As a kind of introduction to the whole of the Bible we will take a short look at the gospel of John to get a general idea of the best picture that the Bible has to offer of God and His character. This gives us an idea of what to look for as we proceed through the Old Testament. We will also present some tables that give a lot of information about the chronology of the Old and New Testaments.

Study Guides will be presented for you to have available to help you think about issues as you read through the book for that time. A Teacher's Guide will also be presented, and is a repeat of the study guide with some brief suggested answers to the questions posed in the study guide as well as some additional questions and suggestions for teachers who are leading groups. I hope that you find this useful. Please let us know how you are using the materials. Your ideas may be useful for others. I believe that collectively we can make this a wonderful experience in sharing and learning. Today's guides are more introductory material entitled "Seeing God Through the 66". Hope you enjoy them.

It will be the purpose of this study group to go through the Bible book-by-book asking one central question of every story, event, promise, and claim:

1. As you understand it at the present, do you see a different "God" pictured in the Old Testament than in the New Testament?
2. If God is "love" (1 John 4:8), then why did He drown all but eight in the days of Noah? (Genesis 6-8) Or did He?
3. Why did God thunder on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20:18-20), and weep on the Mt. of Olives? (Matthew 23:37)
4. What kind of God would make such extensive use of laws and commands (for example: Exodus 20-23; Leviticus 1-11) and then say "the truth shall set you free"? (John 8:32)
5. What kind of relationship does God actually want of us? See Exodus 20 and John 12-17.
6. What kind of God would instruct His children to utterly destroy their enemies, slaying old and young, pregnant women and even babies, saying, "do not leave alive anything that breathes" (Deuteronomy 20:16) and later say "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"? (Matthew 5:43,44)
7. What kind of God would apparently condone and even bless so many polygamous marriages and then say "a church leader should be the husband of only one wife"? (1 Timothy 3:1,2)
8. Where would you look in the Bible to find out what went wrong in God's universe? What was the very first thing that happened that could be described as "wrong" or "sinful?" What is "wrong" with sin? Did it actually change Lucifer and later Adam and Eve? At what point were they changed? What has sin done to us or what does sin do to us today: mentally? physically? emotionally? socially? genetically? and spiritually? Has sin changed our earth? If so, how have all these changes actually been brought about? Are they a result of some action by God? By the Devil? Or have they come about through some natural process(es)?
9. What are the main issues that have been raised in the Great Controversy? What statements, even accusations, have been made against God or the Devil?
10. Could God have established trust (faith) for eternity without sin having ever entered the universe? How did two thirds of the angels decide to trust God? On what basis did Abraham, Job and Moses trust God? None of the Bible had been written yet! Were they just taking a leap in the dark?
11. As we go through the Bible doesn't it look like God may have had a plan, let us call it Plan A, that seems to have failed and then God is forced to move to Plan B, etc.? Doesn't the whole Bible seem to be a record of God having to try and try again to reach men and communicate with them? Or is such a thing not possible for an Omniscient God? Does God ever have to use "emergency measures?"
12. Did God really have to go to the length of dying to convince us to love and trust Him? Is trustworthiness under very difficult circumstances more reliable than under more pleasant circumstances?
13. Looking through the entire Bible, what did God actually accomplish by the use of force of any kind? (Consider the flood, the tower of Babel, the death of the firstborn in Egypt, the Mt. Sinai experience, etc.) Has God been able to answer or deal with any of the questions raised in the Great Controversy through the use of force or power? After each of these experiences, did human beings trust God more or less as a result? Do you think God has tended to use too much power or too little? Would you like to see God use more power or less power in our time?
14. Would you be comfortable worshiping the God of the Old Testament as you understand Him? Do you see any significant differences between this picture of God and the picture of God that you get in the New Testament?
15. Are there any important teachings found in the New Testament that cannot be found in the Old Testament? Why do you think the "scholars" of Christ's time so generally misinterpreted the Old Testament? Do we ever do this to the Old or the New Testament?
16. Which are more important to your understanding of God, the "key texts" or the stories/events where we actually see "God in action?"

It will be the purpose of this discussion group to go through the Bible book-by-book asking one central question of every story, event, promise, and claim:

1. As you understand it at the present, do you see a different "God" pictured in the Old Testament than in the New Testament?

Many people feel that the "God" of the Old Testament is so different than the "God" of the New Testament that they speak of it as two different "dispensations". But Paul apparently did not see it that way.
In 1 Corinthians 10:2-4 he says: "In the cloud and in the sea they were all baptized as followers of Moses. All ate the same spiritual bread and drank the same spiritual drink. They drank from the spiritual rock that went with them; and that rock was Christ himself." (GNB)
Jesus, Himself said in John 5:39,40: "You study the Scriptures, because you think that in them you will find eternal life. And these very Scriptures speak about me! Yet you are not willing to come to me in order to have life." (GNB)
Notice His words to the men on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:44): "Then he said to them,'"These are the very things I told you about while I was still with you: everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the writings of the prophets, and the Psalms had to come true.'" (GNB)
Remember that the only "Scriptures" available in Jesus' day were the Old Testament Scriptures. Nevertheless, there is a considerable difference in the way God is often pictured in the Old Testament than in the New. How do we reconcile these differences? First of all, we need to recognize that even God must behave differently when the situation is different. Conditions in the Old Testament called for a very different approach than when He came in Person to speak with His "own people" in New Testament times. Parents find it necessary to act differently when their children are very small and don't understand what the issues are than when they are, for example, teenagers and feel that they know all the issues for themselves. In the same way, God needed to meet the peoples in each culture and each time in a way that best fit their needs.



2. If God is "love" (1 John 4:8,16), then why did He drown all but eight in the days of Noah? (Genesis 6-8) Or did He?

See the page on "Why Did God Send the Flood?"



3. Why did God thunder on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20:18-20), and weep on the Mt. of Olives? (Matthew 23:37)

See #1 above. Different situations call for different responses. To a nation of ex-slaves used to cruel treatment from their masters and knowing little of religious experience except the pagan "gods" of their former masters, a show of power was needed to impress them. Proof that the show was not too overwhelming is seen in the fact that forty days later they were dancing drunk and naked around a fertility cult symbol from Egypt! (See Exodus 32)
When Jesus came as a baby boy, born into a culture that was longing for such a show of power as had been demonstrated on Sinai, He needed to get them to look beyond the "power" of God to comprehend His character. They needed to learn what kind of a Person God really was and how He wants to conduct His government.



4. What kind of God would make such extensive use of laws and commands (for example: Exodus 20-23; Leviticus 1-11) and then say "the truth shall set you free"? (John 8:32)

See the page on "Why Then the Law?"



5. What kind of relationship does God actually want of us? See Exodus 20 and John 12-17 (Especially John 15:15).

Despite what many have thought down through the years, God Himself says He wants to treat us as "friends". He may respect our approaching Him as a servant would, but He really prefers to relate to us as friends. Read the book Servants or Friends? By A. Graham Maxwell. In many places especially in Paul's writings we are admonished to grow up. This implies a different attitude toward God.



6. What kind of God would instruct His children to utterly destroy their enemies, slaying old and young, pregnant women and even babies, saying, "do not leave alive anything that breathes" (Deuteronomy 20:16) and later say "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"? (Matthew 5:43,44)

See the page on "Was God Fair to the Egyptians and the Canaanites?"

In many minds this is one of the most difficult questions in scripture. There are several major points that must be kept in mind when considering it:

1. Remember that God's ideal was the garden of Eden. We are now in this mess because of sin, selfishness, jealousy, and greed. None of these things came from God.
2. God chose the Israelites to say something about Himself, not to reward them for some extraordinary righteousness or goodness that He saw in them. They served over their long period of existence to illustrate virtually all of the good and bad points that God needed demonstrate.
3. God gave the Israelites a period of probation just as He gave the Canaanites before them a period of probation. When neither of these groups accomplished what God asked them to do, He had to move on and choose other groups to try to forward His cause. Will the Christian church also fail in representing God correctly?
4. In order to show what He needed to show, God had to prepare a people who believed that they were following His will in every detail. If God allowed His "people" to get lost among the heathen, completely carried away with idol worship and fertility cult rituals like the Canaanites were, Jesus could never have demonstrated what He needed to demonstrate. So God had to create a clear distinction between those who were His followers and who were attempting to worship Him correctly and those who were pagans.
5. God needed to demonstrate that He was superior to the other "gods" that the children of Israel were familiar with in order to get their respect and win them to follow Him. After all those years in Egypt they had come to think that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was powerless. The miracles associated with the exodus and the way in which they were able to win battles gave them the courage to believe that their God was worth following and worshiping.


7. What kind of God would apparently condone and even bless so many polygamous marriages and then say "a church leader should be the husband of only one wife"? (1 Timothy 3:1,2)

It is very clear that polygamy was not God's original plan. Adam and Eve would have been very content to remain in the garden of Eden forever without any problems if they had not fallen into sin. Sin brought a lot of problems, including the domination in many places and times of women by men. This has led to some of the most horrendous atrocities that one can imagine. Virtually all modern nations with a background in Biblical principles forbid polygamy. Why do you suppose this is?
Having lived in countries in Eastern Africa where polygamy is practiced widely, I have talked to young people raised in homes where their mothers were the second or third wives of an African man. About the only thing many of these children know about their fathers is that they come around once in a while, get drunk and beat them. Even the jealousy manifested in Jacob's family is a clear lesson of the problems associated with polygamy.
If we want to get back as close as possible to God's ideal, we must understand that that ideal includes equal status for men and women and that it never includes polygamy.
But God had to work with people where He found them in Old Testament times. He certainly never commanded anyone to marry multiple wives. But God needed to say other things about Himself as well. If he had refused to work with anyone who had married more than one wife, much of the Old Testament would not exist. Once again, God demonstrates His graciousness in dealing with conditions way below His ideal.



8. Where would you look in the Bible to find out what went wrong in God's universe? What was the very first thing that happened that could be described as "wrong" or "sinful?" What is "wrong" with sin? Did it actually change Lucifer and later Adam and Eve? At what point were they changed? What has sin done to us or what does sin do to us today: mentally? physically? emotionally? socially? genetically? and spiritually? Has sin changed our earth? If so, how have all these changes actually been brought about? Are they a result of some action by God? By the Devil? Or have they come about through some natural process(es)?

These are thought questions! The Bible does discuss in a number of places the issues that we describe as the "great controversy".

See the page on "The Great Controversy in Scripture."

Sin began right in heaven next to God's throne. It spread to this earth when our parents allowed the serpent to deceive them into thinking that they would be benefited by eating of the "fruit". But dreadful consequences have come about as a result. These consequences are a natural result of the effects of sin in our own minds. Phillips got it right when he translated ""Sin pays its wage: death..." (Romans 6:23, Phillips) Compare Ellen White's words: "We are not to regard God as waiting to punish the sinner for his sin. The sinner brings the punishment upon himself. His own actions start a train of circumstances that bring the sure result. Every act of transgression reacts upon the sinner, works in him a change of character, and makes it more easy for him to transgress again. By choosing to sin, men separate themselves from God, cut themselves off from the channel of blessing, and the sure result is ruin and death."
Letter 96, 1896; Selected Messages, Book 1, p. 235; FLB 84; 6BC 1085,1110; 1MR 130,131; The EGWhite 1888 Materials, p. 1576



9. What are the main issues that have been raised in the Great Controversy? What statements, even accusations, have been made against God or the Devil?

Satan is a very wily foe. He has a wonderful intellect and he uses it to maximum advantage. He realizes that his name has been stigmatized by millennia of people who claim to be God's followers. Satan realizes therefore that for him to bring any accusations against God he must do it in very clever ways. It would certainly not be helpful for him to openly accuse God in the Scripture. Back in the beginning, apparently Satan thought that he could get away with this. In his very first contact with the human race he accuses God of being a liar and also of arbitrarily withholding something from our first parents that would have been for their best good. (See Genesis 3:1-4) In subsequent generations, Satan has realized that it is much more effective to work through those who allegedly are God's servants. He does this by misleading them to accept the things that he believes about God and then spread these views to others as if they were from God. In this way Satan has led people to believe that God is arbitrary, exacting, vengeful, unforgiving, and severe. He accuses God of being a tyrant, just hoping for an opportunity to punish those who don't comply with His commands. Many of God's commands have been considered arbitrary. The tree of knowledge of good and evil and the Sabbath are considered by many to be arbitrary tests.
God is thought to be exacting and vengeful because He is pictured as looking down from heaven with eagle eyes to make sure that every evil deed is recorded and appropriately punished.
God is pictured as unforgiving because many people believe that He must have a large group of "saints" and even His own Son constantly pleading with Him in order to find it in His heart to forgive sinners.
God is thought to be severe because He threw Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden on their first offense. Many believe that if God finds even a single sin remaining on our record when the time comes for Him to review our record we will be disqualified to enter heaven.
These are just a few brief but well known examples of ways in which God has been accused by Satan, working through God's "followers".



10. Could God have established trust (faith) for eternity without sin having ever entered the universe? How did two thirds of the angels decide to trust God? On what basis did Abraham, Job and Moses trust God?

None of the Bible had been written yet! Were they just taking a leap in the dark?
God will always seek the best possible ways to communicate with us. He would veil His own glory and the glory of His angels and come down and talk to us individually every day if it were not for the fact that Satan would demand equal time! We would soon be so confused that we would probably be worse off than we are now. It should be clear however that many angels and men trusted God before there was a single written record of His trustworthiness. All we need to base our confidence in God is an opportunity to see how He has worked down through the years. In our day that record is best provided by the Bible.



11. As we go through the Bible doesn't it look like God may have had a plan, let us call it Plan A, that seems to have failed and then God is forced to move to Plan B, etc.? Doesn't the whole Bible seem to be a record of God having to try and try again to reach men and communicate with them? Or is such a thing not possible for an Omniscient God? Does God ever have to use "emergency measures?"

See the page on "Why Then the Law?"



12. Did God really have to go to the length of dying to convince us to love and trust Him? Is trustworthiness under very difficult circumstances more reliable than under more pleasant circumstances?

When someone has accused you of being untrustworthy it requires considerable time and a great deal of patience and good evidence to re-establish your trustworthiness. The entire Biblical record was given to show that God can be trusted. See the book Can God Be Trusted? But since God has been accused of lying etc., it was necessary for God to demonstrate that those accusations were false before He could fully re-establish our trust. This He accomplished by coming and living and dying as He did. When we see and come to understand all that God has gone through and all the evidence that He has provided that He can be trusted it would be most ungrateful for us to still refuse to acknowledge His trustworthiness.
As noted previously, many people have trusted God with no Bible available to them at all! But look at all the evidence that is available to us in our day! How foolish it would be for us to ignore that evidence or claim that God has not adequately revealed the truth to us.



13. Looking through the entire Bible, what did God actually accomplish by the use of force of any kind? (Consider the flood, the tower of Babel, the death of the firstborn in Egypt, the Mt. Sinai experience, etc.)

Has God been able to answer or deal with any of the questions raised in the Great Controversy through the use of force or power? After each of these experiences, did human beings trust God more or less as a result? Do you think God has tended to use too much power or too little? Would you like to see God use more power or less power in our time? So often we hear religious people and especially TV evangelists seem to suggest that if God would just allow them to use His power as they feel they deserve to receive it they would finish God's work in almost no time!
Think of what this implies about God! They are suggesting that if God were just as "wise" and "efficient" in His use of power as they would be if they had access to that power the work would have been finished long ago!
By contrast, God has demonstrated again and again in Scripture that the use of power never accomplishes anything more than to get people's attention for a little while. Think of the power that God exercised in destroying the entire world in a flood. (Genesis 6-8) What was the result? In a short time they were doing everything they could to defy this "God" or perhaps to escape from Him if He should try to drown the world again!
(Genesis 11:1-9) Were all the Egyptians or even all the Israelites converted by the plagues which were sent on Egypt? (Exodus 14:1-10) Were the Israelites all converted by the watching Korah, Dathan and Abiram and their families being swallowed up by ground? (Numbers 16:30-34, 41) Many other examples could be given, but the point should be clear.
God realizes that in our time the very best way of dealing with us is to provide the evidence for us to review and study so we can make up our own minds. No show of power is going to "scare the hell" out of anyone.
If we are determined to go our own way, God will not prevent it even though He wishes He could. God hopes that we will look over the evidence and be so convinced by it that not even the devil will be able to deceive, confuse or mislead us into distrusting God ever again.



14. Would you be comfortable worshiping the God of the Old Testament as you understand Him? Do you see any significant differences between this picture of God and the picture of God that you get in the New Testament?

The Bible writers clearly felt that the God of the Old Testament was the same as the God of the New Testament. (See 1 Corinthians 4:9; John 5:39; Luke 24:44) It is true that many in Jesus' day did not feel that He was in any way like the "God" of the Old Testament that they thought that they knew. See #1 above.



15. Are there any important teachings found in the New Testament that cannot be found in the Old Testament? Why do you think the "scholars" of Christ's time so generally misinterpreted the Old Testament? Do we ever do this to the Old or the New Testament?

While the emphasis of the New Testament and the setting in which it was written is quite different than the Old Testament, there is very little in the New Testament that is not already found in the Old Testament. BR> Compare Matthew 5:43-48 with Leviticus 19:18. Compare Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5 with Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34 and Luke 10:25-28.
New and different times brought differences in the way some truths were presented and also some new aspects of truths that had been presented before. A number of details of doctrines are brought out in the New Testament that are not spelled out in the Old Testament, but the basic teachings are the same.