Dan, I used to hold to your view (and Copeland’s—Is God A Moral Monster?). However, I find those are the “easy-way-out” views. “The God Always Wins” view is not a cop out—especially for those of us who see the Bible as a text “God-breathed”.

I find Greg Boyd’s explanation (The Crucifixion of the Warrior God & Cross Vision) to be far more compelling. God always bears the sin of the fallen world—we see this in Jesus. As Boyd suggests—God bears the literary sins of Israel. In other words, he allows Israel to describe him in terms of an An Ancient Near Eastern Warrior deity—even though he is not. He does not command the genocides—but Israel reinterprets and rewrites.

Your view misses an important Christian and second covenant understanding of God. Jesus is the exact representation of God. When you look at Jesus, you see God-in-flesh. As Brian Zahnd says, “God is like Jesus. He has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time or will be a time when God is not like Jesus.”

Jesus loves his creation so much he would rather allow creation to kill him rather than to kill his creation.

Before, we viewed God as an ANE warrior deity (and the description of YHWH in the conquest narratives is absolutely no different than the ANE description of Baal or any other ANE warrior god)—but Jesus, the exact representation of God now reveals the true nature of God—one who bears the sins of others, even the literary sins and mischaracterizations of Israel.

This is in keeping with the progressive nature of revelation from the Hebrew Scriptures through to Second Testament.

Does that mean we ditch the first testament? By no means! Jesus took it seriously, so we do too. It means we realize there may be a different message than we realized in those pages.

To sum it up—we should never look at Jesus through the lens of the first testament. Rather we should read the first testament through the lens of Jesus. He is the central and focal point.