Is there anything in the Old Testament that could be called a confession of faith? Of course, the Shema (see Deuteronomy 6:4-9) would qualify. But there is another confession of faith that appears in every part of the Old Testament: the Pentateuch, the historical books, the wisdom literature, and the prophets. Interestingly, the first person to make this “confession” about God was God. In Exodus 34:6-7 God proclaims his name (YHWH) to Moses: “YHWH, YHWH, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

This proclamation of his name includes a description of his character. YHWH is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. This, the ancient Hebrews confessed, is the nature of our God.

God’s proclamation of his own character resounds throughout the Old Testament by those who found it to be true. Forms of it appear three times in the Psalms (86:15; 103:8; 145:8), in Joel 2:13, in Jonah 4:2 (where the unhappy prophet is complaining that God is like this even with hispeople’s enemies), and in Nehemiah 9:17.

I once took a class from a teacher who described the God of the New Testament as loving and forgiving, but the God of the Old Testament as angry and vindictive. He had not read the Old Testament carefully enough.

Someone might respond, “But surely the God of the Old Testament is often spoken of as angry.” Yes, this is true. But he has much to be angry about. He is angry about injustice, abuse, and oppression. He is angry at the things and the people that are ruining his beautiful creation, but he is slow to anger. On the other hand, he is quick to forgive, to help, and restore.

This Old Testament confession of faith was around before Israel became a nation, and it was still on the lips of faithful Jews after Israel ceased to be a nation, went into exile, and then returned to as a remnant.

When we come to the New Testament, we see this confession in another setting—or rather, in another person. While Old Testament people made the good confession in prayer, like Nehemiah and Jonah, or in song, like the Psalmists, or put it in writing like the prophet, in the New Testament the nature of God is expressed in a person: Jesus.

This is what St. John had in mind when he wrote, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). What the Old Testament put into words about God, Jesus put into a body. He is the walking, talking, weeping, loving exposition of the Old Testament confession. In Jesus, the Infinite and Eternal was embedded in space and time.

The Old Testament confessed that YHWH is compassionate. Jesus demonstrated what that compassion is like by healing the diseases of the “harassed and helpless” (see Matthew 8:35-36). When Jesus and his apostles went across the lake for a little R&R, people found out where they were staying and crashed their vacation—by the thousands. Instead of being angry, Jesus “had compassion on them” and made sure that they all received a good meal (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:3-44). When a widow lost her only son, Jesus felt compassion for her (NIV, “his heart went out to her”), and he raised her son back to life.

The confession proclaims that God is gracious. St. John went so far as to say that God’s grace came to humanity through Jesus Christ (John 1:17), who was “full of grace” (literal translation, John 1:14). This grace was demonstrated in Jesus’s willingness to go to a Gentile’s home to heal his servant, his readiness to take time from his busy schedule to stop and bless little children, and his gentle way with people excluded from society (Luke 5:12-15; 7:36-50; John 4:4-26). That grace was epitomized in Jesus’s decision to lift us out of our poverty by becoming poor for us through the incarnation (2 Cor. 8:9).

To Moses, God revealed himself as being “slow to anger.” This was, of course, demonstrated to Moses himself when God called him (Exodus 3), to Israel as it grumbled and rebelled in the wilderness (see Nehemiah 9:29-31 for a comment on this), and with the people of Ninevah in the days of Jonah (Jonah 3:9-4:2).

That God is slow to anger does not mean that he never gets angry. When an adult abuses a child, God is angry. When a nation refuses to turn from its idols, God is angry. When the rich oppress the poor, God is angry. Jesus perfectly demonstrated this. He was slow to anger, putting up with ignorance and error and calming childish fears. But he could become angry, as he did when a synagogue of hard-hearted people ignored a man’s needs because they were more concerned for their rules (not God’s) than they were for their fellow man (Mark 3:1-6). Jesus was angry at his own disciples when they turned people away, thinking Jesus (and themselves) too important to waste time with children (Mark 10:13-16). He overturned the tables of the money changers and drove the merchants out of the temple, where they had usurped the place of Gentile worshipers and turned the temple into a market (Mark 11:15-17).

In the Old Testament confession of faith, it is acknowledged that YHWH is forgiving. Jesus embodied this forgiveness in everyday life. He forgave the young man who was paralyzed – how liberating his words of forgiveness must have been (Mark 2:1-5). He forgave a woman whose sordid life had been the subject of gossip in the community (Luke 7:36-50). He demonstrated forgiveness to a scheming, unpatriotic, greedy tax collector named Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10). The forgiveness he expressed toward each of these people – and more besides – scandalized those who were present.

The quintessential example of forgiveness comes when “wicked men” handed Jesus over to be crucified. As the soldiers drove spikes through his hands/wrists and feet, he prayed: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.” Such mercy, expressed in forgiveness, boggles the mind.

The point, of course, is that this is exactly what YHWH the creator God is like. Jesus perfectly demonstrated his Father’s nature (John 14:9-10) by being “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness … forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” He is “the image of the invisible God,” the “radiance of God’s glory, and the exact representation of his being.”

God Most High is exactly like Jesus? He is. And that is good news for the entire human race.