God Is Jealous

Exodus 20:5  — You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 

After telling the Israelites that they should not place any other gods before Him or worship idols, He reveals something incredible — that He is a jealous God.

God is not jealous in the same way that humans are. We get jealous for all the wrong reasons: pride, vanity, selfishness, arrogance, fear. We hate feeling like anyone or anything is above us. God’s jealousy is different because He actually deserves to be the number one priority.

One of my favorite quotes is, “This is God’s universe, and God does things His way. You may think you have a better way, but you don’t have a universe.” The point is that the potter always gets to tell the clay how things should go — not the other way around.

Part of God’s design for the world and humanity is for humans to have an innate drive to serve, worship, and glorify. The only problem is that we apply those God-given inclinations towards all the wrong things. The Israelites (and other people groups in the ancient world) often turned their worship and glory towards the things that God created rather than God Himself. In Romans 1:25, the Apostle Paul explains that since the beginning the world people have “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…”

God, knowing His own creation well, instructed the Israelites to lean into their natural drive for worship, but to direct it all towards Him and Him alone. Today He still expects the same from us. We may not build physical idols and worship them like the Israelites did, but we build countless mental, emotional, and spiritual idols in our hearts and in our minds every single day. Give your time, energy, and worship to God first!