February 14, 2019 – Exodus 20:5

I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God.
—Exodus 20:5

It is in the Bible, and the Bible only, that we meet with the thought of the jealousy of God. That the unseen powers are envious of humans is an old concept. You light on it far back in ancient Greece; you detect it in a hundred superstitions. That the gods are envious and filled with a grudge against too great prosperity is one of the oldest conceptions of the mind. Such divine envy is wholly different from divine jealousy. [Envy] does not spring from a great pity; it springs from the malevolence of spite. And not until there had dawned on the world that truth so wonderful—that God is love—do you ever have the truth that God is jealous. It is the Bible and the Bible only that has convinced the world that God is love. And it is the very depth and splendor of that love, sealed in the gift of the Lord Jesus Christ, that has given us the jealousy of God.
Note that the same attitude is very evident in our Lord himself. No one can read the story of the Gospels, believing that God was incarnate in humanity, without awaking to the awful truth that the Lord our God is a jealous God. As surely as God will tolerate no rival, Jesus Christ would tolerate no rival. He makes a claim on the human heart of absolute and unconditional surrender. Even had we never heard from the Old Testament that there was such a thing as divine jealousy, we would conclude it from the life of Jesus. There were many things that Jesus tolerated that we would never have thought to find him tolerating. He bore with social abuses—with personal discourtesies—in a way that is sometimes hard to understand.
But there was one thing Jesus never tolerated, and that was the division of his empire. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That is either stupendous arrogance—or the jealousy of God.
A jealous God may be a dark conception, but a jealous God can never be indifferent. He loves with a love so burning and intense that he is passionately jealous for his people. And it was that great love, shown in a beauty that people had never dreamed of, that was at last revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ.
—George H. Morrison