Congratulations to jc christensen from me too - and especially to your wife who presumably did most of the giving birth! And thanks for initiating the excellent discussion on the jealousy of God. I am impressed by the way it has drawn together such different voices so constructively.
I have a few thoughts on how the jealousy of God is not simply believed but experienced. This is a dimension to biblical theology that we need always to keep in view - it is rarely abstract; it is nearly always an expression of actual historical experience in some way or other. There is something to be said for danutz’s emphasis on theology as how Israel viewed God. Even if we might prefer to express this in the more objective language of revelation, we cannot get away from the fact that God is revealed through the process of reflection on corporate experience.
When God is ‘jealous’ in the Old Testament, there is generally a practical outcome attached, either explicitly or implicitly: Israel will experience suffering and devastation, Israel’s enemies will be defeated, Israel will be restored to the land and will prosper. Jealousy is an intense emotion that typically drives a person to act in some exceptional way, to destroy or protect or repair. When the psalmist asks, ‘How long, O LORD? Will you be angry forever? Will your jealousy burn like fire?’ (Psalm 79:5), what raises the question is the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the humiliation and slaughter of the Jews, the desecrating presence of the nations (1-4).
When we move beyond the situation of Judaism under the law into an age of the Spirit, I wonder if perhaps we also shift from the cycle of judgment and restoration to a process of inner renewal. We may still wish to point to occasional instances where the church experiences disaster as a consequence of its failure to live out the covenant, where the name of God is brought into disrepute and the church is judged in a concrete historical sense as a result. But I think perhaps that in general terms one of the consequences of being a redeemed, forgiven people of God in the Spirit, our existence determined by grace, is that it is the Spirit from within us, operating through reform movements, for example, that ensures that the church remains true to the God who called us in Christ to be his people.
I see no reason to think that God is not still a jealous God, which only means that he takes himself and his covenant commitment to his people very seriously and acts accordingly. But it may be that we experience that jealousy, and the consequences of that jealousy, rather differently. Whereas the law envisaged a concrete ‘political’ process of judgment and restoration involving external forces (cf. Deuteronomy 30:1-3), the Spirit, written on our hearts, not on tablets of stone, works from within, in a diffused and covert fashion. When God is jealous, he doesn’t send the Babylonians, he sends his Spirit. Arguably, something of the jealousy of God is manifesting itself in what we are calling the emerging church.
Re: The biblical experience of jealousy
First an aside. In the portion of our deliverance seminar regarding idolatry, I assert that God makes the same sort of claim of exclusivity a spouse would. Then I ask, "Is spousal jealousy a good thing?"
I don’t see God’s jealousy changing or abating in the NT. We’re just running out of excuses as the ages pass and the mechanism of God’s grace becomes ever clearer.
The pre-Mosaic Israelite could say, "Hey God, it’s not like you spoke to ME! Why are you getting on my case about being unfaithful?"
So then God brought them to Sinai so he could speak with them, but now the excuse was, "You’re so frightening, we can’t listen to you!"
So then God made his judgment rest on the words of a prophet, "a person like yourselves." But then of course the problem was that no one respects a person like oneself. "By whose authority," demanded the gatekeepers of Jesus, "do you teach these things?"
So now you claim that things are better that God’s Spirit himself lives within us?
When the author of Hebrews writes, "…you have not come to a mountain that can be touched… but you have come to Mount Zion and the city of the living God," is he congratulating us that we need not fear God’s jealousy any more now that God sits, as it were, in our living rooms? No, the context makes it clear that we have all the more reason to fear, because we have all the less excuse.
Isn’t this why blaspheming the Holy Spirit, not with our mouth but with our unreforming character, is unforgiveable? Isn’t that how people can perform miracles in the name of Christ and still be damned? These are NT verses, BTW.
One more point. The process of renewal involves more than the Spirit’s work. John says that Jesus baptizes with fire as well as Spirit, remember? What burns us in the crucible of purification if not God’s jealousy? The same thing, Paul reminds us, that burned the Israelites in the wilderness AFTER they had partaken of the bread of Christ and been baptized in the sea, and long after they had believed and worshipped at the end of Ex. 4. Worship and belief are NOT the ultimate goal; just the start toward the ultimate goal of being holy as He is holy. This same fire appears in the NT—multiple authors encouraging perseverance during testing from external sources.
Why the post-Christian community does not feel this fire is a good question. We imagine that Sabbath rest is a picnic in a grassy park when in truth it lays far off in the searing heat of a rock-strewn valley.
—M