The Jealous God

By: J.I. Parker, Knowing God

EXODUS 20:3-5c ~ ""You shall have no other gods before Me."  "You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;  you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God""

"The jealous God" — doesn’t it sound offensive?  For we know jealousy, the green-eyed monster, as a vice, one of the most cancerous and soul-destroying vices that there is;  whereas God, we are sure, is perfectly good.  How, then, could anyone ever imagine that jealousy is found in Him?

The first step in answering this question is to make it clear that this is not a case of imagining anything.  We are imagining a God, then naturally we should ascribe to Him only characteristics which we admired, and jealousy would not enter the picture.  Nobody would imagine a jealous God.  But we are not making up an idea of God by drawing on our imagination; we are not seeking instead to listen to the words of Holy Scripture in which God Himself tells us the truth about Himself.  For God our Creator, whom we could never have discovered by any exercise of imagination, has revealed Himself.  He has talked.  He has spoken through many human agents and messengers—and supremely through His Son, our LORD Jesus Christ.  Nor has He left His messages, and the memory of His mighty acts, to be twisted and lost by the distorting processes of oral transmission.  Instead, He has had them put on record in permanent written form.  And there in the Bible, God’s  "public record," as Calvin called it, we find God speaking repeatedly of His jealousy.

When God brought Israel out of Egypt to Sinai, to give them His law and covenant, His jealousy was one of the first facts about Himself which He taught them.  The sanctioned of the second commandment, spoken audibly to Moses and  "inscribed by the finger of God"  on  tablets stone (Ex 31:18), was this:  "I, the LORD your GOD, am a jealous GOD" (Ex 20:5).  A little later God told Moses, even more strikingly,  "the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Ex 34:14).  Coming where it does, this latter is a most significant text.  The making known of God’s name—that is, as always in Scripture, His nature and character—is a basic theme in Exodus.  In chapter 3, God had declared His name as  "I AM WHO I AM,"  or  "I AM"  simply, and in chapter 6 as  "Jehovah"  ("the LORD").  These names spoke of Him as self-existing, self-determining and sovereign.  Then, in chapter 34, God had proclaimed His name to Moses by telling him that  "the LORD"  is  "passionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, … forgiving wickedness. … Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished" (Ex 34:6-7).  Here was a name that set forth God's moral glory.

Finally, seven verses further on, as part of the same conversation with Moses, God summed up and rounded off the revelation of His name by declaring it to be  "Jealous".  Clearly, this unexpected word stood for a quality in God which, far from being inconsistent with the exposition of His name that had gone before, was in some sense an epitome of it.  And since this quality was in true sense His  "name",  it was clearly important that His people should understand it.

In fact, the Bible says a good deal about God's jealousy.  There are references to it elsewhere in the Pentateuch (Num 25:11, Deut 4:24, 6:15, 29:20, 32:16, 21), in the history books (Josh 24:19, 1 Kings14:22), in the prophets (Ezek 8:3-5, 16:38, 42, 23:25, 36:5-7, 38:19, 39:25, Joel 2:18, Nahum 1:2, Zeph 1:18, 3:8, Zech 1:14, 82), and in the Psalms (78:58, 79:5).  It is constantly presented as a motive to action, whether in wrath or mercy.  "I … will be jealous for My Holy Name" (Ezek 39:25),  "I am jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with a great jealousy” (Zech 1:14),  "The LORD is a jealous God and avengeth"  (Nahum 1:2).

In the New Testament,  Paul asks the presumptuous Corinthians  “Shall we provoke the LORD to jealousy?” (1 Cor 20:22), in James 4:5 as  "He yearns jealousy  (literally "unto jealousy") over  the  Spirit  which He has made to dwell in us."

But, we ask what is the nature of this divine jealousy?  How can jealousy be a virtue in God when it is a vice in humans?  God’s perfection are matter for praises—but how can we praise God for being jealous?

Bible statements about God’s jealousy are anthropomorphisms:  That is, they are descriptions of God in language drawn from our life as humans.  The Bible is full of anthropomorphisms—God’s arm, hand and finger, His hearing, seeing and smelling, His tenderness, anger, repentance, laughter, joy and so on.  The reason why God uses these terms to speak to us about Himself is that language from our own personal life is the most accurate medium we have for communicating thoughts about Him.  He is personal, and so are we, in a way that nothing else in the physical creation is.  Only man, of all physical creatures, was made in God’s image.  Since we are more like God than is any other being known to us, it is more illuminating and less misleading for God to picture Himself to us in human terms that any other.

When faced with God’s anthropomorphisms, however, it is easy to get hold of the wrong end of the stick.  We have to remember that man is not the measure of His maker,  and that when the language of human personal life is used of God, none of the limitations of human creaturehood are thereby being implied—limited knowledge, or power, or foresight, or strength, or consistency, or anything of that kind.  And we must remember that those elements in human qualities which show the corrupting effect of sin have no counterpart of God.  Thus, for instance, His wrath is not the ignoble outburst  that human anger so often is, a sign of pride and weakness, but it is Holiness reacting to evil in a way that is morally right and glorious.  “Man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires (Jas 1:20)—but the wrath of God is precisely His righteousness in judicial action.  And in the same way, God’s jealousy is not a compound of frustration, envy and spite, as human jealousy so often is, but appears instead as a (literally) praiseworthy zeal to preserve something supremely precious. (Reference: Knowing God by J.I. Parker; Chapter seventeen p.167-170; Copyright 1973 by J.I. Parker.)

"You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." (Deuteronomy 6:5)