Morning By Morning #256

The LORD is a jealous…God.

Nahum 1:2

From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

Your Lord is very jealous for your love, dear believer. Did He choose you? Then He cannot bear for you to choose another. Did He buy you with His own blood? Then He cannot endure for you to think you are “your own” (1 Cor. 6:19) or that you belong to this world. He loved you with such great love that He would not live forever in heaven without you, and He would sooner die than allow you to perish. Thus, He cannot endure for anything to come between your heart’s love and Himself.

Your Lord is very jealous for your trust. He will not permit you to trust in an “arm of flesh” (2 Chron. 32:8). He cannot bear to watch you digging in dried-out wells when His overflowing fountain is always free to you. He is glad when we lean on Him, but when we transfer our dependence to another, when we rely on our own wisdom or the wisdom of a friend, or—worst of all—when we trust in any works of our own, He is displeased and will discipline us in order to bring us back to Himself.

Your Lord is very jealous of your relationships. There should be no one with whom you converse as much as Jesus. To abide in Him alone shows true love, but to commune with the world, to find satisfaction in worldly comforts, or even to prefer the fellowship of fellow Christians above private communion with Him grieves your jealous Lord. He is pleased when we abide in Him, enjoying constant fellowship with Him, and many of the trials He sends us are intended to wean our hearts from the created and then refocus them more closely upon the Creator Himself.

May our Lord’s jealousy, which is designed to keep us close to Christ, be a true comfort to us. For if He loves us so deeply, enough to care this much about our love for Him, we should be confident He will allow nothing to harm us and will protect us from all our enemies.

Oh, that we may have the grace today to keep our hearts in sacred fidelity for our Beloved alone, and may we with sacred jealousy close our eyes to all the enticements of the world!

From the pen of Jim Reimann:

Why is God a jealous God? Why is jealousy okay for Him, but not for us? It all comes down to the nature of the Lord, versus our nature. God is jealous for our love because of His nature to be absolutely faithful, while if we are jealous we would be hypocritical, for we often walk in unfaithfulness to Him. We allow many things to come between us and our fellowship with our faithful God.

The apostle Paul said to the young pastor Timothy,”If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). When Paul said, “He cannot disown himself,” he means the Lord cannot violate His nature, and one of His attributes is His faithfulness. Thus, since He cannot be unfaithful, He alone can be righteously jealous.

We can take comfort in the fact, however, that although we walk in unfaithfulness from time to time, He has covered us with the righteousness of Christ and “chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph. 1:4).