Jealousy is often portrayed as a bad thing, but I am not so confident about that. Our Lord God Almighty, tells us He is a “jealous God”.
When the Lord sets down the basic parameters by which life is to be lived and the way in which we are to honour Him, He said: “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.” (Ex 20:3-6)
Following this, and in connection with this the Lord speaks about “punishing the children for the sin of the fathers…of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand (generations) of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
At various times I meet people who are going through terrible guilt and distress because they have concluded their parenting has been so poor, that this is why their children have become rebellious and getting into all kinds of terrible trouble. The conclusion these parents often go on to make is that God is punishing their children for their bad parenting. That may be true in some rare and particularly bad cases, but we must also listen to the command of God when he says a father must not be punished for the sin of his son, nor a son for the sin of the father (Deut 24:16).
The Psalmist prays in Psalm 78:8 that the Lord not hold the sins of the fathers against us, but even here it is in the context of God’s jealousy for His name (cf vs 1, and vs 5). What we have in Exodus 20:3-6 is God’s absolute requirement for Him to be the exclusive and only God in our lives. There simply isn’t any room for another. In this regard God is immensely jealous of our love and devotion.
It is also in this connection that He will visit His wrath on the offspring of those who seek to demean and dishonour God by serving another god.
When we lived in Sydney, we were not too far away a Baha’i temple had been erected. On several occasions we were urged to go and visit there because the gardens around it were immaculately cared for and the building was beautiful. Apart from this being a place of worship for another god, it was also a place of worship for all the gods of the faiths of the world.
One draw card to many tourist destinations is the shrines and temples of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and others.
Should Christians, even as curious tourists visit such places? I believe we should not. To do so not only provides financial support to those “gods”; can create a wrong admiration in our hearts for the devotion of the people and the structures to their god, which cannot be a god; but also runs the serious risk of causing jealousy to Him who is the true and only God of heaven and earth, the creator of all that is seen and unseen, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
However, while idols are everywhere and people are worshipping them every day, perhaps the most terrible form of idolatry is when we set ourselves up as gods. This was the every sin which caused God to cast Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden (Gen 3; note especially vss 4-6; 22-24). They thought they too could be gods.
Dan Brown of the Da Vinci Code’ fame has written several other books of mediocre quality, although one critic declared his work to have an usually large IQ.’ Perhaps that’s because Dan Brown so clearly and without any apology reveals the view that is so prevalent in society, that we are all gods. In his story called Demons and Angels’ he tells of a Harvard professor being called in to exercise scientific investigation to save the Roman Catholic church and the world from disaster, and in doing so, reveals his own faith in man and the universe. At one point he declares through a principle character, “Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning...some of us pray to Jesus, some go to Mecca, some of us study sub atomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth.”(p134) and a little further on, the conclusion is that god is female, and she is Mother Earth.
Brown’s idea of god however, doesn’t stop there. He says, “God is the energy that flows through the synapses of our nervous system and the chambers of our hearts! God is all things!”(p585). In other words, Brown is a pantheist, and man for him is one step below the real god — Mother earth. The gods of Brown speak to him as well. In situations of “physical trauma, extreme joy or fear, deep meditation — all of a sudden their neurons start firing like crazy, resulting in massively enhanced clarity...remarkable solutions occur in these moments of clarity. It’s what gurus call higher consciousness. Biologists call it altered states. Psychologists call it super-sentience, Christians call it answered prayer...sometimes divine revelation simply means adjusting your brain to hear what your heart already knows.”(p532)
There is no other god but God! He is a jealous God and will vent His divine displeasure on those who seek to compete with Him for worship and honour.
Let us then love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul and with all our mind. (Matt 22:37)