Our Jealous God

This entry repeats my Cor Deo posting. Please post any responses on that site (Click Here).

For a while any time I read that God is jealous, whose "name is Jealous" (Ex. 34:14), it didn't sit well with me and left me confused.  How could God be jealous when jealousy is wrong? I always heard as a child it was wrong to be jealous of another's skills, friends, possessions, etc. and even the last Commandment says do not covet.  That's the issue isn't it, we often equate covetousness with jealousy, and that jealousy can only be a selfish desire?  The question then, is whether we can reconcile the tension between a God who is perfect, yet also jealous?

Typically you'll receive two answers.  First, some just explain this tension away by saying that God is God and he can have a double standard. Others will answer that God's nature allows him to have two seemingly contradictory attributes, i.e. God is loving but also just.  These answers actually don't help us, but rather blind us from one of the central messages of the Bible: the revelation of God's personality.

I discovered his personality when I just started to read the Bible, cover to cover, a couple times a year.  In the Bible I found he is a lover who does everything on account of love. Adam & Eve were made to be in an intelligent and loving relationship with their God who loves them.  Sadly, we know the story went wrong and that they rejected their purpose as the Son's bride, for the Father to be their Daddy, and for the Spirit to live in them. In Genesis 3 starts one of the main themes in the Bible: the continued rejection of God's heart and our love for anything but him--that is, the theme of whoredom.

The clearest picture of whoredom found in the Bible is in Ezekiel 16.  Here God speaks of his people as a newborn baby abandoned to die by exposure.  He tells us that he saw her, gave her life, and, above all, offered to her his heart. When she had grown into a woman, God made her his bride and clothed her so extravagantly that all the nations knew of her beauty. But instead of complete devotion to the one that loved her, she took what she had been given, and gave it to other lovers. The rejection of her husband doesn't stop here, but it's so heinous I'll let you read it for yourself.

So what's God's response to his "adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband!"?  He will judge her as any women who've committed adultery are judged--his "wrath and jealousy" will be upon her.

This shouldn't be a surprise to us. Any husband that loves his wife and discovers her in the act of adultery will be rightfully jealous and seek justice.  Any jilted spouse that loves their partner would angrily respond, "Why are you doing this? Don't you love me? Look how much I've loved you!" Isn't this a proper response to such a situation?

The Bible declares to us from Genesis to Revelation that "God is a jilted lover!" Its not that he's been wrathful and jealous for all eternity, instead, when his creation rejected his heart and continued to reject him, he became jealous. God is a lover who jealously pursues in order to win his creation's heart back from other lovers.

What's even more amazing about our jealous God is that his goal for judgment in Ezekiel 16 (stripping his bride of her renown, her beautiful clothes and jewelry, and leaving her naked, bare, and alone) is to make her stop playing the whore and to return to him.  God promises to atone for all that she has done and to establish a new covenant with her.  He promises a new covenant that we see later on in Ezekiel as God giving her a new heart and a new spirit, that his Spirit will be within her and she will walk in his ways and obey his instructions. In other places, we see God saying that he desires his people to call him "My Husband" not "My Lord" (Hosea 2), that God will celebrate over his people as a husband celebrates over his wife (Isaiah 62).

He's not like most husbands who have unfaithful wives and therefore seek divorce: no, he hates divorce. Rather, God the Father, out of a love for his Son and his creation, sent the Son to the far country to win and wash his bride.  The Son went out by a love for his Father and his bride, to win his Father more sons and daughters who are deeply loved by the Father. And the Spirit that unites the Father and the Son, the communicator and the koinonia of the Trinity, is given to us and unites us to the Son, our bridegroom.  This is our God whose name is Jealous!

Let me encourage you, jump in the Bible, read it in a month or two and discover that the jealousy of our God is winsome.

Why is Prayer Weird?

This entry repeats my Cor Deo posting. Please post any responses on that site (click here).

Prayer can often be strangely alien. If you think about it, prayer in our churches can be quite otherworldly. Prayer often seems to be inexplicably a-relational and bizarrely formulaic, which conflicts with the reality presented in the Bible.

In God’s story we find that prayer has depth, ceaseless frequency, and a naturalness many of us do not experience. Maybe before I offer some reasons why I think this is the case, let me give a brief description of what I’m referring to today.

The Inexplicable Prayer Meeting: In my experience, a weekly hour-long church prayer meeting consists of a 45-minute discussion about the week to harvest any medical prayer requests.  Once the harvesting is complete, the meeting ends with a 15-minute prayer time where each person takes a single turn to pray. When finished, we go home with some sense of accomplishment. We’ve ticked the box that so many Christians have no desire to tick.

But the strangeness of the meeting doesn’t end there. The actual prayer time is quite foreign. You might hear people speak in spooky voices that seem to take possession of warmhearted people.  Or you may even hear people pray in archaic language that anyone under the age of 150 can’t understand without some careful translation—as though God says, “I love it when you call me ‘Thou!”

I could go on, but you get the picture.  We don’t talk like this to our friends, family, or spouses, well anyone really, yet with God we do.  Then we wonder why we don’t pray. Prayer just doesn’t make any sense, it isn’t natural, and lets face it, God doesn’t seem to respond all that much.  We don’t pray, but when we have to, when it’s a must, we’ll dutifully break out our spooky voice and pray.

Some Inexplicable Advice:  If this is true, and prayer is a duty, we can’t possibly live up to Paul’s command to “pray without ceasing” (1Thess 5:17).  After all, do we do anything without ceasing? And if we do, it can’t possibly be prayer, can it? It’s just so strange to pray to God … that is, it would be if God hadn’t commanded it.

Leaders that offer instruction on prayer instinctively begin with the importance of prayer (feel the vice squeeze down?) followed by a list of advice in order to develop a habit of prayer.  Some advice may include:

• Much praying is not done because we don’t plan to pray, so plan it!
• Pray with some sort of structure like ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication).
• Pray until you pray

I don’t say all this as if I haven’t struggled to pray or haven’t given and used such advice.  Not too long into my walk with Christ, I was told if I had difficulty praying to try to pray through ACTS.  At the time I thought it was great advice, “Finally,” I thought, “a way to make sure I say all the things I needed to say to God!” Yet after awhile I started to realize I was more concerned about order above anything else. My “conversation” with God was robotic and not truly conversing with and baring my heart to God.  Yet I didn’t know what else to do, talking with God just didn’t seem instinctive or easy.

When I finally got into the Bible consistently I discovered this entire struggle was absent. The Bible assumes prayer just happens. From Moses, to David, to Daniel, to Jesus through to the early church, prayer just happens in all circumstances, in every situation, without end.  Prayer just overflows from a relationship with God.  It is as if communication is the very essence of any relationship.

Why is Prayer so Sci-fi Weird? So far I’ve been slightly subtle, but the answer comes down to how you view God.   If we understand God to be the unmoved mover (the eternal monadic God that set everything in motion with a single decree), then there’s no place for prayer.  Prayer is as alien to God as it is to us. Prayer, in this reality, isn’t the communication innate to any relationship.  Instead it’s some kind of relational dissonance: a creature attempting to speak to a non-discursive deity.

God is a Communicative Spreading Goodness: But thankfully, God has been a Father-Son-Spirit God for all eternity.  God’s glory before the creation of the world was a loving communion (John 17).  That is, God’s essence is relationship bonded by communication and other-centered love.  The overflow of this reality was the motivation for creation. The Trinity desired to have a creation to share his communion, his goodness, and his ethos with his image (male-female person united in relationship).   You can imagine Adam and Eve talking with God in the cool of the day in the Garden because they just loved talking with one another.  You can picture them enjoying the presence and warmth of communion with the other.  This was the reality before death and hostility crept in when the image bearers rejected life with God by exploring the reality of making themselves god–the primary object of their affections and reference of reality.

But wait . . . what’s even more amazing is that this God invites us back to participate in his community again.  The Father, motivated by love for his creation, sent his Son to defeat death and make a way for life to return to his creation.  And this gift of grace is the communicative bond the Father and Son share–the person of the Holy Spirit.  Now as part of the Bride of Christ we have the pleasure to speak to our Bridegroom and our Father who poured their love upon us by the Holy Spirit.

Like everything else in Christianity, we tend to pile instructions on top of advice.  However, if we are missing out, the solution won’t come from better techniques, but from a clearer view of God.  And when we glimpse the communicative self-giving love of God, isn’t our response to communicate back?  That’s prayer and there’s nothing weird about that!