I have spent much of my life in some form of Christian ministry, and I can tell you this: one of the most consistent difficulties in handling God’s PR is that God’s CV is … problematic. On the one hand, you’ve got Jesus, turning the other cheek, handing out free food, getting himself crucified rather than calling in angelic air support. On the other, you’ve got Old Testament Yahweh, who at times comes across less like a loving parent and more like an unpredictable warlord. One minute He’s delivering stone tablets outlining a moral code, the next He’s drowning the entire world’s population because they’ve annoyed Him. It’s hard to know where you stand.
Take Exodus 34:6-7, where God introduces Himself as “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.” Sounds lovely. The kind of deity you could bring home to meet your mom. But don’t get too comfortable—because the very next line has Him “punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” Which is less lovely and makes family dinnertime conversation awkward.
There’s an unsettling elasticity to God’s temperament in the Old Testament. He loves justice but hardens Pharaoh’s heart, thereby ensuring mass suffering. He forbids child sacrifice but then asks Abraham to do exactly that. He commands Israel not to kill, then sends them into battle to slaughter entire populations, including women, children, and livestock—presumably just in case the goats were getting ideas above their station.
Enter Jesus, stage left, and suddenly the whole tone shifts. Gone is the God of smiting and plagues. Instead, we get a god who says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Who heals the servant of a Roman centurion—one of the oppressors of His people—without asking for so much as a sinner’s prayer of repentance (he didn’t even have to tithe or put up his hand and come to the front for prayer!). Who tells His followers that the Kingdom of God belongs to children, not warriors. Who, crucially, rejects retribution outright.
And here’s where the real problem emerges: if Jesus is the full revelation of God (as Christianity insists he is), then a lot of what came before him starts to look… well, unreliable. Jesus refuses violence; Yahweh commands genocide. Jesus blesses peacemakers; Yahweh drowns Pharaoh’s army. Jesus insists that God’s sun shines on the righteous and the wicked alike; Yahweh is constantly playing favourites. It’s the kind of stark contrast that should make us pause before declaring that the Bible presents a singular, cohesive picture of God’s nature.
Of course, there are ways we Christians try to smooth this over. Some argue that God was simply working with the moral understanding of ancient people, revealing Himself progressively. Others suggest that Jesus and Yahweh are perfectly compatible, if you squint a bit and tilt your head. But at some point, you come – as I did – to the unavoidable realisation that the contradictions are too glaring to ignore. You have to ask: is God actually bipolar? Or have we, perhaps, mistaken the Bible itself for God?
Jesus never refers to Scripture as inerrant. In fact, He contradicts it. Repeatedly. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye,’ but I say to you, do not resist an evil person” (Matthew 5:38-39). That’s not a gentle reinterpretation; that’s a direct rebuttal of Mosaic law. He lets an adulterous woman go free, despite the Law’s clear death sentence. He redefines the Sabbath. He picks up the texts, turns them inside out, and tells people that if they want to see what God is really like, they should look at him—not at their scrolls.
And yet, here we are, centuries later, still treating Scripture as the ultimate authority, even when it sometimes portrays God as petty, wrathful, and cruel. We say God is love, but we hold onto the parts of the Bible that depict Him as something else entirely, as though we’re afraid that without a bit of divine bloodlust, the whole thing might start to feel too flimsy.
My Christian friends, I am asking something difficult of you, as we enter a season of Easter reflections. I am asking you to be born again. No magic rituals, no emotional coercion to swelling music, no hypothetical speculations on what happens if you die tonight, no asking Jesus to be your boyfriend. I am asking simply that you transform your mind by daring to take Jesus’s claim to be the full revelation of God seriously. For too long we have shaped Jesus around our theology and claimed it was the other way around. As you reflect on the Easter story, my plea is this: start by accepting Jesus as he is – non-violent, inclusive, servant-minded – then shape your theology around that.
What does it mean to follow a God who refuses the throne, who lets himself be crushed rather than conquering? A God who does not return with a sword in his hand but with scars in his palms? Who does not vanquish his enemies but dies forgiving them? So many of us have reshaped Jesus into the kind of king we want: one who, for now, plays nice but will, eventually, come back and set things straight—one final act of divine wrath to balance out all that inconvenient mercy. We treat the Second Coming like a cosmic “just you wait until dad gets home…”, as though Jesus, after all His talk of loving enemies, is secretly stockpiling wrath for a grand finale of smiting. But what if He isn’t? What if the Lamb who was slain is the only King there will ever be? What if justice, in His Kingdom, doesn’t look like vengeance at all? What are we to do with a God who will never be the god we expect?
These questions cannot remain in the cognitive realm. Faith is not the same as belief. This is far more significant than some arbitrary theological debate; there is an urgent necessity for rebirth. And not because your soul is at stake: being born again is a real-life decision with real-life consequences. I have no doubt that the world is on the brink of a fundamental shift – of what will feel, for many, like an apocalypse. All over the world, polarising populist leaders are on the rise – whether on the right wing or on the “liberal” left. And in such times, religion gets weaponised and sacred texts are conscripted to justify all manner of atrocities. They will help us identify who the unrighteous are and compel us to eradicate them. And our gods (on either side) will allow it- they always do. Gods smite the wicked and we are usually all-too happy to be their hands, to carry out their bidding. But that is not the way of Jesus. And this world desperately needs to see Jesus.
It’s time to admit that the Bible is not a seamless, unified whole. It’s time to stop asking it to be. It’s time that we Christians swallow our pride and admit that we have it all wrong. Dangerously wrong. It is time to stop the frankly ridiculous attempts to defend the indefensible. The Bible contains many beautiful, life-transforming revelations, beacons of hope in the darkest of hours. But we – and, tragically, the world – will remain blind to them so long as we insist that the Bible is inerrant. It is time to truly embrace what we have paid lip-service to until now: that God is fully revealed in Jesus. The rest is humanity’s messy, evolving attempt to understand the divine.
It’s terrifying, of course—because it means letting go of certainty, of security, of the comforting illusion that an ancient text can do the hard work of discernment for us. But Jesus never called us to certainty. He called us to love. To forgive. To be merciful, as our Father is merciful. No divine escape clauses. No footnotes permitting holy violence. No caveats that let us baptise vengeance. If we take Jesus at his word, much of what we’ve built in his name comes crumbling down. If Jesus is who he says he is, then we can’t keep clinging to a theology that contradicts him. We can’t keep using Scripture to smuggle in a God of wrath when Jesus has revealed a God of love. And if we follow him, then our idols must fall—our sacred justifications for power, for control, for violence. The question is: are we willing to let them?
Vapors In The Wind 
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