BIBLE DIFFICULTY: GOD, LOVE, AND JEALOUSY
Posted on October 19th, 2011 by Agathos Ministries
1 John 4:8: “God is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:4: “Love is not jealous.” Exodus 20:5: “I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God.” Reconcile…..
It’s stuff like this in the Bible that I love - the apparent contradiction - the paradoxes that require some thought and some trust in the document.
It is also one of those things that points to the Bible not being a mere human-made document. If some guys sat around a table in the late 300s to decide what would go in the Bible and what it would say… why would they leave this kind of stuff in there? It would make things so much easier for a man-made religion to keep it simplistic.
But they have books written in antiquity that they include in their entirety even though it creates difficulties. I love the difficulties. It makes me stretch and grow as a human being and as a Christian.
Starting with the New Testament, and then explaining the Old. God is Love, true, but God is not “nothing but Love.” To just leave it at that would make God more like an elemental force of Love, not a real being. God IS Love in that it is SO much a part of His nature that He is the very definition of Love, but there is so much more to Him than just that. That said…
Love is not jealous. Sure, people who are in love get jealous, but the jealousy is not love, and love is not the jealousy. It is not “the more insanely jealous I get over the stupidest things, the more I love you” nor “the more I love you the more insanely jealous over the stupidest things I must get.” They are two separate things. Jealousy arises because of a lack of security in the relationship - given the terms of the relationship.
Lack of security comes in two basic forms. One is that you are basically dealing with an insecure person who feels a lack of security over pretty much anything - hopefully at least things that have rational threat to the relationship - but really insecure people don’t need even that.
The second form of not being secure in a relationship is when your partner really gives you a reason to not be secure! If a man admires a woman not his wife for her genuine beauty, that should not be a threat to his marriage. But when he actually starts a growing love relationship with a woman outside his marriage, when he starts to consider leaving his wife for this other woman, then his wife no longer has security in her marriage. It IS being threatened, and she would feel jealous not because she is just an insecure woman, but because there is a serious and legitimate threat to her marriage. Make sense?
So with that, let’s go to God. God in and of Himself is totally secure. However, the relationship, like our example above, has two sides - God and (in this case) Israel. Israel has free will. Israel could choose to not maintain her relationship with God. For the God-Israel relationship to be secure, both must commit, and God did. In Exodus, it is talking about the commandment of have just God as God, not as one of many gods, and not making any graven images (which were worshipped as though they were the god or an avatar in many cases, not just a representation or symbol).
In here, God is warning that the security of the deal depends upon Israel keeping the commandment to be faithful to God. He warns them that He will be jealous if Israel removes the security of the relationship by going to other gods. In God’s case, it is the protectiveness of knowing that His bride (as Israel is often portrayed) should stick with the True God and not some made up god - a Real God who wants the best for her, not some made up god that will let her do self-destructive things in the name of religion.
So here, jealousy does have to do with insecurity. Love is Not Jealous and God is Not Jealous because of a deficiency in character we call “being insecure.” But jealousy born of a relationship not being secure, and God being jealous FOR us (He knows WE are the ones who suffer by going after other gods), that God IS.
Verses reconciled. Does that make sense?
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