Some good text to preserve and parse out:

Then you have that wonderful statement in the fourteenth chapter of Exodus, 14:14, where the Lord through Moses says to the people, “Listen, have faith, stand firm, be quiet, be still, I will fight for you. I will fight for you, and this very day, you will see the Egyptians perish before your very eyes. I will save you. I will rescue you. I will deliver you.” And in the Old Testament, that meant a violent act of salvation in, literally, killing the enemies. And God is killing the enemies all the time in the Old Testament. That’s what he’s doing day and night, so to speak, and some people are scandalized by it, but the Bible reader, in the light of Jesus Christ, would say, “What was God to do? How else was he going to proceed? He’s dealing with a violent world where people are killing each other all the time, and in the names of their gods they’re killing each other,” and so on.

Now, in the Passover exodus story, eight times you have that expression with these plagues that God says, “I am doing this that you may know that I am God, that you may know that I am your God, that the nations and the Egyptians may know that I reign over all creation, and that you may know that I am the only God that there is.” So the violence in the Old Testament and the violence of God himself against his enemies—because those people who are enemies of Israel, they are enemies of him—here we should see that the warfare in the Old Testament is not so much, so to speak, a warfare between peoples. It’s a warfare, actually, between gods. It’s the one true and living God fighting against all the false gods and all those who are evilly inspired into idolatry by those false gods, by the powers of evil, by the demons.

It is interesting to think of it in those terms, but it still has potentially the issue of using humans as pawns.

And by the way, I mentioned in a podcast before, I made a mistake; I misspoke definitely, for sure, when I claimed that however sinful people might be, the righteous of the Old Testament are considered righteous because of their faith, because they believed in God. So many of them did many immoral things. They did murder, they did adultery like David, but they never, ever apostatized against the true God. And the mistake that I made is that I included Solomon in that number. Well, Solomon is never included in that number because at the end of Solomon’s life he did apostatize. Besides having 300 wives and 700 concubines, he was also worshiping the Baalim and the Asterith, and he was worshiping the gods of all those women who led him into sexual impurity and lewdness and unchastity and just carnality. So Solomon is not among the marvels of the Old Testament, because he did not keep faith to the end. And sometimes I think we should never put a fresco of Solomon in any of our churches.

By the way, in the letter to the Hebrews, when they list those who were faithful to God in the Old Covenant, and they may have been sinful in their moral behavior, but they never apostatized against God, Solomon is never included in that number. Pay attention in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews; read about who are listed as righteous there. They are the ones who never apostatized.

I had no idea about this, to be honest.

So God finds people who can believe in him, and believe in him as the one, true, and only God, and he does all these violent acts that they may know, that you may know that I am God. And that is a theme that persists through the entire Hebrew Scripture. And then it even comes into the New Testament that this God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses raises his Son, Jesus, from the dead, who is the fulfillment of that entire history, that we might know that he is God. The ultimate—how can you say?—proof of God’s action, that we may know that he is God, is when he vindicates his own Son who has been rejected, killed and murdered, and has become the victim of murder, violence of all his enemies, in order to destroy his enemies by dying himself and not by killing them but by dying for them and with them.

It ultimately has to come back to this, right: God dying for all the people of all the lands, including those who had died in previous wars, going into Hades and liberating them.

He died on the cross for the very people that also had put him there.

There’s a great Protestant thinker, a theologian named Karl Bart, who said, “Until God can establish his power over the false gods, until he can show that he can kill and make alive, that the can cast down, that he can raise up, and that he is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, then that God cannot really show mercy.” Because if he would show mercy without showing his power, people would think that he didn’t have the power, and that’s certainly a teaching of the Old Testament. God has to establish his power, and the way you establish your power is by killing your enemies. Sadly, that’s the truth.

This is a very interesting observation: God in the Old Testament is proving himself to the people who are scared and fragile, just like how people are now.

Now, if that were the last word, then we would really have a scandal on our hands, but for Christianity that is not the last word, as we will see in a second and as we already know, I hope. In Jesus Christ, you do not have that any more. You have a radical reversal of God’s activity, because once he has established his power, then he can send his Son to show mercy and to show what the power of God really is, which is the power of truth, the power of righteousness, the power of love, which is absolutely, fully, completely, and totally revealed in the Cross of Christ and in the crucified Messiah.

But in the Old Testament, you have God doing these acts so that they would know that he is God. Here I would recommend to you as an exercise: read the Prophet Ezekiel. If you read the Prophet Ezekiel and all that is going on there, you will see that it says in Ezekiel over 65 times—I counted them—where God says, “I am against you and I will do these mighty acts and I will destroy not only your enemies: I will destroy you, and I will destroy Jerusalem”—how about that?—“so that you may know that I am God.”

Now here we’ve got to see something very important: that the violence of God in the Old Covenant is not just against the enemies of Israel and the enemies of God. It’s not simply against those people whose names are listed: the Canaanites, the Perusites, the Moabites, the Edomites, the Hittites, the Hagorites. There’s all these names of all these people in Canaan that God has to actually destroy so that he could keep his soteriological, his saving activities in the world alive and keep his own name holy and his own name glorified over and against all the demonic powers that are being worshiped as gods, all those idols.

So this is what you have there, but in Ezekiel and in Jeremiah, in Isaiah, you have a new thing there, God doing a new thing. What’s he doing? Well, he is saying to his own people now, “You are unrighteous. You are unfaithful. You are sinful. You are idolaters. And I’ll show you what you’re going to get, too.” And then he razes Jerusalem to the ground, and he actually calls Nebuchadnezzar… he calls him, “My christ, my anointed.” He calls Nebuchadnezzar, the most wicked king of all the earth, who comes in the year—what is it? the sixth century before Christ—586 BCE, before the Common Era, before Christ—you have the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.

And then the Persians defeat the Babylonians, Cyrus comes in, and he’s now called God’s anointed and God’s christ, to rebuilt the temple. But by the time you get to Darius, the temple’s still not rebuilt; then in the time of Haggai and Ezra and Nehemiah and Zachariah, you have the second temple being rebuilt. But then that temple itself is going to get destroyed after Jesus is crucified in the year 70, never to be rebuilt again. But the most amazing thing is that God says to his own people in the Old Testament Scripture, “I am against you. I am against you, because you are trusting in horses. You think you can manipulate me. You think that because I told you you are my people that you can do whatever you want and you can be unrighteous and sinful and break that Law and not keep the commandments and not keep the Sabbath or anything else.”

So God has to show his righteousness, and sometimes in the Bible it’s pretty awesome how he does it. There’s that terrible story of that guy, Uzzah, who—they’re carrying the Ark of the Covenant when they’re going into Cana, and he stumbles and trips and he falls against the ark and touches it, and he drops dead. Well, maybe he had a heart attack because he was so scared that he touched the holy ark, but of course in the Hebrew mind, it said: “God killed him.” Then you have that terrible story of the guy collecting sticks on the Sabbath day, and God says, “Stone him to death.” Well, God has to show that power, and that’s the kind of world he was dealing with; those are the kind of people he was dealing with, the kind of men he was dealing with, and this is not a joke.

The problem with this is that it cannot actually be very persuasive in the eyes of nonbelievers.

This is real business, and we can’t flash back our post-Christian, post-Enlightenment, humanistic, secularly humanistic ethics back into the old days. And of course, the one thing, as I mentioned already on the radio about the humanistic ethics is that they say it doesn’t really matter who God is, and there’s no worship at all. There’s no one to give thanks and glory and honor and worship to at all. You’re just supposed to be a nice person and get what you want and share the greed, and, as I said, our modern time is almost a radical opposite of the Old Testament. The Old Testament was for God to establish his divinity and to be worshiped and to receive glory and honor, because that’s where human beings find life and salvation and that’s where they are not becoming overcome by the powers of passion and sin and death and destruction itself. And of course, in the Scripture the last enemy that God has to destroy is death itself, and he does that on the Cross through the death of his Son, Jesus the Messiah.

It is absolutely the case that we take these value systems for granted.

I also like where he's going with this --

So in Isaiah, that 26th chapter where you find the canticle, you have those words there that—terrifying words—where it says: If God would show favor and kindness to wicked people, they don’t repent; they just become worse. He says if favor is shown to the wicked he does not learn righteousness. In the land of uprightness, he deals perversely. He does not recognize the majesty of the Lord. Here one of the accusations of God against his people is: they think that they can do with him whatever they want, and they think that they’re invincible, and they think that it is by their horses and their powers that they’re going to keep themselves alive, and they make deals with Egyptians and Assyrians and Persians and God-knows-what. Well, God is working with all of that, but at the same time, he keeps telling them: “I am your God. I will fight for you. Don’t put your trust in princes and sons of men. Don’t think horses are going to save you.” And then when they think it too much, he says, “Okay, I’ll show you,” and then he allows the enemies to just raze Jerusalem itself and the holy temple right to the ground, and that happens a couple of times in history. It gets razed, it gets rebuilt, and it gets razed to the ground again, never to be rebuilt again, because the raised temple of God now is the body of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

But it also says in that canticle in the Septuagint version—this is not in the Hebrew version—you have that line that we sing in church during Lent: [prosthes kaka] render evil unto them, O God, render evils unto them, even to the proud ones of the earth. And the Holy Fathers teach us that God’s only tool against unrighteousness are evils. God has to show punishment, God has to chastise, God has to show his anger, otherwise people don’t repent, and if they’re blessed, they think the blessings are due to them, that they have the right to them, that they’re not gifts and graces of God, which is the ultimate blasphemy against God. Who are you, creature?

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with another person concerning issues of man at his basic level... Man, at his root, is not a pure, good, undefiled being that is free from corruption. We read that into it after the fact, based on what we have in modernity, and the atheist certainly is eager to interpret man as this whenever possible because it makes God's wrath in the Old Testament unjustifiable.

But that is not how man really is - and it takes fallen times for people to learn the real identity of God.

Now, there is one other thing that should be mentioned, and that is: in the Old Testament, you also have violence and killing done as a kind of vindication by human beings against evils done to them. Like, for example here, one of the great examples I think would be, again if you just have it right in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis 34, when Simon and Levi kill Shechem and they kill all the males in the land and they plunder the whole city and they take all the women and the children and everything because Shechem has violated their sister Dinah. So when Dinah is raped and taken by Shechem and [seduced] and plundered, [her] brothers vindicate this action of Shechem by killing him, including all his people and killing all his place and plundering his city, so you have the evils that are done as vindication: evil given for evil. You return the evils by evils in order to vindicate your righteousness against the unrighteousness of those who harmed you. So you find all of this in the Scriptures, all this kind of evil and murder and going-on, and it’s there all the time.

Now, in the psalms, which are, of course, absolutely necessary to be read also… I once tried to count how many times it speaks about enemies, adversaries, and putting them to shame and overcoming them and destroying them that you find in the psalter. I had to give up, because it is so darn filled with that that you can’t even add how many times it’s there. Read the psalter. It’s all about the victory of God over his enemies. It’s always the victory of God on behalf of the poor and the needy and the lowly and the rejected. It’s all about God defending the widows and orphans by punishing and destroying and ultimately showing his power against the unrighteous, the sinful, the enemy, the idolater, the apostate.

Here in the psalms, we believers, we identify the Lord in all of the psalms with Jesus Christ himself, but we also identify all the victims in the psalms, all the poor, the needy, the righteous who are vindicated, who are the victims of violence, we also identify them with Jesus. And then we try to identify ourselves with the righteous, and we pray to be made righteous. We ask God to let us be upright, to keep the commandments. We say we want to keep those commandments, but at the same time, we know in the psalter that we are sinners ourselves, that we deserve the wrath and the anger of God upon us because of our sins.

It would be interesting to think of these calls for us to be humble and broken in spirit as also very literal calls for us to be as the widow, as the orphan, as the dejected from the earth, because these are the ones who God will fight for. Of course, it is foolish to literally throw away yourself into such a state, abandoning the comforts that you have to invite such conflict is to tempt God, so at no point are we to "assume the position" of victim. Such opportunities will present themselves naturally, with time...

But the point is to become that in spirit.

More importantly, this is absolutely an important part - the resolution of all of this is found in the Old Testament:

But now let’s end up today with the New Testament, because what does the New Testament say? What does the final covenant of God say? What does God speak through his final Word incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth? What is the word of the Cross? What is the Gospel of God in Christ Jesus? And very simply put, to sum it up simply, it is this: that we are all sinners, but God shows mercy on all. God triumphs over all his enemies, and all his enemies are sin and evil and demons and demonic people. Those are God’s enemies, and those enemies will be destroyed. In the same way that the Ark of the Covenant, when it was brought into battle, in the book of Numbers, for example, the people would sing, “Let God arise. Let his enemies be scattered. Let those who hate him flee from before his face.” That’s Numbers 11, and that’s Psalm 68. That will become, for Orthodox Christians, the Paschal Psalm. That’ll be the psalm of the Resurrection of Christ, when God finally destroys all his enemies.

Another tremendous excerpt:

But one thing is for certain: Christ sheds his blood on the Cross for Sodom and Gomorrah. Christ sheds his blood on the Cross for everyone that Yahweh killed in the Old Testament. Everyone that was killed in the Old Testament in any way, whether it was Jephthah’s daughter who had to be sacrificed because he made a vow, whether it’s that concubine who was chopped up into twelve parts and sent through Israel, whether it’s the ravishing of the young maidens outside Sodom and Gomorrah and in other places in the Bible, whether it’s Cain killing Abel, whatever it is—all those murders, all [that] violence—that is all subsumed in the flesh of Christ on the Cross, and he endures it all. And it is God Almighty that is in human flesh that’s enduring it in order to have mercy on all.

Now here I would say this very clearly: if God did not so love the world that he sent his only-begotten Son, that those who believe in him would not perish, and if he did not give the opportunity for everyone to repent, and if the final judgment, when the Lord appears in glory, is not the moment of truth when anyone can finally repent of all their ignorances and their evils, their passions and their crimes, and if God did not die for everyone and shed his blood for everyone without exception, then we would have real problems with the murders of the Old Testament. All that violence would be nothing but scandalous violence. But the scandal for Christians, the scandal of the Cross replaces, so to speak, heals all the violence of men, even the violence of God himself that he had to perpetrate in the Old Testament in order for his plan to be completed for the Messiah to come.

Another very vital piece is covered here - I actually had only previously been familiar with St. Maximus the Confessor's take on this:

And that’s how the ancient Christians read the Old Testament, and that’s why they read it often allegorically, symbolically. They saw that fighting in the Old Testament as the warfare between God’s graciousness and goodness against idolatry and fornication and [un]chastity and blasphemy and sin and evil and murder and all the violations of the commandments of God.

And here it’s very important: Christians read the psalms that way. Take, for example, the psalm that says about the Babylonians, “Blessed are they who take your little ones and smash them on the rocks.” St. Nilus of Sinai, St. Benedict of Nursia, all the holy Fathers say that we have to interpret that spiritually, allegorically. Yeah, God did say you have to bash those babies on the rocks, you have to kill the women and the children, because if they grow up and become powerful, they’re going to kill you and then it’s going to be the end of the story and evil is going to triumph, and God cannot let evil triumph, so he has to kill the evil-doers—but that’s not the final word. The final word is that he gets killed for the sake of the forgiveness of the evil-doers. That’s the Christian faith.

And the Christian transforms into something else:

So when, in the final covenant of God with his people in Christ, Christians are no longer killers, they are those who get killed—the martyr and the confessor and the meek and gentle and the non-violent and the peaceful—those are the quintessential victors in Christ. As the Apocalypse puts it, Christians fight the Lamb’s war, and the Lamb’s war is against sin, including the sin that’s in your own heart, in your own mind, in your own flesh, in your own body. That’s what Christ has to destroy ultimately, but you’ve got to get Christ into the world. You’ve got to get Mary into the world so there’s a woman capable of giving birth to God in the flesh.

This next part really brings it home as to the source of destruction:

And the only way God can do it is the way he did it, and the way he did it is recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament. The way God did it is recorded in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and he did it in a violent way. As Jesus said, “From the beginning until John the Baptist, the kingdom of God is taken by violence, and the violent take it by force.” But there’s some sense in which the violence of God is now the violence of the Lamb. It’s the violence of non-violence. It’s the violence of martyria, of witness. It’s the violence of suffering. We know Jesus said that. For example, when the apostles wanted to call fire down on Bethsaida, Chorazin, Capernaum, whatever, all those cities that did not accept Jesus, Jesus says, “No.” He says, “This is over now. The final new covenant is here. I’m here in order to die, not to kill.”

Now, will God kill and destroy his enemies, ultimately, in the coming kingdom? Well, the ancient Christian scriptural answer is no. He will have mercy on everybody. But still, people may not accept that mercy, and then God’s love and his truth and his righteousness and his blood will torment them, and they will be tormented forever and ever if they blaspheme the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Some people think that nobody can do that; other people—and it seems to be the scriptural teaching—no. The demons and the evil people who love the demons and hate God, they will suffer from the mercy of God forever, and that’s the fire of hell. But God is no longer destroying. God is no longer destroying. People are destroying themselves by opposing the righteousness of God.

The violence of non-violence seems like a great reference to the pacifism conundrum: [i]when we stay our hands from violence, it occasionally allows an orgy of violence, which produces its own sense of injustice.

But this is ultimately what man brings onto himself.

Let's leave the conclusion to Fr. Thomas Hopko himself:

The Christian Gospel is that God is victorious over his enemies, ultimately, finally, perfectly, totally, and once and for all, but the weapon of God is the Cross, and God is victorious by dying. He is victorious by being killed, and that’s the scandal and that’s the radical newness of Christianity. As it was said in the book of Acts, the Jews who didn’t believe in Jesus were saying about the preaching of the apostles, “These men are turning the world upside down.” And in Christ everything is turned upside down.

So we read about the violence and the murder and the killing and the violence of God and the violence of people and the sinful violence and the unrighteous violence, but then the necessary violence that is necessary for God’s plan to be completed, we read about all this in the Old Testament. We see it fulfilled in the non-violent Christ, who as a Lamb is led to the slaughter and opens not his mouth, who is denied justice, who takes upon himself the sin of the world, and who dies for all those for all those who have died in any way, and he dies even for those whom God himself has killed in the Old Testament, because the final word does not belong to death. The final word does not belong to destruction. The final word belongs to mercy and forgiveness. The final word belongs to resurrection and life. The final word belongs to the peace of God, not the violence of God.

But that peace itself is very violent for people who do not want it, it produces violence, because as Isaiah said, peace and gifts and favor and grace shown to the wicked does not always produce repentance; it could make people even worse and more violent and more hating and more crazy and more mad. Yeah, that’s possible.

And the delusions can come, as Christ said, “And the day will come when people will even be murdering each other and think they’re doing it in the name of Christ crucified.” Can you imagine that they’re doing it in the name of God? Or the time can go on as if Christ has not come, and then, of course, there can be delusion. People can kill in the name of God, but it’s not God at all that they’re killing in the name of. And in the Old Testament, those who had to kill in the name of God, it had better have been in the name of God, for the sake of God’s plan, with great sorrow and repentance on their own part, or else they were in tremendous trouble.

So this is how we understand the violence in the Bible. The Old Testament is prefigurative, preparatory, and pedagogic to Christ. It does involve violence and murder and warfare, but that warfare is a prefiguration of the ultimate warfare of God on the Cross in Christ. He is the Iēsus Christos Nika; he is the Victor. And here is the radical newness of the New Testament.

And that was so new that some people thought that the New Testament God was not even the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses; they thought it was a different God, but we Christians say, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s not; it’s the same God. It’s the same God.” It is. Moses spoke about Christ. Isaiah spoke about Christ. All the events of the Old Testament prefigure Christ. All the warfare and the victories of Yahweh over his enemies in the Old Testament prefigure the victory of Christ on the Cross. That’s how Christians read and understand the violence, the killing, the murder that we find in the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament.

Now one last little thought: This goes on even in the Christian era, and the shame will be for Christians that they will kill in the name of Christ. The shame of Christians is that they will become as if they had the power to invoke God and use God for the destruction of their enemies. Even the Theotokos will be praised as a victorious leader who smashes barbarians or something. This is an apostasy in its own way, and it’s a million times worse than what we find in the Old Testament.

So let’s think about these things, but let’s know for sure that all that violence of old was necessary to produce the Christ, and then the Christ comes and takes the violence upon himself and forgives everyone everything. And that’s the teaching of the Gospel. And the victory of God ultimately is one when his Son dies the most violent, degrading, horrible death on the Cross. So for Christians, we preach Christ crucified, scandal to Jews, folly to Gentiles, but the wisdom and the power, the ultimate wisdom and the ultimate power, of God Almighty himself.