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If you were asked to list the attributes of God, would one of them be “jealousy”? Many people don’t respond well when you tell them that God is a jealous God. One of the world’s most famous atheists, Richard Dawkins, calls God “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction”, and lists His jealousy as one of the reasons why. How should we approach the topic of God’s jealousy? Is He jealous? Do we even want Him to be?

God is a jealous God- it is clearly taught in Scripture.  For God not to be jealous would be for God to cease to be God! It is a vital part of who He is:

“You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5).

“for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exodus 34:14).

“For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24).

Dawkins was right when he said that God is a jealous God. But how do we explain His jealousy?

God is jealous for His people- We must understand that God is not jealous in the same way that we are jealous. He is not jealous for a next door neighbor’s car. He is not jealous of a schoolmates GPA. He doesn’t want things that are not rightfully His, unlike us. His jealousy is a holy jealous, a just jealousy. One chapter in the Bible that deals extensively with God’s jealousy is Ezekiel 16, where God is portrayed as the husband of a faithless bride, Israel.

“And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I made you flourish like a plant of the field. And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment. Your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare” (Ezekiel 16:6-7).

Here we see that God picks up His bride when she is “naked and bare.” He chose Israel to be His people not because of her own glory or worth, but because He loved her (Deuteronomy 7:6-8). When she was wallowing in her blood, He told her to live. He caused her to flourish and to grow. His people grew up in His care. We are just like Israel. God has chosen us and loved us, and not because of anything we have done. But how did His bride Israel, His beloved, respond? And similarly, how do we respond?

“But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore because of your renown and lavished your whorings on any passerby; your beauty became his” (Ezekiel 16:15).

Despite the love that God has for Israel, she turned against Him. She trusted in her own power and her own beauty. She also played the whore; she committed “spiritual adultery” and worshiped idols. As this verse says, she “lavished her whorings on any passerby.” She gave her beauty to other things; she didn’t give her love to God. She prostituted herself to other nations and idols, while God wanted her to love Him. He wanted to be the One in whom Israel trusted. Today, God wants to be the only One we trust. He wants to be our only priority, our only love. God wants our time, our love, and our praise. But does He even deserve it?

Let’s first describe God’s jealousy with an illustration from marriage, like Ezekiel 16 does. Let’s say there was a couple (and I’m sure there are many like this) where the husband loves his wife, but his wife cheats on him multiple times. Is the husband wrong to want the love of his wife? Is he wrong for being angry that his wife is committing adultery? Not at all! It is the same way with God, except much more so. He deserves our love, our time, and our praise. He is jealous for it. But we trust in ourselves and love other things more than Him. This provokes God to jealousy, and rightly so! He is the faithful husband, we are the faithless bride.

The Bible also gives us a few reasons why God has the right to be jealous for us:
1) He created us- God formed man out of the dust; He breathed life into us. He made us for His glory, yet we have rebelled against Him in our sin.
2) He has shown us His mercy- The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). We deserve death and hell when we sin. But God shows us His mercy in that every time we sin, we are not sent to hell. If you are a Christian, God poured out His wrath for your sin on His Son Jesus Christ.
3) He has shown us His love- God sent His Son to save us from our sin. He did this because He so loved the world (John 3:16). We don’t deserve His love, for we are by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3).
4) He has shown us His grace- God has given us so much. He has given us earthly blessings that we so often take for granted. And still He gives us more. He has given us the best gift of all, Jesus Christ. And since He has given us Christ, will He not also give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

Since God has done so much for us, can we really say that it is wrong for Him to be jealous? It is time that we stop seeing His jealousy as something despicable, but rather as a blessing!

And indeed it is a blessing! You should want a jealous God! You should want Him to want my love! Can you imagine what it would be like if God wasn’t jealous? If we left Him and committed idolatry and He was indifferent? If God was not jealous for His people, He would have left Israel in her blood and nakedness. And He would have left us too. It is partly because of God’s jealousy that we can confidently say that He will NEVER leave us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).

It is my prayer that our hearts would come to know the God of the Bible, and that we would not only accept Him as He is, but praise Him. May we not see God’s jealousy as something that is abominable, but as an amazing attribute that we need to give God glory for! God is jealous for our love, so let’s give Him what He wants!

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