10 Keys to Successful Living
2 - Don't Chase Shadows
Ex 20.4-6

God is jealous for your love

God is jealous for you…

“What’s that?” you say. “How many weddings have I been to where they read that passage from 1 Corinthians? And I’m sure it says there that ‘Love is not jealous.’ And doesn’t it say somewhere else that ‘God is love?’ So, I’m no philosopher but, if God is love and love is not jealous, then how can God be jealous?”

God isn’t jealous of you, or anybody else for that matter. That’s the kind of jealousy that 1 Corinthians is talking about. The kind of jealousy that begrudges somebody something because you’re afraid it might take away from what you have yourself. When people use “jealousy” that way, it’s a lot like “envy.”

“His house is bigger than mine, I’m jealous.” “She gets better marks in school than I do, I’m jealous.” “They have cooler clothes than me, I’m jealous.”

That kind of jealousy is about comparisons. It takes something you have and compares it with what someone else has, and when you come up short, you’re jealous. 

None of that is good.

But there is at least one place where jealousy is not only good; it’s the only appropriate response. That place is in a marriage. A marriage is an exclusive relationship between a man and a woman in which they commit themselves to each other whole-heartedly for life. If someone then intrudes on that relationship and seeks to seduce, or entice away one of the partners, the appropriate response from the other partner is to be jealous, and to work to save the relationship… You see, “jealousy” is part of the language of love.

When we were talking about romantic love this summer we looked at Song of Solomon. In Song of Solomon 8:6 the woman says to her husband to be, “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.” Love and jealousy are seen as parallels. Jealousy is what protects the relationship.

Last week we looked at the first commandment, and we saw that the Ten Commandments are an expression of God’s love for his people. We talked about the language he uses for rescuing Israel, “I carried you on eagles wings and brought you to myself…” “out of all the nations you will be my treasured possession…” And we saw that this is the language of love. We talked about the way the prophets use the metaphor of God as husband and God’s people as his bride and wife. In fact that picture of God’s relationship with his people runs through the Bible; from here in Exodus, clear through to the very last chapter of Revelation.

So when God says he’s jealous, he isn’t jealous of anything or anybody. But he is jealous for you. He’s jealous for your love, for your devotion. He’s jealous for your heart. Because there’s a place there that belongs rightfully to him. Something else we talked about last week was how there’s a God shaped space at the centre of each of our lives. There is one relationship that belongs in that space, and that’s your relationship with God. If anything else sneaks in there to take his place, then he is rightfully jealous for your heart and for your love.

That’s what the second commandment is about; keeping that place at the centre of your heart for no-one and nothing other than God.

“OK,” you say. “I can see how that might be important to God. But why should it be important to me? Why does he have to have that space at the centre of my life? Surely it’s my life. If I want to put something other than God at the centre of it, then that’s my choice.”

It isn’t that easy. Because, whether you’re aware of it or not, that space at the centre of your life is what holds everything else up. It’s where the whole weight of your world rests; and only God is up to the strain of holding your world together.

[In 1999 I was in an earthquake in Istanbul that measured 7.4 on the Richter scale. That night 15,000 people died, 25,000 people were injured and half a million people were made homeless. The main reason the casualty figures were so high was because many of the new buildings had been built with substandard materials. When the shock came they didn’t stand up to the strain and building after building collapsed.

A couple of years earlier a bridge outside of Islamabad in Pakistan collapsed. An Afghan friend of mine who had worked on its construction wasn’t surprised. He told me that, after the engineer had come by and checked the rebar, the foreman had told the crew to take out every second bar before pouring the concrete. He then sold the rebar. After a couple of years of traffic the bridge gave way. It didn’t stand up to the strain.

Our first car was a 1978 Honda Accord that we bought second hand in 1982. A year later I was going round a corner when the front right shock tower collapsed. When I took it into the shop it turned out there was a recall on the car. The shock towers had been built with substandard material and when the stress came they gave way.]

That space at the centre of you life, where God belongs, is the point where all the stresses and strains of life end up. Eventually, if you put anything else in that space it will just crumble and give way under the pressure; because it isn’t God, it’s something else pretending to be God. It’s what the Bible calls an idol.

Identifying idols

I have to confess that I feel like I have to defend even talking about idols. After all, aren’t we living in 21^st century Canada? Most of us come from a background that is at least nominally Christian. We live in a Western culture that rejected idols made of wood or stone centuries ago. Maybe Moses had to deal with people worshipping idols; or the prophets. And we know that Paul had to preach against idols in Athens and Ephesus. But we don't have idols anymore. We're living in a modern, Western culture, and people aren't bowing down to little statues anywhere. So what has this got to do with us?

The answer to that question is that idolatry, worshipping idols, is much more of an internal issue than an external one.

So, what is an idol? An idol is anything that’s so central to your life that you can't have a meaningful life if you lose it. Idolatry is when you look at something, and in your heart of hearts you say, If I have that, then my life has value, then my life has meaning. If I would lose that, I don't know how I would live. An idol can be anything. An idol can be family and children. It could be career or making money. It can be achievement or reputation. It can be social standing or a romantic relationship. It can be your competence and skill. It can be physical beauty, either your own or someone else’s. It can be some political or social cause. It could be your moral record. It can even be your religious activity and or your ministry. All of those things can be idols.

Here’s how you can identify if something is an idol in your life. Imagine losing it. How does that make you feel? If it only makes you sad, then it’s just a good thing in your life. But if you lose something and you can’t imagine life without it, if life would no longer be worth living without it, then it’s an idol.

It doesn’t matter if you say, "I believe in God." If you are so invested in your career that if it goes south—or you’re so invested in a particular romantic relationship, that if you break up—or if you’re so invested in your appearance that, if something happens and you’re disfigured in some way – you no longer have anything to live for. That shows you're in the control of an idol. When you take any finite, created thing, and make it into an absolute, when you take a good thing and make it into an ultimate thing, you've created an idol.

So what are some of the things that can become idols in our lives?

Money

In our society one of the major idols is money. In Ephesians 5:5 Paul says that a greedy person is an idolater. Why? Because they have put wealth at the centre of their life. That space at the centre of their life that is made for God has been filled instead with money. And it’s not just rich people who have this problem. Remember, an idol is anything that you look at and say, If I have that, then my life has value, then my life has meaning. That can apply to people who have little or nothing just as much as it applies to those with lots. Because it’s not the amount of money you have that’s the issue (large or small). It’s the place that it holds in your life.

The problem with idols is they’re not God. God is compassionate and loving and cares about us. Idols aren’t. If you serve them they will destroy you. So, if your idol is money, or its cousin “success,” – your idol – will work you into the ground. You may not make animal sacrifices to it, but you’ll end up sacrificing your time, your family, your health, maybe even your life.

[I remember my father-in-law telling me how so many of his peers retired from their jobs in good health, and 2-3 years later they were dead. Their jobs had become the centre of their lives. In biblical terms, it had become their idol. When it was gone, they had nothing left to live for. So they just stopped living.]

Physical appearance

Another popular idol in our society is physical appearance. There is a growing backlash against it, but there is still a huge industry devoted to telling us that we’re not slim enough, or muscular enough, or that we have the wrong kind of body. Particularly young women are victimised by idolatry of the body. Airbrushed pictures of models prepared by professional makeup artists lead them to think, “If only I looked different, my life would be so much better.” And so they sacrifice themselves to an image; which is almost a definition of idolatry. 

Family

Then there’s family. Family idolatry takes all kinds of forms. There’s the traditional form where the idol is family honour. This has been in the news recently with so-called “honour killings” where (usually) a daughter or sister is killed for having brought dishonour on the family name.

Or there’s the more modern version where people make their children into idols. Parents who look at their children and essentially in their heart of hearts are saying, If my children are happy, if my children are believers, if my children grow up to love me, if my children are successful, then I know that I'm worth something. If that's how you look at your children, not just as good things but as ultimate things, you start to live out your life through your children. The result will be either that that child will stay near you and live a crushed life, because they will always be crushed under the weight of your expectations, or that child will get as far away from you as possible. And because you have turned that child into an idol, he or she will wound you in a way that you'll never get over, and you'll be mad at God. How dare God do such a thing as this! I can't believe in God. But the wound is your own making.

It works the other way round too. People will say, "I believe God's forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself." What that means is there is a higher god in their life than God; they failed something else. For example, many people are driven by parental expectations, and when they fail to reach those parental expectations they hate themselves, and they beat themselves up. Whenever they fail, it's, "I know God forgives me; I can't forgive myself," but what that really means is their real god—which is their parents with their parental expectations—doesn't forgive them. Their real god, their spiritual master, their idol, is cursing them; because idols are always violent. There's no mercy in them.

Do you see how easy it is to place something other than God at the centre of your life? And do you see the results? Because nothing and no-one, other than God, can fill that space at the centre of your life. Anything else you put there will become an idol, just a shadow of the real thing. At best it will collapse when times get hard. At worst it will destroy you.

That’s at least part of what’s going on in verses 5 and 6, where it talks about God… punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, ⁶ but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. In Romans Paul talks about God’s punishment in ways that suggest that the worst thing God can do to us is let us have our own way. If we want to serve violent idols that will destroy our lives; if – to use the language of Exodus 20 – we chose to hate God, he lets us have our way.

People often get angry at this passage, especially where it talks about God punishing people to the third and fourth generation. But you need to see that it says “the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” This says two things. 1. It takes very seriously the effect that parents have on children. If we are angry at God, or if we have made something other than God an idol in our lives, we’re very likely to pass that on to our kids. 2. It also takes very seriously the ability of people to choose their own path. There is a way to avoid the consequences of your parents’ sin. Make your own choice to love God and become one of the thousand generations of those who love [him] and keep [his] commandments.

By the way – that passage suggests that God has a 250:1 bias in favour of doing good to people. He doesn’t like judging or punishing folks.

Destroying idols

So, how do you actually do something about this? How do we not just identify the idols in our lives; how do we actually destroy them? You can physically destroy an image or a statue, but how do we destroy the idols in our hearts? Because, don’t be deceived, idols are dangerous. On the one hand, the bible says that idols are empty. They’re shadows. They're worthless things. They’re created things (sometimes things you've made yourself) that don’t have the power to give you what you want. On the other hand, idols seem to wield enormous power over us because spiritual powers use them to get a foothold in our lives.

But here's the key. In Colossians 2:15 it says that Jesus, "Having disarmed the powers and authorities, … made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them on the cross." Which means that when Jesus Christ went to the cross—when the world, the flesh, and the devil, when the powers and principalities, unleashed all their fury against the Son of God, he bowed his head into it and died. That storm swept over him, and he sank. And yet we're told that, in doing that, he defeated them. He utterly defeated the idols. He utterly defeated the powers and principalities behind them.

The way to break the power of idols in our lives is not to focus on the idol; it’s to focus on Jesus and on what he has done for us. As one of my old teachers used to say, “It’s a lot easier to say ‘yes’ to Jesus than ‘no’ to the devil.” When that reality breaks through on me, it changes me. That’s what frees me from my idols.

I love Marilyn dearly and she’s an amazing woman. But even Marilyn can’t carry the strain of holding my world together. Only God can do that. I've got to love Jesus more than anything, even more than my wife. The only way that's going to happen is if I worship and pray and think the gospel deep into my heart, so that as much as I love my wife, I love Jesus more.  

I don't want to love Marilyn less. I want to love him more. Because I know this: One of us is going to look at the other person in a coffin, and if our saviour is in that coffin, how will our saviour help us when our heart is breaking? There's only one Saviour that can always help you when your heart is breaking, who will be able to help you face anything, even that. It’s not an idol, it’s Jesus Christ, who died in order to break the power of idols over your life and mine, so that we can be free, to love and serve God.