This was a good article I read by Jeffrey Poor over at Rethink. I keep coming back to questions like this concerning the Old Testament here on my own site and so I found this article helpful: https://rethinknow.org/2018/07/03/why-is-god-so-angry-in-the-old-testament/
Why Is God So Angry in the Old Testament?
Haden Clark 
I agree, the Old Testament was to show humanity how much we needed Jesus. God can’t deny Himself and his absolute righteousness, and so before Jesus’s sacrifice which put us in “right standing” with God, there had to be strict laws and sacrifices that couldn’t always be followed because of our sinfulness. If we aren’t with God, we are opposed to Him. There isn’t an in-between. Jesus brought salvation and mercy. That is vital if we are to reach the lost nations today. In the Old, any lost soul was more or less an enemy to the Israelite way, we see that the Israelites were easily swayed by the opposing beliefs of their enemies. Mercy often led to corruption. Today, with the Holy Spirit, we can truly transform a people, instead of them transforming us.
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I have not seen any anger. God is the Good Parent.
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I am not sure if I agree that God seems mean in the OT because he is “operating under a different set of rules” and that “when Jesus entered the picture he changed everything.” Everything that is contained with the NT is hidden in the OT. The reason for this is because the core message of the OT the covenant between God and humanity is revealed in the NT through the Body of Christ and His sacrifice for our salvation. I think that the problem with this post is that it starts from a premise that the OT and NT are different, unique and distinct which they are not, both are a unifying force of each other. I like to think of the OT as a giant forest with trees, and rocks and small streams and uneven pathways. We walk through this forest without the NT and without Christ in the dark. Our foot hits something hard on the ground and we can reason and suppose it to be a rock. Walk into something wet, and assume it is a stream. By the end of walking through this forest we get a pretty good idea of what the whole area is like (little stream here, big tree there, hike up a hill over there) but it is not the full and complete picture because we did it in the dark. Christ is like a giant flashlight, now we know that the wet thing we walk through was a stream, but that hard thing our foot hit was actually a stump and not a rock (close before, but now we know for certain what it is). The OT is like a facet dripping slowly overnight and the NT is the sink that is filled with water at the end, and if I want to beat this analogy to death, Christ would be plug in the drain keeping the water held together.
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Thank you for sharing. That was a good article. I often wondered why God seemed so Angry in the Old Testament. Jeffery Poor did have some good points. And like him, a lot of things still just don’t make sense to me. That’s where faith comes in. We have to have faith and believe that God knows what He is doing and He has a reason for everything. We are not meant to understand God. Our human minds are not capable of understanding the divine mysteries of God.
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I left a longer reply to this post on the ‘rethink’ blog itself. It comes down to this: When we view the ‘old’ testament as showing something different then the ‘new’ in any way, shape, or form, we underscore a misunderstanding of God, His grace and salvation, and His judgment, and we will fail to understand all that Yeshua (Jesus) did for us, both in His life and the sacrifice He made.
– Yosef
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Good article. Thanks for sharing.
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My flip, my turn.? Larry stated eagerly wiggling to get an opportunity to talk.
?I feel the very best factor about God is that he can beat up the satan as a result of the
devil is frightening and imply and ugly and dangerous
and God can beat him up so the devil can?t hurt us like he did those demon filled folks in Jesus day.
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Beautifully penned down
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