When we read the OT I think we often fail to understand the context of its primitiveness. We can talk about the revelation Jesus gave, forgetting that He gave the Holy Spirit to enable the manifestation of a higher revelation in us, and through us into this world of chaos and futility.
“The Holy Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified.”
Jesus taught that if He did not “go away” the Holy Spirit could not come and thst until the Holy Spirit could come His work was greatly constrained.
Also, if we look at the world that was before the flood we see that the whole earth had descended into depravity and violence of an extreme nature.We know that God loves the world, but His experiment with stewardship has largely been a failure. So God starts over with Noah. A new steward. A righteous family.
But without the Holy Spirit in the earth man continues to tend towards evil. So God creates the Lampstand(Israel) from the loins of Abraham, and institutes among them a just, but fairly stringent law because they will still tend towards evil, and even with the law- they do gravitate towards evil, over and over.
God created the world and one of the pillars of that is family. God institutes His most serious consequences around the sins that threaten the family because the family is the core element that sustains community and community is the foundation for civilization and the secure and peaceful cohabitation of the creature. Hence severe penalties towards adultery and homosexuality because we have already demonstrated our propensity towards destruction and degeneration over thousands of years.
In order for humans to develop normally they must be grown in the womb of innocense. Within a wholesome family. The consequences of defiling that precious womb are all around us. Dysfunction, addiction, suicide, chaos. So the law is formed with the preservation of family and community at its core, in the midst of a populace that tends towards self agrandizement- even at the cost of its children’s futures- and the individuals preferences are subject to the welfare of the whole in a wholesome way.
Who has known the mind of the Lord and who has been His counselor?
We speak as if we understand who we are and what we have been better than God does because we are naiive, heavily invested in our own survival as an interest that even supercedes(in our own minds) the purpose God intends as the destination for all creation.
Family, harmony, union, communion.
YHWH is more serious than we are. Our specious reasonings for judging His acts are superficial and uninformed concerning “olam” past and “olam” future. We speak from an environment vastly different than the one we think to understand and thus we judge the scriptures and the God of the scriptures from a smug superficial view, but if the Old Testament scriptures are that faulty and uninformed then much of what we believe and claim to verify by the New Testament is just as faulty because the writers of it do not recognize this “so-called” deficiency in those OT scriptures. Paul says these things were "recorded for our examples so that we will not fall in the same manner of disobedience.
I am all for questioning what the scriptures mean. I am all for questioning the common interpretations of them. I am all for continually delving into translation issues. But if you question the inspiration of the OT then you are building on a foundation of sand in your NT- written by men who could not understand they were attributing divine inspiration to the foibles of the lowly foolish Israelites and that ignorant guy Moses and the wacky prophets.
We do not understand how God can be so severe and at the same time define Himself as love because we do not understand love, or understand Him. Our immediate survival is not His endgame. We will all be as He is within, and we will all love as He loves, in a wonderful, beautiful, universal community- and that is the “Light that shines out of darkness”- the form emerging from chaos. Without chaos there can be no form, no re-creation, no “transformation into the image of Christ”… and YHWH is dealing with man as a whole, as well as individuals, and He will bring the whole into a perfect redemption that was shaped in chaos, injustice, betrayal and irreverence …focused on the greatest injustice of all, the crucifixion of Jesus the Beloved…the Anointed One.
“The Holy Spirit had not yet been given, for Jesus had not yet been glorified.”
“If I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me”.
7“But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. 8“And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment; 9concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me; 10and concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you no longer see Me; 11and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.
12“I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13“But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. 14“He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. 15“All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.