Our Jealous God
In my quiet times this week, I was reading in Exodus where God established a covenant relationship with the Israelites after they had fled Egypt. It is here in Exodus 20, where He first gives the Israelites the Ten Commandments. In verses 3-5, God says, "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol . . . you shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God." I think we all know what it's like to be jealous. At times, we've all been jealous of something someone else has. Though God has graciously blessed us, we often find ourselves being jealous or envious of someone who seems to have it better, their house or their family or their job or looks or talent. And it's a sin that we constantly need to repent of. But God's jealousy is different.
When the Bible says that God is a jealous God, it's not that He's jealous because someone has something He wants or needs. His jealousy stems from His people giving their worship to someone or something else that belongs to Him. In these verses, God is warning His people of making idols and bowing down and worshiping them instead of Him. When God makes a covenant with His people - that He will be their God and they will be His people - He seeks to protect the integrity of that relationship. So He is protective of us and what we give our hearts to. He says it again in Deuteronomy 4:23-24 with even more passion. It says, "Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything the Lord your God has forbidden. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God." Here we see that there's even a rage or intolerance to God's jealousy! So the integrity of our commitment to Him is something we need to take seriously.
Now most of us don't usually struggle with bowing before statues or carved images, but it is easy to make idols of things in our lives. John Calvin famously said, "the human heart is a perpetual idol factory." Some idols are more obvious than others such as money, sex, pleasure, and power. But other idols such as love, success, comfort, health, even family are subtle and perhaps even more dangerous because they can easily become the source of our happiness. As Tim Keller puts it, they can become "counterfeit gods," the things we ultimately worship in our lives. So perhaps this is just a reminder for us to not let these things become idols in our lives, May the Lord be the sole object of our worship and devotion.
God bless,
Pastor Darren
