God is Jealous
From the Series: God Is
Speaker: Heather Zempel
Date: May 24, 2009
Leave a comment | Back to Media Page
Transcript
Hello NCC! How ya doing? Go ahead and open your Bibles to Deuteronomy 6 and I’ll get there in a second. We are continuing our ‘God Is’ series. Before we do that, I want to welcome all of our locations. I’m so excited to be with you guys! Since I may be new to some of you, I feel like an introduction might be in order. My name is Heather Zempel, I’m the Discipleship Pastor here at NCC. I am from a little place down south called Mobil, Alabama. I grew up in church. You might say I was spit out of my mother’s womb right onto the church pew. My earliest memory is of the church nursery. I grew up around this whole church thing. The problem is, in Alabama, at my particular church, we spoke funny. The little accent thing that happens, and because of that, there were certain biblical and theological truths that were difficult for me to grasp because of the language barrier. Here’s an example, in my great southern Baptist church, at the end of every message was the altar call. You know what I’m talking about? After the Gospel is proclaimed, there’s an invitation for you to come forward and make a decision about what to do with what you’ve heard, make a decision to follow Christ. There were all these great altar call songs we sang like I Have Decided to Follow Jesus and Jesus Paid It All, I Surrender All. Now, here was the problem for my 5-year old self, every time we sang I Surrender All, I could not figure out for the life of me why God wanted our all because ‘all’ to us was what you drilled for in the Gulf of Mexico and what you changed in your car every 3,000 miles or 3 months. I couldn’t figure out why Jesus needed our oil! It took me years to figure out it was a-l-l. Here’s another example, the first verse I ever memorized, John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Here’s the problem though, as a 5-year old, I memorized it as: For God so loved the world that He gave his only forgotten Son. And I couldn’t figure out why anyone had forgotten Jesus. My world was totally engulfed in Jesus, I went to school with Jesus, I went to church with Jesus, everything in my life was Jesus, had God forgotten Jesus? So it was a few months later that my mom explained that it wasn’t forgotten, it was begotten, which raised all other kinds of questions. But the idea of God’s only forgotten Son continued to haunt me, and although God is not forgotten in John 3:16, if we look in other places in Scripture, we see that there is a tragic cycle of people forgetting God. Let’s look at one example today, in Deuteronomy 6.
1These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, 2 so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. 3 Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you.
Let me stop there for a second and explain what is going on. The first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are often attributed to Moses. Genesis tells those great stories of the beginning from Adam and Eve and the Garden to Noah and the flood to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob all the way to Joseph. Then Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers tell the story of the children of Israel escaping from Egypt, going to the Promised Land and it introduces this idea of the law, the way that they should live, how they should go about their everyday lives as people of God. Then fast forward 40 years and you get to the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is basically the same information as Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, telling the story of their flights from Egypt to the Promised Land, it retells the law for a new generation. All the people that were alive during the writing of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers had died in the wilderness, so Moses is retelling the story, re-giving the law for a new generation of Israelites who did not see God part the Red Sea, who did not know slavery in Egypt, who didn’t see the plagues come on the Egyptian people, and Moses is writing this to them to tell them who they are, whose they are, where they are going, why they are going there and how they should live once they are there. So there is a very hopeful tone, ‘You are going into a new land, let me remind you of who you are and what that means to you.’ Let’s continue.
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
In the Jewish religious tradition, this is known as the Shamah [?]. This is saying God is God and it is giving instructions on how they should worship God, with all their hearts, all their souls and all their strength. And it goes on to lay out exactly what this should look like. Remember God all the time, when you get up in the morning, when you go to bed at night, when you are at home, when you are traveling, wear them, display them in your home. All of these laws that you have just received, live them, have them invade every nook and cranny of your life. The chapter before this, 5, we see the re-telling of the 10 Commandments. The reason we often get bogged down in the book of Leviticus is because there are all these picky, ceremonial laws, what to eat, what to wear, what to drink, how to bathe ourselves. And we look at that and we read that and we don’t see any relevance to our lives. The relevance is this – that God wants to saturate every area of our lives. Every time that the Israelites obeyed one of those picky, ceremonial laws, they were reminded that they were a people who belonged to God, and they realized that God was central to every aspect of their life. And he goes on to tell them why he wants them to be reminded of this.
10 When the LORD your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, 11 houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, 12 be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 13 Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name.
He is saying, ‘You are going into a land where you are going to be blessed, but you didn’t build it, it wasn’t your idea, none of it belongs to you, it all belongs to God.’ I think the greatest time of temptation of forgetting God is when everything is going well for us. Moses is saying they are going into a place of abundance but you’ve got to remember that this isn’t yours, it all belongs to God. He punctuates it by saying this:
14 Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; 15 for the LORD your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land.
This is where I start to squirm a little bit. This is where I want to just read right over that and get back to the whole loving God with all your heart, soul strength and this land I’m going into. We are in the ‘God Is’ series. It’s fun to talk about God is faithful, God is trustworthy, God is giving, God is love, God is hope, but what about God is jealous. We read right here that God is jealous. If we go all the way back to Exodus where the 10 Commandments were first given, this is how it lays it out there. Exodus 34:12-14.
12 Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you. 13 Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles. 14 Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.
It’s like he is saying if you missed it the first time, here’s the deal – God, also known as Jealous, is a jealous God. Real clearly, God is jealous. God is saying don’t worship idols, don’t make idols, don’t hang out with people who do. Then we get to Deuteronomy where there is this brand new generation of Israelites about to go into this amazing land and God tells them again that He is a jealous God and not to worship their idols or make idols. Don’t worship them, don’t make them, don’t hang out with the people who do. Yet, they get into the Promised Land and we begin to see this tragic cycle of people forgetting God and placing their worship in other places. In Judges 3, the Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, they forgot about the Lord their God and they worshipped the images of Baal and the Asherah poles, exactly what they were warned not to do. Judges 8:33-34:
33 No sooner had Gideon died than the Israelites again prostituted themselves to the Baals. They set up Baal-Berith as their god and 34 did not remember the LORD their God, who had rescued them from the hands of all their enemies on every side.
The Psalmist cries out in agony at the repeated cycles of forgetting God. He says, “Lord, how long will you be angry with us? How long will your jealousy burn like fire?” The prophets proclaim it later in Zephaniah 3:8: All the earth will be devoured with the fire of my jealousy. Nahum 1:2 says the Lord is a jealous and avenging God. They were warned in Deuteronomy, you will be dazzled and you will be seduced by other things that demand your focus and attention and loyalty, and because of that, he said, do not worship their idols, keep your worship focused where it belongs. And he told them not to enter into pagan covenants because your loyalty will be divided. God is jealous. We are told 20 times in Scripture that God is jealous. We can’t ignore it, we can’t let that go, we have to do something with it. I think that one thing that might be helpful to understand is that the word ‘jealous’ comes from the same root word that we get ‘zeal’ so jealous and zealous are very similar words. I think also we have a tendency to think of jealousy as an immoral word, that it is a flawed emotional reaction when something happens to us, we react out of jealousy, or we see something that we want, so we go after it in jealousy. I think it might be helpful to understand that there is a difference between envy and jealousy. Nowhere in the original text are we told that God is envious, but we are told that He is jealous. Envy is when you want something that rightfully belongs to someone else. Jealousy is when God wants something that rightfully belongs to Him. I think it is helpful for us to think about God’s jealousy in terms of what He is jealous for, the source of his jealousy, and I think it is helpful to think of how God’s jealousy manifests itself, what does it look like? When God is jealous, how does that reaction look?
Isaiah 48 is very clear about the source of God’s jealousy and what He is jealous for. It says: My glory I will not give to another. There is no way to dance around that, He is jealous for his glory. It is something that rightfully belongs to Him. Worship, giving glory to his honor and his name that rightfully belongs to Him, that’s what He is jealous for. God is not on an ego trip, He doesn’t need our worship, He is self-sufficient in and of Himself. But the reason He is jealous for our worship is because that’s what we were created to do. We were created to have relationship with Him. Isaiah 43 says that we were created to worship, that was the mechanism by which we were to have relationship with God. So when we give our worship other places, we are not even being the people that God created us to be. God is the only One who is uncreated. He is the only One who is all-powerful, He is the only One who is all-knowing, He is the only One who is love, and we were created to worship Him, and He is the One we were created to worship. So God is jealous for his name, He is jealous for his glory, He is jealous that the worth that He is is ascribed to Him.
I think it is helpful to understand how God’s jealousy manifests itself. When God displays his jealousy, what does it look like? I don’t think it is a moral flaw, I think it is a demonstration of his goodness and his righteousness and his love.
In the Old Testament prophets, there’s a guy by the name of Hosea and he wrote a book and it basically an action sermon. His life became a living active sermon to the people around him. God told Hosea to go marry a prostitute named Gomer. So he married this woman and loved her with unmerited love, gives her an opportunity for a life that is so different from what she knew, he gives her grace and mercy and loves her, and she ran away from that to go back into prostitution. What did Hosea do? He humbled himself, re-entered her life and bought her back. He walked into the filth of prostitution to buy back what already belonged to him, and that’s the same thing that God does with us. When we read in the Scripture about how God’s jealousy burns and his righteousness is raging, his jealousy burns and rages and it drove Him to the cross. That’s not a moral flaw, that is the greatest demonstration of love that the world has ever know. God would be so jealous for his glory and so jealous for his people that He would go to death on the cross, that He would pour out all his wrath and all his righteousness on the cross so that He can reclaim his glory and his people.
That shouldn’t make us wonder about the goodness of God. That shouldn’t make us see his jealousy as a fallen human state, that should inspire in us worship and gratitude and remembering God.
I think it is also helpful to think about what idolatry means and what that looks like. To a lot of us, idolatry seems like an ancient word. Idolatry is something that happened back there in those pagan countries. But an idol is anything that takes the place of God in our lives, anything we give priority to over God. Anything we give worship to or anything from which we derive our worth and our meaning and our purpose as people aside from God, those are different forms of idols. John Calvin said that the human heart is an idol factory. Because we are created to worship, we will worship. That’s how we were created, that’s how we were designed, so we will worship something, we will find something to worship, we will create something to worship because it is a drive we have as human beings that must find expressions. So I think as we are thinking about what our idols are, some of these questions might help.
Where do we focus our affections and our attention? Where do we assign glory? From what do we derive our meaning? What or who do we look to to give us meaning and worth and purpose? What do you love? What do you hate? What do you fear? What do you look to for security or shelter or comfort or pleasure? Who must you please? Whose opinion counts in your life? Do we dream of our glory or do we dream of bringing glory to God. Idols could include your career, your relationships, recreation, comfort, security, it could come in a lot of different forms. We might discover an idol when we say something like, ‘I don’t believe God would ever…’ or when we read something difficult in Scripture and we say, ‘My God would never…’ because when we do that, we’ve probably got a god of our own making in our heads. Whenever we are concerned about something we read and we say, ‘I can’t believe that the God I love would do that!’ then maybe the god you love isn’t the God who says his name is Jealous.
I think it is also helpful to think about how this whole thing progresses. Like, we don’t just wake up one morning and decide we are going to worship an idol today. We don’t go to the store and pick out our idols. It’s not that obvious. It comes more subtly, it comes more deceptively. An idol in your life might even be something negative that happened to you and you haven’t been able to go beyond that and you are actually deriving your worth and your meaning or who you are by that incident. An idol is usually a ‘good’ thing. It might be a goal that we want to meet, or a relationship or success or a career. Nothing in and of those things is bad, but when we put it on the throne of our life or in the center of our life where God should be, it becomes an idol. A question that has been haunting me lately is how faithful am I to God? On a percentage scale, how faithful and I to God? Am I faithful 70% of the time? 80%? If we are faithful 90% of the time to God, is that good enough? Is that as good as we can get as human beings? Well, if a man was unfaithful to his wife only 10% of the time, we’d say he is unfaithful! 1% unfaithfulness renders us unfaithful. How faithful are we to God?
Often we don’t even see the idols that we have. Let me give you an example. I went to Louisiana State University, you can cheer for LSU, and I love football! When those games would roll around, I was the perfect fan, I was decked out purple and gold, I was tailgating from early in the morning, I was cheering and yelling and jumping. I am not a touchy person but I was hugging everybody and clapping high fives, I loved it! But there was one thing that as an LSU fan that I refused to do. Whenever our defense forced a turnover, our band would play the Chinese Bandits and the entire student section would bow down in reverence to LSU’s defense, and I would stand there in confidence and in righteousness, probably as I look back on it now, self-righteousness, refusing to bow down even to LSU’s defense. I would do nothing that even hinted at giving worship to anything other than God. Yet, I would walk out of that stadium and hinge my worth on the opinion of a professor. I would gauge my value by the number of friends I had or the kind of friends that I had. I would measure my spiritual formation by the words of people after a Bible study or a sermon on campus. It was sick. It was idolatry. I let something else come in to the place that belongs to Jesus Christ. Now, some of you are saying, ok Heather, this is all Old Testament, gloom doom, hard stuff. Yes, God was really harsh in the Old Testament but you’re forgetting that in the New Testament, God gets saved! No doom and gloom anymore. God had a bad several thousand years in the Old Testament, then Jesus came along and it’s all better! We have kinder, gentler God. But read what Jesus says in Luke 14:26: If you want to be my follower, you must love me more than your own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, more than your own life, otherwise, you cannot be my disciple. The original Greek is you must hate them. Luke 18:22: Sell all you have and give the money to the poor. Luke 6:6: Let the dead bury their own dead. That doesn’t sound like buddy Jesus to me! This is hard stuff. Now, what we do is we just read right over that. We think Jesus was just making a point. Well, what point was he making? We know that God honors families. He says in the 10 Commandments to honor your father and mother, so what does He mean by saying that you’ve got to hate them in order to be his disciple. We know that there is nothing wrong in and of itself with wealth, He blessed Solomon with wealth. We know we are to grieve those we have lost because He cried for his friend Lazarus, so what is this about? Every one of these was about testing our loyalty. Where is your loyalty, ultimately? Is it God or is it something else?
Jesus isn’t our buddy, He isn’t our boyfriend, He is God. He is not up in heaven ringing his hands wondering if we are going to love Him. He is not up in heaven hoping that we will be willing to come out and play with Him. He is God who is jealous for his glory and for his name and for his people, and that jealousy drove Him to the cross. And that should drive us to our knees in worship and in gratitude.
What if our motivation for worshiping was not just to prepare us for a church experience but because God desires glory? What if our reason for living right wasn’t because it’s a good idea or because that’s what the Bible teaches but because we know by doing so, it brings God glory? What if we wanted to expand the kingdom of God in our generation, not so that we had a better place to live but because it brings glory to God? What if our reason for sharing our faith with other people wasn’t because we were concerned about them dying and going to hell but because we were concerned about God’s name being glorified enough and we wanted to see more worshipers for Him?
II Corinthians 11:2, Paul says, “I am jealous for you with the jealousy of God Himself, for I promise you as a pure bride to one husband, Christ. God is jealous for his Son because of the covenant that He made with Him on the cross and He desires to present his church, that’s us, as a pure, spotless bride. And yet we are all the time running off to other loves and other passions. We are all the time giving glory to other things and putting other things in the place that belongs to Jesus. Sometimes we do it unknowingly, sometimes we do it willingly, but it is always sinfully.
(Song)
In the book, The Weight of Glory, author C.S. Lewis says this: Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased, and yet God still wants you. As you stand poisoned and polluted by the stink and filth of what you’ve allowed yourself to participate in, Jesus stands at the end of that aisle waiting for you.
It’s common for us to say something like ‘God wants you just the way you are, He wants to meet you just as you are, He wants to accept you just as you are,’ but the reality is that God will not accept you just as you are, He will accept you as you are in Jesus. There is nothing we can do to make ourselves acceptable to God. There is nothing we can do to cover up what we have done, but God is so jealous for his glory and for his name and for you that He took that jealousy to the cross and that should drive us to our knees in worship.
God we thank You and You are jealous because we know that it is that jealousy that enables us to have life with You today; that it is because You are jealous that we have the opportunity to enter into relationship with You. God all of us here today need to stop worshipping idols, we need to stop prostituting ourselves to the world around us. We need to re-establish You on the throne of our lives. For some of us, we need to re-establish that. God for some of us we need to put You on the throne of our lives for the first time. Holy Spirit, I pray that You would come and that You wouldn’t bring condemnation but conviction. God, that we would see You and in your glory we would worship You and be so filled with gratitude. Thank You Jesus, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
