Or so the story goes.

The Old Testament is hard.

It's full of all these things we don't understand because our context is so different from the time we're reading about, and so is the God.

Don't get me wrong, it's the same God, loving, compassionate, merciful, and yet there's a darkness that we don't get with post-resurrection theology that speaks of jealousy and pride and all those things we're not supposed to have in order to be like Jesus.

And the deeper who delve, the harder the questions get. Especially when it comes to metaphors.

This is partly because, as stated above, our context is so different, but is there more to it than that? Are there things inherent in God's character in the OT that we don't see once Jesus makes it on the scene? Some would say no, because God doesn't change. Ever. But what if God does? What if, just like we who are made in the image of the Creator and have an uncanny ability to adapt, and yes, even grow and change over time, God can too? What if God got to make God's own choices and not be railroaded by a narrow version of whatever God shaped box we choose to put the most powerful being that has ever existed into?

I'm not saying that there was some kind of 180 degree turn and the God of the OT was some terrible tyrant who had no regard for the lives of people and then suddenly did. I think the God back then was just as loving as God is now. What's changed are the tactics.

OT God was frustrated, to say the least, and quite frankly at the end of a very long rope. God had been patient, had heard the people out, had a change of heart about destroying them on more than one occasion. The Creator got fed up, and after the millionth threat made good on it. Years of exile and as many promises of renewal as threats of punishment later, like the proverbial toddler who thinks timeout is never going to end, Israel gets to go home. And while this metaphor is sorely lacking in the depth-of -Israel's-experience-and-pain category, it's the easiest for my to swallow.

Maybe it's that a grew up with the constant and unending metaphor of God's family. Maybe I'm just still too close to the 'kid' end of the growing up spectrum, but God's parenting seems to have grown with the times. in our infancy as a species we were given leeway to cry and make mistakes and be gross because we didn't know any better, and the punishment only came about when we were old enough to handle it. The garden ended up being a bigger step than we were ready for, so we had to play somewhere else (or so the story goes). When dangerous people that would cause us harm were introduced too early they were removed, and eventually we got to the point where we could make some decisions on our own. God gave us those decisions, and like so many adolescents, we made the wrong choices, pushed too many boundaries, and made mistakes we couldn't get ourselves out of. And since we were still young enough that we weren't going to see the error of our ways ourselves, God sent us people to tell us what to do, but when we didn't listen (and if you've ever seen a 4-10 year old single-mindedly ignore you as you repeat their name more than ten times you know exactly what I'm talking about) so eventually intervention was necessary.

We were running out into the street, or playing with knives, or throwing heavy things at our siblings, something potentially disastrous, and needed a little reminder that danger is real, and not listening can, occasionally, get you killed. Of course we still didn't listen, and our mistakes were all our own. God picked up who God could and placed us out of harm's way, letting us return to play after we'd had time to evaluate our choices. (The grown up equivalent of thinking about what you've done.)  So we returned, but there was a distance. We learned our lesson, to a degree, but we'd entered our awkward adolescent years. We knew better, we took God's words with a grain of salt and interpreted rules as we saw fit. We weren't old enough to fully understand God's Word, but we thought we did. We'd gained new knowledge and nothing was going to stop us from doing with that information as we saw fit. We'd grown smart, but not yet wise.

Enter the teenage years. We were old enough to talk to, but we no longer cared to listen. So the prophets stopped coming, or maybe they just got ignored, and we made our own choices, still under God's watchful eye, but somehow distanced. We got moody. We got rebellious. We knew what we thought God was supposed to be giving us, and when it showed up, we mostly rejected it as less than what we deserved. We wanted retribution against our enemies. We wanted our anger justified through the utter destruction of those who had wronged us. We wanted to fight. But, like any angry teenager, that's not what we needed. We were being spoken to like adults, which is all we wanted, but we couldn't see the forest for the trees. We weren't getting what we wanted, and that only made us more angry. So angry that, save for a few who matured a little earlier than the rest, we rejected the conversation completely because once again, God gave us more than we were ready for. Luckily the most mature of us had the good sense to save all that knowledge for a time when we would understand it.

We grew a little older. We discovered science and different worldviews and alternate ways of thinking. Some of us found that those things made more sense, and began to try to understand in earnest, others clung to a more basic understanding of what had been passed on, and still others found ways to make sense of God's words in the ever changing contexts that we lived in. We continued to grow and wrestle and figure out how to make God's words our own. We thought back to the complex ideas we were given in our youth and slowly but surely we're beginning to make sense of them now that we understand a little better.

And someday, in that distant time when we've grown a bit more, and we understand a bit more, we will look back and say, "remember when we fought about the dumbest things? I wish we could have better understood." And God, sitting with us and reminiscing will smile and recall the times when all we wanted was to be held, and when we turned away and got lost, and when we came back. And with all the love and acceptance that has always been there, God will pat us on the shoulder and say, "You were young then."

And in that day when we finally understand, we will walk side by side with our Creator. And finally, God will tell us secrets we already know. And finally, the world will be as it was always intended. And it will have been an awfully big adventure.