God did threaten judgment in the Old Covenant and so he has in the New Covenant: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31) because “our God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29). This language comes right out of the Old Testament, because there are not two Gods, one old and one new, one wrathful and one loving, but only one God who is both righteous and merciful. 

Dave writes to ask how we should respond to this: “I embrace the all-loving God of the New Testament and not the mean pompous God of the Old Testament”?

We should respond to this proposition the way Christians have done since the early 2nd century, by recognizing the claim for what it is, paganism disguised as Christianity. Specifically, it is Gnosticism, a variety of loosely related persons and movements with common themes and interests that flourished in the second century in reaction to Christianity. Pro-Gnostic scholars have claimed for nearly a century that Gnosticism was the original religion (or “spirituality”) which was supplanted by Christianity, by force, as “orthodoxy.” The great problem with this claim is that there is virtually no evidence for it. The evidence is very strong, however, that, as the second-century fathers and apologists claimed, the Christian faith came first and then was attacked by the Gnostics, who tried to revise it radically. This debate has been renewed in the modern period. Peter Jones has been chronicling its renewal for years.

Gnosticism did not offer salvation from sin or the wrath of God to come, but rather they offered escape from our humanity via secret knowledge (hence Gnosticism, from gnosis or knowledge). They posited a sort of ladder of being between this existence and the next—it’s always a ladder isn’t it? No wonder a cross is so offensive!—According to the Gnostics, our fundamental problem is not legal (sin) but a lack of being, a lack of divinity. In effect, they were siding with the serpent, “You will be like God” (Gen 3:4–5). They posited a radical dualism between the immaterial (spirit) and the material. The latter was said to inherently evil.

What we need, they said, is to escape it by climbing the ladder of gnosis. They set the “Old Testament God” of wrath, whom they regarded as a mere “demiurge” (not the real God) against the “New Testament God” of love. This, of course, is familiar to anyone who has experienced modern liberalism. If, said the Gnostics (and others), the material world is evil, created by a demiurge, then Jesus could not have been truly human. He only appeared (docetism) to be human. This theology led to radical extremes. If the body is evil and not quite real then either we must tame it via asceticism or we may indulge it completely via libertinism. Once again, this practically describes late modern life. Either we must starve ourselves or become Epicureans.

The Gnostics tuned Jesus from the God-Man Savior into just another teacher of mystical, esoteric secrets about how to climb the ladder of being into the One.

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