Before God Was Good

Before God was good, he was terrifying. Before He was the universal father of love preached in the Gospels, He was the Lord of Hosts, a pillar of fire in the desert, a jealous and vengeful deity who drowned the world and demanded unwavering, fearful obedience. For most of Western religion, this difficult, wrathful figure is reconciled as an earlier, sterner manifestation of the one true God. But for a fascinating and radical group of early Christian mystics, the Gnostics, this was no mere phase. They read the Old Testament and came to a shocking conclusion: the god depicted within its pages was not the true, ultimate God at all. He was an imposter. They gave him a name: Yaldabaoth, the “child of chaos,” known more commonly as the Demiurge.

To understand this audacious claim, one must first grasp the Gnostic cosmos. For them, the ultimate reality was not creation, but the Pleroma—a perfect, unknowable fullness of pure spirit, presided over by a transcendent, distant God. From this God emanated divine beings, or Aeons. However, a cosmic error led to the creation of a lesser, imperfect being – the Demiurge. This Demiurge, in Gnostic thought, was the architect of the material world, the flawed and transient realm of flesh and suffering perceived by humans.

Unaware of the True God above him, he blundered forth and fashioned the material universe, a clumsy and corrupt imitation of the spiritual realm. Trapping sparks of the divine Pleroma within human bodies of flesh, he then proclaimed himself the one and only God.

The Old Testament, for the Gnostics, became Exhibit A in the case against this cosmic jailer. They didn’t need to invent evidence; they simply pointed to Yahweh’s own words and deeds.

Consider His very first introduction in Genesis. The Gnostic reading of the Garden of Eden is a masterclass in subversion. Here is a god who creates a garden, populates it with fragile beings, and then, most suspiciously, forbids them from eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Why would a truly benevolent, ultimate God fear his creations becoming wise? The Gnostics argued that the Demiurge, being fundamentally ignorant of the realms above him, prized ignorance in his subjects. Knowledge was a threat, for it could lead humanity to realise their true, spiritual origin and the prison-like nature of their material existence. In this narrative, the serpent is not a tempter but a liberator, a messenger from the true God, urging Adam and Eve to awaken. Yahweh’s subsequent punishment—cursing the ground, inflicting the pain of childbirth, and casting them out—is not the just act of a father, but the panicked retaliation of a tyrant whose control has been challenged.

This jealousy and insecurity, for the Gnostics, thunders through the Pentateuch. “I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God,” he declares in Exodus. The Gnostic asks: what kind of ultimate being experiences jealousy? A perfect, all-encompassing God would have no rivals to be jealous of. Jealousy is the emotion of a limited being, one who fears losing power and worship to others. The constant demand for sacrifice, the intricate and bloody rituals, the obsession with obedience to his specific laws—these are the behaviours of a lesser ruler demanding tribute, not a transcendent spirit seeking communion.

Then there is the matter of his temperament. The Old Testament is filled with acts of staggering violence that are difficult to square with a being of perfect love. The Gnostics saw the Great Flood not as a righteous cleansing, but as a cosmic tantrum. An imperfect creator, frustrated with the flaws in his own handiwork, decides to smash his creation and start over. This is the act of a failed artisan, not a perfect deity.

Nowhere is this character profile more damning than in the commands for genocide. When Yahweh orders the Israelites to utterly destroy the Canaanites—”show them no mercy; do not make a treaty with them or allow them to intermarry”—the Gnostics saw the brutal tribalism of a war god. This was not the universal father of all souls, but a local deity protecting his chosen people, his private project, against all others. It is the celestial equivalent of a gang leader marking his territory. The smiting of firstborn sons in Egypt, the command to utterly destroy the Amalekites (in Deuteronomy 25:17-19), and the instances of divine punishment that led to mass death – all of these could be seen as evidence of a creator who was powerful but also harsh, prone to fits of anger, and lacking in the boundless compassion expected of the ultimate divine source. 

The Old Testament portrayal of Yahweh also infamously includes commands for brutal punishments such as stoning, burning, and drowning, alongside demands for regular animal sacrifices, described as a “pleasing aroma.” This depiction, with its emphasis on violence and ritualistic death, is often viewed by the discerning as aligning more with the characteristics of a malevolent entity or demon than a benevolent God of Love. This challenging perception is further compounded by the actions of many of Yahweh’s prominent followers, who frequently mirrored their deity’s ruthlessness: Moses committed murder, King David orchestrated the death of Uriah for personal gain, Abraham was prepared to commit infanticide, Joshua waged genocidal wars attributed to Yahweh “hardening their hearts” for total destruction, and Elijah famously immolated dozens of men with fire. Such accounts, portraying both the deity and his adherents engaging in acts of extreme violence and questionable morality, lend significant credence to the Gnostic perspective, which identifies Yahweh as the Demiurge – a flawed, imperfect creator – rather than the ultimate, true God of divine love and ultimate goodness.

Even the story of Job, often cited as a profound exploration of faith and suffering, was read by the Gnostics as a portrait of cosmic cruelty. Here, Yahweh engages in what amounts to a wager with a subordinate (Satan, or “the accuser”), using a good man’s life as the playing field. He allows Job’s family to be killed and his body to be wracked with disease simply to prove a point. When Job finally confronts God, he is not given a compassionate answer but is instead bullied into submission by a display of raw power: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” This is the voice of the Demiurge, who mistakes power for wisdom and creation for ownership.

Thus, the Gnostics ingeniously inverted the scripture. They saw not a story of revelation, but of concealment; not a history of a chosen people, but the chronicle of a cosmic mistake. The fiery, insecure, and violent Yahweh of the Old Testament was a perfect match for their portrait of the Demiurge: a powerful but blind god who crafted a broken world and ruled it through fear and law, desperately trying to keep the divine sparks trapped within his flawed creation from remembering their true home in the light. The Gnostic path, then, was to seek the secret knowledge, the gnosis, that would allow them to bypass this cosmic warden and ascend back to the Pleroma, leaving the angry god of this world to rage in his empty kingdom.