God is a Jealous God

I understand that Jessica Biel is doing a remake of “Easy Virtue.” I can’t swear as to how close this will follow the original movie, but in the original movie, Biel’s character, Larita, has an abusive drunk for a husband, but there is a local artist who tries to convince her to leave her husband and run away with him. The husband becomes convinced that she is having an affair with the artist, and kills him, and divorces her. His defense, of course, is that killing the artist was a crime of passion. Most of the film is about what happens to Larita after the fact; she goes to France, where no one knows her, and no one thinks of her as a less-than-virtuous woman who had an affair (this is where the title, “Easy Virtue” come from). I personally found it interesting that the divorce court jury deliberations mostly consisted of, “Well, of course she did it; that drunken lout of a husband, and that handsome artist, she must have done it.”
It’s kind of interesting that, although a crime of passion is not legally recognized as a defense, it is occasionally used by defense lawyers to try to get a lesser sentence. That is, if a husband catches his wife cheating and kills her, or her lover, juries generally consider that to be less criminal than if he planned out a murder, say, for money. Generally, we understand when someone finds out that his or her spouse has been unfaithful, and then gets violent during that moment of passion.
My point is that jealousy, at least under certain circumstances, is an emotion that we understand, that we, in general, can identify with. Now, if I’m jealous of someone else because he has a young wife who is better looking or more passionate than mine (or both), that’s wrong. If I’m jealous because my wife is spending a lot of time with a man who is younger, better looking, and more passionate than me, well, maybe I have good reason to be jealous (and maybe I don’t—after all, I should be able to trust her, right? And yet…). Envy is generally listed as one of the seven deadly sins, but not jealousy. I would imagine that most thesauruses list envy and jealousy as synonyms, but only because if I’m jealous of someone else’s marriage, or house, or job, then that’s envy. If I’m jealous that my spouse may be seeing someone else, that’s not envy.
There are a number of times in the Bible where the relationship between us and God is compared to a marriage (Jeremiah 3, Matthew 9:15, Matthew 22, Matthew 25, John 3:29, Revelations 21:9). It seems very clear to me that God ordained marriage as an image of the kind of relationship that he wants to have with us. It should be a relationship of mutual love and trust. Historically, though, we haven’t done a very good job of upholding our end of the bargain. The situation described in Jeremiah 3 didn’t stop with the Old Testament. We’re under a New Covenant, I understand that, but God hasn’t changed, and people haven’t changed. We still have the same faults and foibles that Ancient Israel had. We, as Christians, still commit basically the same sins that our Jewish forbearers did.
Having said all of that, some people have been very critical of the fact that God is a jealous God (Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:14, Deuteronomy 4:24, Deuteronomy 5:9, Deuteronomy 6:15, Joshua 24:19, Ezekiel 39:25, Nahum 1:2). God shouldn’t be jealous, jealousy is a bad thing, that’s a negative emotion. Jealousy in the sense of envy is a negative emotion, but jealousy in the sense of protection what is rightfully yours is not. To those that would say God shouldn’t be jealous, I have to ask the question, shouldn’t God be jealous? Haven’t we given Him good reason to be jealous? Shouldn’t we be more careful to be faithful to God, so that He doesn’t have to be jealous?

The Grass Is Always Greener

I think most of us are familiar with the expression, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” Somebody with way too much time on their hands, and probably a whole lot more federal grant money than they should have been entitled to, did a study on this a few years ago and determined that, when one is standing in one’s own yard, looking down, most of the grass points pretty much straight up, so one is able to see between the blades of grass, and see the dirt, which makes the grass look less green. If one looks into the neighbor’s yard, though, the angle is different, and one generally just sees the grass, and not the dirt. I couldn’t tell you who thought this was worth the effort to investigate.
Really, the expression has little to do with grass. It’s easy to look at what someone else has, or what someone else does, and think, that must be nice. We don’t see the whole picture in someone else’s life. We don’t see the dirt between the blades of grass, so to speak. Sometimes it isn’t even so much that one person wants what another person has, it’s just that sometimes one person would feel better about himself or herself if they knew that they could have what the other person has.
I have heard from more than one married man that, as soon as he put on that ring, suddenly he was irresistible to women that would not have given him the time of day when he was single. It isn’t that these women wanted to be married to him; they just would have felt better about themselves if they could have broken his commitment.
Of course, the man in question doesn’t have to be married. Joseph had a commitment to God that Potiphar’s wife was jealous of. She knew that what she wanted was wrong, and yet she pursued Joseph relentlessly. Eventually, she managed to corner him, and put him in a position that made it look like he had broken his commitment. That was enough for her, and it was enough to have Joseph sent to prison. Of course, if you know the story, you know that God parlayed Joseph’s prison time into a position as Pharaoh’s most trusted advisor. So God rewarded Joseph for his integrity, but what did Potiphar’s wife get out of it? Hopefully a guilty conscience… Certainly not what she wanted. Perhaps it made her feel better about herself that she was able to convince so many others that Joseph was willing to sacrifice his integrity for her, even though she always knew that he never did any such thing.
It’s interesting to note, too, that men have traditionally allowed ourselves to be laid low by women. Adam had his Eve, Samson had his Delilah, David had his Bathsheba… And it isn’t necessarily that women are evil (Eve and Bathsheba certainly were not), but that we allow ourselves to be unduly influenced by them. If you consider the situation that I outlined above: a married man, and a single woman who considers his commitment to be a challenge, rather than a boundary. If he allows himself to be tempted into breaking his marriage commitment, one of two things will probably happen: she will leave him, and move on to the next ‘challenge,’ or they will get married, and she won’t understand when some other woman does to her what she did to his first wife.
Sometimes it works the other way, too. Sometimes a man will tempt a woman away from the things that she considers important. It comes down to the same thing, either way; one person is ruining another person’s life just to stroke his or her own ego. Whether that’s a man or a woman that’s doing it, that’s wrong. At the same time, we should be aware that such things are happening, and not fall into that trap.