A man struggling with the Old Testament saw a God of judgment, but former country singer and Christian minister Granger Smith wanted him to see the hope waiting just a few verses later.
“Our hope isn’t that God will somehow overlook our record. It’s that Christ has given us His,” Smith said in a video shared on his YouTube channel Oct. 27.
In the three-minute message, Smith recalled talking with a man who found the Old Testament harsh and judgmental. Rather than brushing off his concern, Smith acknowledged it and offered to share something from his own morning Bible reading.
His answer began in Jeremiah 23, right where the man’s discomfort seemed most understandable: God’s warning of judgment. Smith remembered the man recognizing that warning as exactly the kind of passage that troubled him.
“The very law that revealed his holiness was the same law that exposed their sin,” Smith explained.
Smith didn’t leave the problem safely in the past. He pointed to God’s commands to love Him wholeheartedly, love our neighbors and reject lying, lust, coveting and idolatry — then confronted the gap between those commands and the way we actually live.
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That left a hard question: Where can guilty people find hope? For Smith, the answer wasn’t to lower God’s standard or pretend the disobedience didn’t matter.
The same chapter in Jeremiah moves from a rebuke of shepherds who scattered God’s flock to promises of restoration and a righteous king from David’s line. Smith identified that promised King as Jesus, turning the conversation from what sinners lack to what Christ supplies.
“The righteousness that we desperately need is not something that we could produce. It’s something Christ provides,” he said.
Smith described Jesus’ perfect obedience and His death on the cross as the answer to our failure. He explained that when a sinner repents and trusts Christ, God credits Christ’s righteousness to that person, rather than simply ignoring the person’s sin.
“And it’s not that God somehow pretends that we’re righteous. It’s that he counts us righteous because we belong to Christ,” Smith said.
He also pointed to 2 Corinthians 5:21, which describes the sinless Christ bearing sin so that those in Him might become the righteousness of God. The surrounding passage connects that promise with reconciliation to God and new life in Christ.
The message fits the work Smith has embraced since stepping away from country music. His official biography describes his focus on ministry, biblical teaching and discipleship after a 24-year music career.
His book, Poison in the Well: 11 Toxic Beliefs That Kept Me from the Living Water of Jesus, explores related questions. Publisher Thomas Nelson describes it as a challenge to surface-level Christianity, including the belief that being a good person can save us.
Back in the video, Smith emphasized that freedom in Christ doesn’t make obedience meaningless. Instead, he described a changed desire to live God’s way after experiencing that freedom.
“You should have seen the guy’s face whenever I told him this amazing news,” Smith recalled.
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