Some Christians mistakenly think the Old Testament depicts God primarily as wrathful and angry, while the New Testament depicts God primarily as loving and and merciful. But this is a false dichotomy, an unnecessary and uninformed conclusion.

In For the Love of God, Volume 2, D. A. Carson (one of my favorite theologians), comments on one of my favorite psalms (Psalm 103) to prove this. Some excerpts:

One of the loveliest of the psalms is Psalm 103.

“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.” (103:8) That truth is often expressed in the Old Testament… Yet that is not the imopression that many reader of the Old testament have of God. Someheow they think he runs on a short fuse, never ery far off from an outburst that can wipe out a nation or two.

Probably because they do not read the Old Testament very closely.

[God] delays judgment. On the first signs of genuine repentance, he turns from wrath, for the Lord is “slow to anger, abounding in love.”

It is almost as if God is looking for reasons to be as forbearing as possible.

In our guilt before a holy God, what we need most is to be forgiven all our sins (103:3), to have them removed far from us: “as far as the east is from the west (a distance without limit, unlike north to south), so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (103:12). With that assurance, all other blessings of any worth will one day be ours: without the forgiveness of sins, any other blessing we have received is worse than worthless: it may be deceptive.

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