If we want to know God, we must realize that we must begin with what He as revealed to us. To know the book is to know the author. We do not need to know all the reasons and answers, or why He does not always respond. God says, “you will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.” (Jer. 29:13) We must have a love for God that seeks Him in the darkness of incomprehensibility. We must leave behind the attractions, the desires, and the idolatries of this life. The nearer we draw to God the sweeter will be our joy. A thirst for God can be satisfied. David said, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him?” Psalm 42:1-2
There are two questions to ask before we consider anything else. Firstly, what do we do with some of the Old Testament revelations that seem perplexing, and secondly, we need to deal with the lie that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are somehow different.

There seems to be a lot of “putting to death” in the Old Testament! A gay activist was heard to say, “I’m glad we don’t follow the Old testament any more or they would stone us.” A Jehovah’s Witness once accosted me with a similar taunt when he said, “In the Old Testament if you broke the Sabbath you would be stoned to death.” I was able to point out in both cases that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) in both testaments. The only difference is that Jesus has now taken my penalty and in effect has been “stoned to death” in my place. When Israel was liberated, they had to be re-educated in the ways of God and so the lessons were quite dramatic – the wages of sin, literally, was death. My gay activist friend said, “If that is God then I don’t want anything to do with Him!” My response is, “So you only want a God that agrees with you?”

It needs to be pointed out that there is no exclusion zone around the cross. “Whosoever will may come.” (Revelation 22:17). ‘Whosoever’ is an all-inclusive pronoun that excludes no one. The same word is found in the greatest invitation in the Bible – John 3:16. There is nothing in the word of God to forbid you coming to God in Christ Jesus, but everything to invite and encourage you.