’t always infallible. So, you could have someone hear something from God but then they misinterpret it so that it is not wholly accurate. That could be possible. However, if we look at the prophet Samuel, the Bible says that none of his words fell to the ground, none of his words failed (1 Sam 3:19). That is, all that He said and prophesied came to pass. His words were accurate and so we can have assurance that the books he wrote were accurate as well. To say that none of his words failed might be redundant to say if every prophet was always fully accurate and right in everything they said. But to say that none of his words fell to the ground, is to position Samuel as a trustworthy prophet, distinguishing him among all the prophets. For these reasons, I believe we can have confidence in the things Samuel said that they were accurate regarding God’s character.

Then there is Moses. God spoke in the presence of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam when He said this. God said:

Hear now My words:
If there is a prophet among you,
I, the Lord, shall make Myself known to him in a vision.
I shall speak with him in a dream.
7 “Not so, with My servant Moses,
He is faithful in all My household;
8 With him I speak mouth to mouth,
Even openly, and not in dark sayings,
And he beholds the form of the Lord.
Why then were you not afraid
To speak against My servant, against Moses?

(Numbers 12:6-8)

Moses was a prophet unlike the rest. He didn’t receive some dreams or visions from God that he would then have to interpret to make sense of them. He didn’t receive “dark sayings” like parables and metaphors and other things like that which would need interpretation. Moses received revelation directly from God, “mouth to mouth” from the very presence of God communicating to him. God’s voice was audible. It wasn’t just in his head. When God spoke to him, it was clear and unmistakable. With the long periods of time that Moses spent with God, he would have had the opportunity to get to know God really well. For these reasons, the writings of Moses are trustworthy and I believe what Moses communicates about God’s character is accurate. Therefore, Moses’ writings of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are accurate about God. Therefore, because of our confidence in Samuel and Moses, we can have confidence in the other books of the Bible as well when prophets speak God’s words and say the same things about God’s character as what Moses and Samuel have already affirmed. The theology of God is consistent throughout the whole Bible all the way to Revelation.

In addition to this, 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” And 2 Peter 1:20-21 says, “But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Because of all of these things, I have confidence that whenever a prophet from the Old Testament quotes God saying something, that is what God actually said. It wasn’t just their personal theology of God—it was the very words of God because the Holy Spirit put those words in their mouth and caused them to speak it.

Having said all these things, God does reveal Himself in both Old and New Testaments as a God who deals out retribution. He says that “He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished” (Ex 34:7). I have spoken about this in a previous article so I won’t belabor the point here. I will just mention a few Bible verses. First is Jeremiah 46:10

For that day belongs to the Lord God of hosts,
A day of vengeance, so as to avenge Himself on His foes;
And the sword will devour and be satiated
And drink its fill of their blood;
For there will be a slaughter for the Lord God of hosts,
In the land of the north by the river Euphrates.

This is a time of judgement that came upon Egypt for their evil ways and it is reminiscent of a future day of judgement that is coming to the world where Jesus will kill people. Revelation 19:21 says, “And the rest were killed with the sword which came from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse, and all the birds were filled with their flesh.” In the context, these are all the people who died because they took the mark of the beast and made war against the Lamb. Revelation 19:15 says, “From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty.” (cf. 14:10; 16:6). What is the wine press?

Isaiah 63:1-6 explains:

Who is this who comes from Edom,
With garments of glowing colors from Bozrah,
This One who is majestic in His apparel,
Marching in the greatness of His strength?
“It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.”
2 Why is Your apparel red,
And Your garments like the one who treads in the wine press?
3 “I have trodden the wine trough alone,
And from the peoples there was no man with Me.
I also trod them in My anger
And trampled them in My wrath;
And their lifeblood is sprinkled on My garments,
And I stained all My raiment.
4 “For the day of vengeance was in My heart,
And My year of redemption has come.
5 “I looked, and there was no one to help,
And I was astonished and there was no one to uphold;
So My own arm brought salvation to Me,
And My wrath upheld Me.
6 “I trod down the peoples in My anger
And made them drunk in My wrath,
And I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.

The wine press is Jesus killing His enemies in righteous judgement. Revelation gives us a picture of Jesus as riding a white horse “and in righteousness He judges and wages war” (Rev 19:11). And “He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God” (v. 13). Why is the robe dipped in blood? Some liberal theologians say it’s because Jesus is the Lamb and as the Lamb, He is our sacrifice for sins and so it’s all about His love and forgiveness, they say, and the book of revelation is just super symbolic like a Roman drama that has comedy and chorus and all these things like a plot twist kind of play. They even claim that Jesus hasn’t even started the war yet and His garment already has blood on it. But that is simply false. Reading the context, the bowls of wrath had been poured on the earth. Jesus has been busy treading the wine press. The blood is the blood of His enemies. Jesus judged the harlot Babylon the great, and avenged the blood of his bond-servants (16:6; 19:2). This was at the sixth bowl of wrath which means all the previous bowls of wrath had already been poured out. All these things are necessary to say to maintain the consistency of God all throughout Scripture and so that we don’t go too far to one extreme or the other of God’s wrath or God’s love. Be sure of this, Jesus is coming back one day to judge the earth for her sins and He will be coming in vengeance and retribution.

Even aside from the book of Revelation, we have a recorded event in the book of Acts regarding the death of King Herod. People were praising and exalting him, crying out, “The voice of a god and not of a man!” After this, it says, “immediately an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and died” (Acts 12:23). The specific reason given for why he died was because he did not give glory to God. His death was also said to be as a supernatural event from God. This was retribution. I would be curious to see how the liberal theologians fenagle their way around this text… It seems as though God takes offenses against His honor seriously.

Progressive revelation shows us and clearly communicates to us the doctrine of the Trinity and that there is this inter-Trinitarian love within the Godhead. Misrepresenting God, blaspheming His name, and stealing the glory that rightfully belongs to Him is no joke. God’s love is fierce and He responds with much zeal. God doesn’t overlook every offense just because He is gracious. He won’t let the guilty go unpunished. However, He also forgives those who repent because He is abounding in lovingkindness.

Throughout all of my articles, I maintain the consistency of God’s unchanging nature. And while I believe God is immutable, I do leave room for the possibility for God to change His methods, as His methods are separate from His nature. I explain this to some degree in the Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement article. I’ve also explained the necessity for why God needed to be harsh in His judgements throughout most of Israel’s history, to preserve the seed of faith so that all the ends of the earth could have the opportunity to be saved.

A few other things about interpreting the Old Testament:

Not everything we read in the Old Testament should be taken as authoritative from God. For example, Job’s friends. Although they seemed to say some very wise and intelligent things regarding theology, their interpretation of Job’s situation was incorrect and so God harshly rebuked them for it. Also, many of the psalms have various literary devices since they are songs and a form of poetry, it would be unwise to take everything they say literally or to have the foundation of our theology from a psalm. There are also times when the psalmist may say something that God would not approve or they would approach God in some way that God would not be okay with. Just because they do it, that doesn’t make it okay for us to do it. Narrative is not prescriptive. It’s not okay to yell at and get angry with God. I know some of us may be hurting sometimes but that doesn’t automatically give us a free pass to be irreverent with God and blame Him for things or curse His name.

It’s also important to note who is speaking. A prophet may be speaking like Jeremiah but that doesn’t mean everything Jeremiah says we should take as an authoritative view about God. Everything he says from the words that God directly gives him to speak, we can trust that as being from God. But there were times in Jeremiah’s life where he didn’t have the right attitude and didn’t speak right about God. For example, Jeremiah said to God: “Why has my pain been perpetual and my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will You indeed be to me like a deceptive stream with water that is unreliable?” (Jer 15:18). That is quite the accusation against God to call Him deceptive and unreliable. It’s something that God reproved him for in the next verse to repent of. Later, when Jeremiah is older, he’s giving advice for young men and says, “It is good for a man that he should bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone and be silent since He has laid it on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust, perhaps there is hope” (Lam 3:27-29). It sounds like this older sage advice was from him learning the hard way and regretting some of the mistakes he made in his relationship to God while he was a young man. He should have stayed silent instead of accusing God of wrongdoing.

Did you know that when the laws for Israel were written at Mt. Siani, the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God while the rest of the laws were written by Moses? This is confirmed by the fact of whenever Moses is speaking in the first person on God’s behalf or when he is just speaking just from himself. This is also confirmed by Jesus when He speaks about divorce. Jesus said to the Pharisees that divorce is not okay because God created male and female together in the beginning and what God has joined together, let no one separate, because they are one flesh. So then the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” And Jesus answered, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery” (Mt 19:3-9). This was also part of Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:31-32). And Malachi 2:16 also says that God hates divorce. So, apparently, Moses was responsible for making certain laws for Israel to keep them in check but there were also certain things he didn’t include like divorce because he probably thought that it would be too hard for them to keep that law because of their hardness of heart. And so he excluded this moral law and from the context of Jesus’ words, it was his prerogative to do that. Moses was taking the lead acting as God’s representative, establishing a model of government for Israel to live by. You could say that he was the founding father of Israel becoming a nation. However, we shouldn’t see this as some rogue action from Moses either because Moses was in constant communication with God when he was on the mountain and God let him decide certain things for the people and certain laws. For this reason, all these other laws in addition to the Ten Commandments, were not God’s law but more properly, the law of Moses. Now, God still punished people for breaking the law of Moses and there were times when Moses was in agreement with those punishments. However, we would be wrong to think that every time one of the laws were broken that they always used the full extent of punishment like stoning someone. That didn’t always happen. There was also grace. All of that to say, we cannot be entirely certain that all the laws that Moses gave Israel were directly and exclusively from God. Yet, we cannot exclude God from that process either. What we do know is that whatever standard Moses had for God’s people, God’s standard was higher. This might have even included the topic of slavery. Though, slavery today is not the same type as what was back then. Even so, many of the laws that Moses gave, if they were followed, would have prevented slavery or make it short-lived since they were not supposed to charge each other interest or force someone to be their wife, and were supposed to release all debts on the seventh year.

I believe Moses represented the nature of God accurately but yet there was a clarity that his representation also lacked but this clarity was shown to us through Jesus. However, it would certainly be untenable to believe that Moses had a dark theology of God as being wrathful without compassion. In Exodus 32:11 Moses entreated the Lord on behalf of the sins of the Israelites making the golden calf to worship. God wanted to destroy all of them but Moses asked God to show mercy and God agreed with Moses and showed them mercy. Because of this, we could say that it was against Moses’ inherent nature to present the Lord as more wrathful than He actually was. Therefore, Moses would not have been inclined to have a dark theology about God or to blindly accept some oral tradition about God as infallible truth. For this reason, we could say that Moses accurately represented God’s nature. When people died from the result of God’s wrath, those were real events that occurred. God’s retribution was real. Moses didn’t conjure up a theology of God in his own mind; but rather, he was moved by the Holy Spirit to write down the truth about God.

Then in John 1:17 it says, “For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.” This doesn’t mean that what Moses wrote and commanded was bad because the Law is good and necessary. This verse means that through Jesus, grace and truth came to full light. In the previous dispensation of time, the law was given through Moses to show people the problem of their own sin but Jesus came as the solution to that problem and provided the grace and truth necessary to overcome that problem. The Torah was a shadow of the nature of God because who could have ever conceived that God would come down from heaven to dwell with us and suffer and die to set us free? We knew God was compassionate but to see His compassion and love in action and in person is something on a completely different level. Through Jesus, we were shown the true nature of the Father’s love. The Law was given to God’s people to show them His loving nature for treating people right and treating God right but it went over their heads and they saw the law as an end unto itself rather than as a means to truly know God. Jesus came to clarify that through both word and deed. The intent of the law was always about leading people to life and to a relationship with God. It wasn’t about judging people and condemning them to death. Jesus said He didn’t come into the world to judge the world but to save it (Jn 3:16-21). It was our own evil actions and unbelief that led us to death and separation from God and this we have achieved all by ourselves. Our own actions have judged us and condemned us. For this reason, the law was given not to punish us but to inform us of the consequences of our actions so that we would correct our ways and be led into God’s life. When Jesus came, He showed us the way back to God’s heart.

David taking a census. What went wrong? And who incited him to do it?

2 Samuel 24:1 says, “Now again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and it incited David against them to say, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’”

1 Chronicles 21:1 says, “Then Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel.”

This apparent discrepancy between these two passages is what has led some people to believe in evolutionary revelation. Since 2 Samuel was written much early than 1 Chronicles, some have suggested that Jewish thought about Satan evolved over time and that’s why Satan wasn’t mentioned earlier. It is argued that since the Jews didn’t have much of a concept for Satan at the time, God was credited as the one behind all misfortune and calamity but once the idea of Satan developed, he was rightfully credited with all those things. However, this is not a sound way to interpret the Scriptures. As we shall see, these two passages are not a contradiction if we interpret them correctly. There are also inherent problems within this argument, considering that in Job, one of the oldest books of the Bible, Satan is mentioned. Evidences point to it being written either before or during the time of the patriarchs. But even if that earlier date is not accepted by some people, we can still prove that these passages do not contradict one another.

First, demons are mentioned earlier in the Bible (Lev 17:7; Dt 32:17; Ps 106:37). For this reason, the idea of evil angelic entities was already present early on in biblical history. Since Satan is an evil angelic entity, he cannot be excluded from this. Therefore, the understanding of the demonic unseen realm was already present when 2 Samuel was written.

Second, we need to establish the fact that God is not the author of sin and nor does He tempt anyone to sin (James 1:13). The census itself also was not sinful because Exodus 30:12-16 mentions the process and gives instructions for taking a census. The problem, however, was that David must not have followed that process accurately and that’s the reason for why the plague came against the Israelites.

It’s also important to ask the question, why did David decide to hold a census to count the people? He wouldn’t have needed to do this unless he was trying to figure out how large of an army he could muster up. That being the case, holding a census would have displayed David’s failure to trust in God for the victory over battles and instead put confidence in the flesh. And this would be sinful. Therefore, David was the one responsible for his actions.

We might come to the conclusion that it was Satan who did the tempting yet it was God who allowed it to happen and in this way, Samuel writes that God wanted this to happen so that He could punish Israel for their sins; so, they had it coming anyway. This interpretation would harmonize both passages. But notice how in 2 Samuel it is translated as “it” that did the inciting rather than “He,” (the Lord). There is no subject connected to the verb “incited.” For this reason, Samuel leaves it as a mystery as to who or what incited David to take a census. Therefore, Samuel isn’t blaming God for this but he does mention God’s anger against Israel and David’s actions were an opportune time to bring about their punishment. God probably allowed Satan to tempt David so that these events could take place. David still had the ability to say no to sin but he decided not to and God knew that he would fail in that but this failure would ultimately bring about God’s purpose.

Another way to look at this is that the biblical authors could be sharing their interpretations of the events that happened which is from their perspective and what they wanted to emphasize according to their narrative of the stories. Even as I mentioned earlier about Jeremiah having a perspective, that doesn’t mean the perspective he shared was accurate concerning God or theology. However, he nonetheless had an experience that he was trying to make sense of. This could also be the case of what is happening here. There were two subjective interpretations of the event.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the word for “Satan” literally means “adversary,” so it isn’t necessarily a particular individual. Numbers 22:22 is an example of this same word being used but translated differently when speaking about “the angel of the Lord” that “took his stand in the way as an adversary against him [Balaam].” This leads some people to interpret 1 Chronicles 21:1 more like this: Then a satan (adversary of Israel / an army and enemy of Israel) stood up against Israel (intimidated Israel or challenged Israel’s strength) and moved David (he was afraid and worried, which cause him) to number Israel. This may be a legitimate conclusion regarding this passage.

Regardless, I don’t believe the concept of Satan as an individual evolved over time to where the concept of God also evolved over time with the biblical writers. I just don’t see any consistent or substantial biblical or logical evidence for that. While progressive revelation brings more clarity to a subject, evolutionary revelation changes the subject. I accept the progressive but reject the evolution. I believe we can wholeheartedly trust the words of the prophets recorded in the Bible as they were speaking from God. Their testimony of truth carries on all the way to the book of Revelation and the testimony is consistent, reliable, and harmonious.

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).

Further Resources for the subject of David being incited to number Israel:

GotQuestions.org article

AnswersInGensis.org article

GoodQuestionBlog.com article

StackExchange.com article

Evidence Unseen: Did The Concept of Satan Evolve?