There is a fashionable little trick in modern Christianity. One that praises Jesus loudly, then uses him to gag the Bible. The trick works because it sounds holy. “We read everything through Jesus.” Amen. Of course we do. The question is whether we mean the Jesus who is actually there, or the Jesus we keep in a jar like scented wax: gentle, glowing, and useless against sin.
The real Jesus is not the chaplain of our moral preferences. He is not sent into the world to apologize for Sinai, blush at Sodom, wince at the flood, and assure us that the prophets got carried away. He is the eternal Son, the Word who was with God and was God, the one through whom all things were made. If John 1 means anything, it means Bethlehem was not His beginning. It was His arrival in flesh.
What passes for careful hermeneutics today would not have impressed the early church. They had already seen what happens when you blur the identity of the Son or soften His role in God’s action. Writing against Praxeas, Tertullian did not attempt to rescue God from His own Scriptures. He identified the one acting in them.
“It is the Son, therefore, who has been from the beginning administering judgment, throwing down the haughty tower, and dividing the tongues, punishing the whole world by the violence of waters, raining upon Sodom and Gomorrah fire and brimstone, as the LORD from the LORD. For He it was who at all times came down to hold converse with men, from Adam on to the patriarchs and the prophets, in vision, in dream, in mirror, in dark saying; ever from the beginning laying the foundation of the course of His dispensations, which He meant to follow out to the very last.”
That claim leaves very little room for selective readings of Scripture. Tertullian does not allow you to attribute only the comforting parts of God’s action to Christ while quietly relocating the rest. He does not isolate the Son in the gentle scenes and leave the remainder to a vague doctrine of divine mystery. He traces a single line of action in which the one who speaks, the one who appears, and the one who judges are identified as the same Son, and that identification forces the question of whether the New Testament confirms or overturns that unity.
The New Testament confirms it. Its claims about Christ are not limited to revelation but extend to agency. “All things were made through him” (John 1:3) and “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17) establish that nothing in creation or its history stands outside His work. “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22) assigns judgment itself to Him. Taken together, these claims do not permit a divided account of Christ’s activity. If He is the agent of creation and the bearer of judgment, then the historical acts by which God creates and judges cannot be placed outside His work.
Scripture presents those acts as direct and revelatory. The flood is framed as God’s response to pervasive violence, “every intention… only evil continually… I will blot out man” (Gen. 6:5–7). Sodom is described as judicial inquiry and execution, “I will go down to see… then the Lord rained… fire from the Lord out of heaven” (Gen. 18:21; 19:24). Babel is a deliberate intervention, “let us go down and confuse their language” (Gen. 11:7). These are not indirect permissions or narrative misreadings. They are presented as God’s own actions, disclosing His opposition to sin.
The prophets and apostles treat them in exactly that way. Amos and Isaiah appeal to these events as precedents of divine judgment. Jesus does the same, “as were the days of Noah… so will be the coming of the Son of Man” and “just as it was in the days of Lot… so will it be” (Matt. 24:37; Luke 17:28–30). Peter and Jude invoke the flood and Sodom as examples of what God does to the ungodly (2 Pet. 2:5–6; Jude 7). The force of these appeals depends on a straightforward assumption that God truly acted in judgment then and will do so again, and Jesus identifies that future judgment with His own authority.
This is where the modern interpretive move becomes visible. It is often granted that Christ is present throughout Scripture, yet His role in judgment is qualified. Judgment is recast as indirect or accommodated, so that what appears to be divine action no longer directly reveals God’s character. But that move introduces a fracture. It separates what God does from what God reveals, turning acts that Scripture presents as disclosure into material that must be corrected.
That fracture cannot be contained once the cross is brought into view. The New Testament presents Christ’s death in terms that presuppose real divine judgment. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). God put Him forward “to show his righteousness… so that he might be just and the justifier” (Rom. 3:25–26). These claims are only coherent if judgment is not merely apparent but actual. To bear judgment is to bear what God truly executes against sin, not what He appears to execute while doing something else.
The relation is therefore direct and unavoidable. If one denies that God judges in the way Scripture describes in Genesis and the prophets, then one must also deny that Christ bears that judgment, because there is no stable content left to be borne. Conversely, if one affirms that Christ bears divine judgment, one is committed to affirming that such judgment is genuinely exercised by God and disclosed in the scriptural record of His actions.
You cannot deny the flood as an act of divine judgment while retaining the claim that Christ bears judgment for sin, because the latter depends on the former. You cannot treat Sodom as a narrative misreading while appealing to the cross as the place where that same judgment is satisfied, because the content of what is satisfied has been removed. You cannot evacuate judgment from the events that establish the category and then invoke that category at the cross without emptying it of meaning.