By John Piper
God Is Jealous
Now it’s true. It’s just plain, straight-up, on-the-face-of-it true that God commands our affections, that they be entirely his. Jesus said that the first and great commandment is to love the Lord your God. “You shall [it’s a command] love the Lord your God with all your heart (Matthew 22:37). All of it. “With all your heart,” God demands that we love him. “Don’t give any of your affections that belong to God to anyone else,” he’s saying. Or the way the Old Testament put it in Exodus 34:14: “You shall worship” — that is,treasure, reverence, admire, esteem, praise, love, delight in — “no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”
In other words, God demands that you and I give him all our worship, all our allegiance, all our affection. Nothing is to be loved more. Jesus said, “Whoever loves father or mother . . . [or] son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). So Jesus is demanding all of our supreme affections and allegiance for himself. If we give any of our worship to another, God is jealous, because it belongs to him. And if we
don’t repent, he will break forth in wrath. “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24).
Now, why do sinners — that’s all of us, unless the Lord breaks our hearts and causes us to be born again — bristle at this?
Sin does not like that for at least two reasons. First, we don’t like being told what to do — period. And the second reason is that sin does not find its greatest pleasure in God. So we don’t want to be told what to do, and we certainly can’t be told to find our greatest pleasure in God because we don’t have our greatest pleasure in God. That’sthe very meaning of sin. And so, the way we justify our resistance, both to God’s authority and to our finding all satisfaction in him, is by finding fault with his jealousy.
Jealous for His Bride
But suppose that God does have a right to tell us what to do because he made us, he owns us, and he’s the only person in the universe who knows everything, and is infinitely wise and infinitely good, and knows what’s best for us. And suppose he is the greatest good in the universe, and he is the greatest joy, and he is the all-satisfying pleasure. Suppose all that’s true — which it is. Then how would we think about God’s jealousy?
Maybe we would think biblically like this. God looked at fallen, sinful, rebellious humanity, and in his immeasurable grace, he decided to call out a people for his own possession. And the way he would relate to these people is as a loving husband to a beautiful wife. She would find her joy in his greatness and wisdom and strength and love and care and protection, and he would rejoice over her and protect her and provide everything for her that she needs to find her fullest joy in his presence.
Married
So that’s what he did; that’s what God did. In the Old Testament, it’s described like this in Hosea 2:19–20. This is God talking to his people: “I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you will know the Lord.”
in the New Testament, the church — God’s people, God’s chosen people, his own special possession — is described as Christ’s bride, his wife. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . . so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25, 27). In other words, Christ aims to have a beautiful wife, and he died for this.
Unfaithful
What happens, then, if the church, the bride, starts drifting into a love affair with the world? What happens? And here’s the way James describes that happening: “You adulteresses!” Now, that’s very significant, because not all the translations get the fact that it’s a feminine word. It’s not “adulterers”; it’s not “adulterous generation”; it’s “adulteresses” because it’s treating the church as the wife of God. “You adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world” — in other words, a love affair, a paramour affair with the world — “is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend [a lover, a paramour] of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” He turns God into a cuckold.
Jealous for Our Joy
The jealousy of God is the measure of his zeal for our happiness in him. His anger at our spiritual adultery, at our having other lovers besides him, is a reflex both of his zeal for his own worth, but also of his zeal for our joy. If we turn away from him as the greatest treasure, we turn away from our own greatest pleasure.
John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For more than thirty years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis. He is author of more than fifty books, and his sermons, articles, books, and more are available free of charge at desiringGod.org.
Excerpts taken from “How Could God Be Jealous?” by John Piper. © Desiring God Foundation. Source: desiringGod.org