The Jealousy of God

Muriel and I would like to thank you so much for the warmness and the love of your welcome. We are beginning to feel so much at home among you. It's a wonderful family of God that the Lord has raised up in this place. And you are in our prayers weekly. And we do appreciate Brian's request for you to pray for us. Maybe in the next two weeks our commentary on John 17 will be coming off the press. the greatest prayer ever prayed, and we would like you to pray for the distribution of that book, not because of any royalties. All the royalties go to distributing the book among pastors in Africa who are in the bush and haven't had a chance to have seminary training, but we do pray that there will be a wide distribution of that book. So thank you for your prayers. I'd like you to turn to the passage in which our meditation is found today, namely Exodus chapter 34. And I will read to you as you remain seated. Exodus 34 verse 1, And the Lord said to Moses, Cut two tablets of stone like the first ones, and I will write on these tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke. So be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself to me there on the top of the mountain. And no man shall come up with you, Let no man be seen throughout all the mountain. Let neither flocks nor herds feed before that mountain.' So he cut two tablets of stone like the first ones. Then Moses rose early in the morning and went up Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him. And he took in his hand the two tablets of stone. Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there. and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation. So Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth and worshipped. Then he said, If now I have found grace in your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as your inheritance.' And he said, Behold, I make a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth nor in any nation. And all the peoples among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is an awesome thing that will be done with you. Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from before you the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hevite and the Jebusite. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in your midst. But you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images. For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. Lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they play the harlot with their gods and make sacrifice to their gods, and one of them invites you, and you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of his daughters for your sons, and his daughters play the harlot with their gods, and make your sons play the harlot with their gods. You shall make no molded gods for yourselves. There ends the reading of God's Word. The Lord bless it to our understanding. Let us pray. Our gracious God and Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus went to heaven to receive from you. We thank you, our Father, that he has come down to this earth and indwells the church to do and continue the good work that Jesus Christ began, and especially to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, to take the things of Christ and to show them to us, And we pray this morning, our Father, that by that same Holy Spirit, by His power, by His conviction, by His teaching, by His enabling, Christ will be magnified in our midst, that we will see Him in a larger, a clearer, and a greater measure than we have before, so that we will love Him with all our heart and with all our soul. In His precious name we pray these things. Amen. Our meditation this morning is on the jealousy of God, an attribute that sounds unthinkable and even offensive when it is associated with Him. How, the question is asked, can jealousy, which is one of the ugliest and vilest of sins among men, be attributed to God, who is perfectly good? Just think of some of the places in Scripture where it is roundly condemned. Song of Solomon, 8 and verse 6. Jealousy is as cruel as the grave, a most vehement fire. Proverbs 27, verse 4, sorry, wrath is cruel and anger a torrent, but who is able to stand before jealousy? James 3, verse 16, where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. How then can this reasonable objection be answered? I think we must begin by saying that the Bible does affirm that God is a jealous God. It would be futile to try and deny this in any way. God has gone on record again and again in scripture to affirm his jealousy. The second commandment written with the finger of God on a tablet of stone says, you shall not make for yourself a graven image. For I, Jehovah your God, am a jealous God. In Exodus 34, 14 we read, You shall worship no other God, for Jehovah, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. And altogether there are 25 references to the jealousy of God in the Old Testament. And the biblical writers, you know, do not hesitate to speak of God's jealousy burning like a fire against those who do not worship Him alone. The truth is also stated in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul warns the believers there that to attend an idol feast and to partake of the sacrifice that has been offered to an idol, whether you were invited by family or by friends, is to provoke the Lord to jealousy. And James says the same thing about making a god of this world, of being too friendly with the world. He says, do you think, Scripture says, without reason, that God jealously longs for the spirit that he made to live in us? So that brings us back again to the question we raised at the beginning and so far haven't answered. If jealousy is a vice in man, How can it be a virtue in God? I think the solution lies in the way we define jealousy. So, let's look at the nature of lawful and righteous jealousy. The Oxford Dictionary says that to be jealous is to be resentful towards another on account of known or suspected rivalry. In other words, the essence of jealousy is the intolerance and the unwillingness to allow anyone to have what I think should be mine. Now, whether my jealousy is right or wrong, depends on whether the object I consider is my due or is not my due. If it is not lawfully due to me, then my jealousy is wrong. If it is lawfully due to me, my jealousy is most definitely righteous. This, then, is the important question to ask in determining whether jealousy is lawful or not, whether it is righteous or wrong. Do I have a rightful claim to the object? So, for example, if I see somebody being admired for their beauty or for their success and resent it, then I am sinning. for the admiration that they are getting is due to them, because of their beauty and their success, and not to me. Again, if I become resentful towards a friend who is making friends with other people, and I resent it, then it is sinful, because I have no right to monopolize that friend's friendship. But if, on the other hand, a husband sees his wife transferring her affection to a third party, he is right to be jealous, not with malicious vindictiveness, but with righteous indignation. This kind of jealousy is a godly jealousy, for a husband and a wife have made a covenant to love each other exclusively until death parts them. They have vowed to forsake all suitors. any married person who feels no jealousy at the intrusion of an adulterer into that sacred union and shows no proper zeal to keep that union intact. would surely be lacking in righteousness. Indeed, you know, it was because the law of Moses recognized the rightness of such jealousy that it prescribed what Numbers 5 has called a jealous offering. And by this procedure, a husband who had genuine reasons to suspect that his wife had committed adultery would bring her before the Lord, and a priest would put her under oath. She was then required to drink bitter water, which, if she had lied under oath in the presence of God, would bring the curse of God upon her. If she had not lied, then God's blessing would rest upon the marriage. Now, this ritual, plus In the New Testament, Joseph's desire, being a righteous man, not to go through with his marriage to Mary, because she was found with child before they came together, are examples in Scripture where marital jealousy is portrayed as natural, right, legitimate, because it is proof that a man and a woman regard their marriage as a sacred, lifelong union ordained by God. And what we want to now go on and see is that this is also the nature of the righteous jealousy that God exhibits in the Bible. So let me say in the third place, God's jealousy is based on His covenant relationship with His people. God made a covenant with Abraham to be his God. and to accept him and all his believing posterity as a people who would belong exclusively to God, as a chosen race, as a holy nation, as a peculiar people. That covenant was renewed with the children of Israel at Mount Sinai after God redeemed them from slavery in Egypt and repeated the covenant promise, I will be your God. and you will be my people." It is a commitment made to God's people in the Old and the New Testament 15 times, from Exodus 6 all the way through to Revelation 21, where in heaven the covenant between God and His people finds its fullest and complete expression. In that new heaven and new earth, the apostle John says, God will dwell with men, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be their God. Moreover, you know, the Ten Commandments given to the Israelites on Mount Sinai are intelligible only in the light of God's covenant with His people. For the Ten Commandments are the rules governing the relationship between God and His people, and between his people and each other. And in them God is described five times by his covenant name, Jehovah, your God. Now, this covenant is also frequently portrayed in the Bible as a marriage covenant in which God is the heavenly bridegroom who in his free grace has set his love upon a people and called them to be his bride. Isaiah 54, God says to Israel, your maker is your husband, for Jehovah has called you like a youthful wife. And again in Ephesians 5, husbands are commanded to love their wives just as Christ loved the church, his bride, and gave himself for her. And then in Revelation 19, we read that the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready, arrayed in fine linen, which is the righteous acts of the saints. This holy covenant between God and His people, because it is like a marriage covenant, is to be taken seriously by His people. As God is faithful in His love and His commitment to us, He expects us to be undivided in our affection and in our loyalty to Him. And it is in this sense, I say, that God is a jealous God. and his love is a jealous love. Any turning away from him to idols, whether those idols are personal, material, or spiritual, is provoking to God because it is a breach of his covenant with his people. In Deuteronomy 32, God calls Israel, I quote, a perverse generation in whom is no faith, They have provoked me to jealousy by what is not God. They have moved me to anger by their foolish idols. In Ezekiel 8, we are told that an idol was set up in the temple in Jerusalem to be worshipped. And in Ezekiel 8, God calls that idol the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy. And then in Ezekiel 16, God depicts Israel as an adulterous wife who is engaging in unholy associations with Canaanite idols and idolaters. And He says to them in Ezekiel 16, I will judge you as women who break wedlock are judged. I will bring blood upon you in fury and jealousy. From this small sample of text taken from the Bible, we see plainly what God means when He says, His name is jealous and He is a jealous God. He demands undivided love and loyalty from those whom He has loved and redeemed for Himself. But you know, that's not all. In the fourth place, we need to see that God's jealousy is righteous not only because of His covenant with His people, but because He alone is God. And therefore, even those who are not yet His people, or refuse to be His people, or under an obligation to worship Him and to worship Him alone as their Creator. He has a right, I say, to the exclusive worship of all people, because He is our Creator, and besides Him there is no other God. The Jehovah of the Old Testament is the Jesus of the New Testament, who is the only God there is, the living and the true God who has created everything, says the Old Testament and John and Hebrews in the New Testament. Everything, visible, invisible, animate, inanimate. How can men worship gods who are no gods and have no rightful claim upon them, upon their gratitude or upon their homage? This is strictly prohibited, as I said, in the first and second commandments. It is also stated particularly strongly at the end of the book of Isaiah, Where Jehovah says, there is no other God besides me, a just God and a Saviour. And again, I am Jehovah, that is my name and my glory. I will not give to another, nor my praise to carved images. So, the righteous judgement of God is twofold. God demands our exclusive worship on the grounds that to worship anyone or anything else is a breach of His covenant and a denial of His deity. The sacredness of God's covenant of redemption and the uniqueness of His divine nature give Him the right to be jealous when He does not have the undivided homage of His people. Now, fifthly, in the remainder of my time, I want to draw out at a little more length two practical lessons to be learned from God's jealousy. And the first lesson is this. Negatively, we must not provoke God to jealousy by flirting with the world. A key verse here is the verse I quoted earlier on from James, chapter 4. I want to quote it again, but this time in connection with the verse that precedes it, with verse 4. Adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that Scripture says in vain, that is, with no purpose, God jealously desires the spirit he has made to dwell in you. Here James, like the prophets of the Old Testament, is speaking metaphorically of the spiritual marital union between God and his people. He is accusing some of his Christian readers of unfaithfulness to God, of becoming spiritual adulterers and adulteresses by joining themselves to the world. And the same charge is made again in the Old Testament, as it is in the New Testament, because God's relationship with his people in the Old Testament and the New Testament is spiritually the same. And so in Jeremiah 3, God says, Return, O backsliding children, says Jehovah, for I am married to you. Surely as a wife treacherously departs from her husband, so have you dwelt treacherously with me, O house of Israel. So Paul similarly says in 2 Corinthians 11, I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy for I have betrothed you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Jesus Christ. It's a beautiful picture of Christ who has come down from heaven to seek a bride for himself, the church. And He has purchased us with the priceless dowry of His own blood, the blood of God. And He has made a covenant with us, ratified by that blood. So we are no longer our own. We belong exclusively to Him. So, friends, to get in bed with the world is to commit adultery, just as Israel did. It is to become what Jesus also called, not only Moses, but Jesus also called, it is to become an adulterous generation. For it is not necessary to bow down before a carved image to commit adultery. Worldliness is spiritual adultery. And you don't have to be a pollster to know that worldliness has invaded the modern church. So many Christians, you know, seem to be only half converted. I should say professing Christians. They are no better than Israel, of whom the scripture says, listen carefully, they feared the Lord, yet served their own gods. They claim to belong to God, but they are flirting with the world, who is the enemy of God. They come to church on a Sunday, but honestly, throughout the rest of the week, there is no real apparent difference between them and those who are not Christians. Their moral standards in private and in business are those of the world, and not those of Christ. Their outlook is materialistic. Their affections are set on things below, not on things above. Their conversation, their thoughts, their ambitions, their interests, the books they read, the friends that they prefer, the places of amusement that they frequent, are all evidence of their love of the world. They are spiritual adulterers and adulteresses, and God won't have it. The Bible says we can either be a friend of God or a friend of the world, but not of both. As Jesus said, no man can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and mammon. And as James says again in chapter one, pure and undefiled religion before God is to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Well, that's the first lesson to be learned from this truth that God is a jealous God and that he jealously desires or yearns or longs for the spirit, the human spirit, that he has made to dwell in our hearts. If we are united by a spiritual covenant of grace to Christ, then we must give him our undivided, undying love and loyalty, and not provoke him to jealousy by flirting with the world and the things of the world. Now, the second lesson we must take home with us today is this. Positively, we should be jealous with God's jealousy and for his glory. If God by his Spirit dwells in us, and we have become partakers of the divine nature, which we have, then God's own jealousy should possess us and motivate us. We should not only agree with it, but we should share it, for it is a real test of the depth of our Christian lives. The biblical word for such a passion, you know, is zeal. And it is often translated as jealousy in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Indeed, when we read the lives of great men and women in the Bible, we find that they were men and women of jealousy. Jealousy for God. The prophet Elijah, for example, when the corrupting influence of Queen Jezebel had led most of the Israelites from the worship of Jehovah to the worship of Baal, said, I have been very zealous, and the authorized version has jealous. I have been very zealous for Jehovah, God of hosts, for the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life." Of course, Elijah did have his weak moments when at the end he just wanted to lie down and die. But you know, God honoured his zeal by sending a chariot of fire to take him up to heaven and then allowing him later to witness the transfiguration of Jesus on the mount with Moses. Or take the example of Phineas, the priest. When the Israelites committed harlotry with the women of Moab and bowed down to the God of Moab, Baal of Peor, after God had sent a plague among the offenders, and in the sight of all the congregation who were weeping at the door of the tabernacle, an Israelite man had the brazenness to take a Midianite party girl into his tent. And Phineas, overcome with jealousy for God, took a javelin and speared them both. Immediately The Bible says the plague stopped with 24,000 dead, and God said to Moses, Phineas, my servant, turn back my wrath, because he was zealous with my zeal, so that I did not consume them in my zeal. Similarly, the Apostle Paul was moved to publicly warn some in the church at Corinth of the danger of falling away from grace. He says, I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy, for I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be led astray from the simplicity of a pure devotion to Christ. But the greatest example, of course, is that of our Lord Jesus Christ when he saw the temple of God, the most sacred spot on earth at that time, profaned by the evil trafficking of merchants and money changers. And John says, when he had made a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen and poured out the changers' money and overturned the tables. Then his disciples remembered that it was written, Psalm 69, verse 9, zeal for your house has eaten me up. And the word zeal there is, of course, the word jealousy. Friends, it was jealousy for God, for God's name and God's honour and for God's house of prayer that consumed Jesus. He was eaten up with it, the scripture says. And in this particular matter of zeal for God, as in so many other things like suffering and humility, Jesus has left us an example to follow in His steps. Are we following Him in this regard? Do we have something of His jealous zeal for God? When we look at the world today, giving its worship and its service to gods that are no gods, are we filled with jealousy to go out there and tell them the gospel? You know, I know that when people speak of motivation to evangelize, of incentives for evangelism, they generally speak of compassion for the lost or of obedience to the Great Commission. But I dare to say that the greatest incentive comes from this jealousy we receive from God for His glory and for His honour. Or when we see our friends and our neighbours turning to false cults, do we feel no stirrings of divine jealousy in us? No concern that the homage that is due to Christ from them is given to another. Or what about the moral drift in our country, with the legalizing of abortion and pornography and same-sex marriage, gambling, and the wholesale desecration of the Lord's Day? Or consider again the backslidden state of so many Christian churches, where there is a famine for the Word of God, irregular attendance, prayerlessness, unfaithful stewardship. Friends, if these things do not move us to action and to prayer, it can only be that we are not eaten up with zeal for the honor of God's name and God's house. I'm coming to a close. In his book, Practical Religion, Bishop J.C. Ryle, a godly Anglican minister in the 19th century, gives the soul-searching description of zeal. I found it in a magazine, and it really is soul-searching. I quote, A zealous man in religion is pre-eminently a man of one thing. He only sees one thing. He cares for one thing. He is swallowed up in one thing, and that one thing is to please God, whether He lives or whether He dies, whether He pleases man or whether He gives offence, whether He is thought wise or whether He is thought foolish. For all this, the zealous man cares nothing at all. He burns for one thing. And that one thing is to please God and to advance His glory. If He is consumed in the very burning, He cares not for it. He is content. He feels that like a lamp, He is made to burn. And if consumed in burning, He has done the work for which God appointed Him. Such a one will always find a sphere for his zeal. If he cannot preach and work and give money, he will cry and sigh and pray. If he cannot fight in the valley with Joshua, he will do the work of Moses, Aaron and Hur on the hill. If he is cut off from working himself, He will give the Lord no rest till help is raised up from another quarter and the work is done. This is what I mean when I speak of zeal in religion." Brothers and sisters, Is this true of you and me? Are we filled with jealousy for God and the glory that is His due? Does zeal for the glory of Christ and the advance of His kingdom eat us up? Are we possessed and consumed by it? Because to be lukewarm, to be indifferent, to be complacent, is to be in a very dangerous spiritual condition. Our Lord Himself warns us in Revelation 3 as He speaks to the church in Laodicea, I know your works, He says, that you are neither cold nor hot. I would that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. Those whom I love I reprove and discipline. Therefore, Be zealous. As I conclude, beloved, my prayer for you and for myself is that God, in His graciousness by His Holy Spirit, will help us first of all to feel His jealousy over us so that we will give Him our wholehearted devotion and that then he will help us to feel his jealousy over others and not rest until they give him the glory that is due to his name. Let's pray. Our gracious God and Father, we thank you that you are gracious. Even when you revealed your name as jealous, you assured your people through Moses that you are long-suffering and merciful and loving. And our Father, we pray that we may take seriously the righteousness of your jealousy over your people, that we indeed may have our love quickened for you to that point where it would be unthinkable to even turn our eyes and take any notice of the world. We know that's hard, Lord, but we pray that you'll bring us to that place where we will be faithful to you and to you alone, where we will give you our undying and undivided love and loyalty. We pray too, dear Father, that you will give to us who have your nature, who have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, your godly jealousy for the worship of all men and women, nations, tribes and peoples all over the world who are worshipping gods that are no gods. O God, stir us up to jealousy, we pray, that we may indeed speak and pray and give until all in the world have heard of you and know their responsibility to worship and to serve you. We ask it for Jesus' sake. Amen.