Does God Get Jealous?

 Does God Get Jealous?

 

You must worship no other gods, for the LORD, whose very name is Jealous, is a God who is jealous about his relationship with you.

EXODUS 34.14

 

I am jealous for you with the jealousy of God himself. I promised you as a pure bride to one husband — Christ. But I fear that somehow your pure and undivided devotion to Christ will be corrupted.

2 CORINTHIANS 11.2-3

 

You adulterers! Don’t you realise that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? . . . If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God. What do you think the Scriptures mean when they say that the spirit God has placed within us is filled with envy?

JAMES 4.4-5

 

Some people call it the “green-eyed monster.” It ruins relationships and makes people miserable. What is it? Jealousy. To be jealous is to want what someone else has only for yourself. Paul lists jealousy with other “desires of your sinful nature,” like being involved with the occult and getting drunk (Gal 5.19-21).

So if jealousy is bad, how could God describe himself as jealous? Everything about God is perfect —so his jealousy must be part of that perfection. This tells us that his jealousy is not like our self-serving jealousy. He is not out of sorts or irritable because of envy, but he is passionate for our affection out of love. Think of the people you know who are married. There is an appropriate measure of jealousy that a husband and wife should have for each other because they love each other and want to keep their marriage as an exclusive relationship. It’s not that different with God — he is right to jealously guard the relationship he has with the people who belong to him.

The fact that God is jealous shows us how passionate he is about us. This isn’t just a businesslike relationship we have with him. It is a love relationship that stirs his deep desire to pursue us. Because he loves us, he doesn’t want our affections to wander away from him.