God’s Jealousy

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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So if you'll turn in your Bibles this morning to Zephaniah chapter 1.

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You've got Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. So it's about the fourth from the end of the

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Old Testament. There's an exhortation in there that you should know the

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Bible books in order and you should be able to find them. This is the word of the

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Lord in verse 18. I'm going to read to you.

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Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them on the day of Yahweh's wrath.

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The whole earth will be consumed by the fire of his jealousy, for indeed he will make a sudden end of all who dwell on the earth.

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There is a verse in Exodus. Oh, thanks for standing.

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We're you can remain seated for the rest of the sermon.

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In the book of Exodus chapter 20, God reveals to us the

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Ten Commandments. And if you turn to Exodus 20 in verse 5, well verse 4, he says, you shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the above, on the earth below, or in the waters beneath.

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You shall not bow down to them or worship them. He says, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.

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So what I want to talk about this morning is jealousy. Specifically, the

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Lord's jealousy. But in order to do that, we're going to have to talk about other types of jealousy. And so jealousy is a word that God uses to describe his own disposition towards events happening here in history.

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But also, jealousy is a word that most people are familiar with. And if you're not, we're going to look at some passages that define jealousy in a very negative light.

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So we have what would appear to be a contradiction of sorts, where we have a negative response to things—jealousy.

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We have something that is actually listed in lists of sins that will cause you to go to hell.

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And then we have the Lord describing himself this way. And so we need to reconcile what is jealousy, how is jealousy appropriated correctly with the

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Lord, of course? He always does it correctly. I'll reveal that to you now. And then with humans, how ought we to imitate our

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God? But then is there times that in our jealousy we're actually in sin?

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And then how can we apply these truths? So jealousy, I would—there's a bunch of definitions you can get for jealousy, and some of them involve things more than people.

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But I'm going to give you a working definition of jealousy, which is the response to someone or something else receiving the affection that is due to oneself or to yourself, if you're thinking about it that way, or somebody else receiving a good thing that's expected.

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And I would say that jealousy is not properly an attribute of God, but rather it is

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God's disposition towards things that are happening in time and in history, showing his zeal for his own glory and his own worship, and demonstrating his love for justice and proper worship.

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Now, the thing about jealousy is this, that you can be jealous legitimately, and you can be jealous illegitimately.

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So it's possible to perceive something has happened that you perceive as a slight to you, and to become jealous even though that thing didn't really happen.

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So imagine a relationship that's exclusive in your life, usually a married couple or somebody that's courting, and you're in the process of getting married.

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If the spouse in a marriage relationship treats another person in such a way that you should only treat your spouse, that arouses jealousy in the other person.

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And so it's also possible that a person could arouse jealousy in their spouse, even though they didn't do anything, because the spouse who's getting jealous is perceiving things wrongly.

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So turn to Ezekiel 23 with me. We're going to look at a lot of passages.

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I don't necessarily expect you to turn to every one of them, but some of the longer ones that we'll go through,

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I want you to see the page. So first I want to give you an idea of how serious idolatry is.

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If we're going to profess to the world around us that our

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God is a jealous God, and they're going to have in their mind what the word jealousy means, which is usually just an angry boyfriend because his girlfriend's giving affection to someone else, or a spiteful wife because her husband cheated on her.

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That's what people are going to imagine. We have to tell them why the Lord being jealous is actually a good thing.

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Why He's not just some kind of vindictive, vengeful being, because He calls

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Himself jealous and actually visits the iniquity of people, even on their children and their children's children.

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So Ezekiel 23, I'm not going to read most of it, and when you do so later you'll know why.

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Ezekiel 23 gives us vivid depictions of adultery.

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Adultery is, we'll say, easily defined in a context with children around as when a married person treats another person like they are treating their spouse instead of giving that affection to their spouse.

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And so it's like if a mommy or a daddy is treating somebody else like they're the mommy or daddy.

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And we have an understanding of things in our world that is very natural.

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We know, for example, from being a small child, you know stealing is wrong. You know lying is wrong.

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We know that to murder or to kill is wrong. And we know in every culture of the world, until a culture becomes utterly perverted and unwholesome, we also know adultery is wrong.

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Every civilized culture from the beginning of time has had a concept of marriage that was very similar to the one that God outlines.

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One man, one woman for life, and they have laws against adultery.

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And what God often does for us to help us to understand our relationship to Him and to help us to understand

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Him is God gives us physical realities that we can understand very easily, and then

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He will relate those things to our relationship to Him or to attributes of His so that we can understand

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Him better. And so God gives us an analogy in this chapter of of a wife committing adultery, of somebody who's been given devotion from her husband, and she's going and giving affection to another man.

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And we rightly understand that to be wicked. We understand it to be horrible.

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Nobody in here wants that to happen to them, and I say nobody in here wants that to happen to anyone.

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But God has a way of then showing us that He creates these physical pictures of things that are utterly clear to us through even natural revelation.

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You don't need a Bible to know adultery is wrong, all right? The Bible definitely says it, and it's a good tool to use to proclaim it.

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But nobody needs a Bible to know that. But God wants us to see how serious idolatry is.

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And God compares adultery to idolatry so that we will see how evil it really looks.

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So in Ezekiel 23, if you just look at verses 35 to about 39, therefore this is what the

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Lord Yahweh says. Also, if you're unfamiliar with why I keep saying Yahweh, it's because in the original the word was not

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Lord that was used. Most of the time you see the all caps Lord, and so I simply transliterate what was there.

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And Andrew can explain that to you much better than I could, so you can ask Andrew about that one.

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Therefore this is what the Lord Yahweh says, because you have forgotten me and have cast me behind your back, you must bear the consequences of your indecency and prostitution.

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So he spends the whole chapter referring to these sisters

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Oholaba and Ohola as prostitutes and indecent women.

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But he's describing the way nations have turned from worshiping him. The exact thing that you just heard about would happen when

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Pastor Conley read from Deuteronomy 31. Then verse 36, then

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Yahweh said to me, son of man, will you pass judgment against Ohola and Oholaba?

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Then to declare to them their abominations, he says, for they have committed adultery, he says.

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We all know what that is, and it's horrible. He says, and blood is on their hands.

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They have committed adultery with their idols, he says. He spends the entire chapter describing things in physical terms that we utterly understand to tell us at this point that what he's been referring to as adultery, indecency, and prostitution for 34 verses is idolatry, which is the worship of another

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God. Again, remember my working definition of jealousy. When someone other than the one who is due affection is receiving it, then the one who is due the affection is rightly jealous.

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So God is owed all of our worship, adoration, affection, praise, honor, glory, and when we give what

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God is owed to anything else, whether it's a living thing, whether it's a dead thing, whether it's just an imaginative thing, an idol in our mind, when we give other things the devotion and affection that is owed to God, the trust that's owed to God, he is rightly jealous.

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He says, they have even sacrificed their children whom they bore to me in the fire as food for their idols.

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If you don't think that idolatry is a bad sin, in the

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Bible it always ends up leading to child sacrifice. And I know this is a church that is active in the battle against abortion, and I will tell you as someone who talks to people about abortion on a regular basis, that I can always tell you after a few moments of talking to somebody about their abortion or about why they defended that there is, at the root of it, idolatry.

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And there's a whole nother sermon in here about that. But I will say one of the reasons

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I do not lock arms with non -Christians who are opposed to abortion, one of the reasons why

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I fight abortion only with other Christians is that I cannot imagine fighting abortion with somebody who is an active idolater because it's idolatry that leads to the mentality that causes us to shed innocent blood like that.

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So God says, they have also done this to me. On that very day, same day, they defiled my sanctuary and profaned my

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Sabbaths. Verse 39, on the very day they slaughtered their children for their idols, they entered my sanctuary to profane it.

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Yes, they did this inside my house. These were people who would have been considered believers in a sense.

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They were people who were going to the house of worship, and even on the same day, they were sacrificing to idols.

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So we're not talking about people who were in the pagan nations.

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It's easy for us to say, yeah, when they have a pride parade in downtown

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San Jose or wherever town you're from here, it's easy to say, well, they're idolaters.

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God sees the hearts of people that are coming into the building that is supposedly for true worship.

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He sees their evil deeds. He also sees the idols they carry in their hearts while they sit in his worship.

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And so God is a jealous God. So now turn to James 3, and we will start to investigate that jealousy is bad.

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And I've already told you that there's a good jealousy, but we need to be able to reconcile, especially when the

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Bible uses the same words over and over to describe things. The same word does not always mean the exact same thing in different parts of the

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Bible. And that's true even if you're able to go look at the historical language, the original language.

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One of the dangers I found of trying to do word studies in Greek or Hebrew is,

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I don't know Greek or Hebrew, and the fact that the same word has been used in two spots doesn't mean

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God meant the same thing both times. And so that's one of the reasons we have teachers to help us with those things.

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In James 3, verses 13 to 16, James says, who is wise and understanding among you, let him show it by his good conduct, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.

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But if you harbor bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast in it or deny the truth.

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Such wisdom does not come from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.

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And then he adds, for where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder in every evil practice.

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Galatians 5, just highlighting verses now to remind us that just because God's a jealous

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God, that doesn't mean all forms of jealousy that creatures like us may employ is excusable or valid.

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In Galatians 5, Paul's trying to tell the Galatians how to walk in the spirit, and he says, the acts of the flesh, this is verse 19, the acts of the flesh or the works of the flesh are obvious, they're evident, sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery, idolatry, and sorcery, hatred, discord, jealousy, and rage, rivalries, divisions, factions, and envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like.

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I don't know about you, but when I read the lists of sins that Paul groups together frequently in the

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New Testament, I always find that he includes sins in there in just one list.

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He doesn't separate the list, like here's the real bad ones, and then here's the kind of respectable ones.

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Paul just makes lists. These things are evident that you're functioning in the flesh, not in the spirit.

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And he includes a sin like jealousy. And he includes it alongside sins that some of us wouldn't have even done before we got saved.

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So, it's a serious thing to be a jealous person. It's a serious thing to constantly think that you're owed something, because here's the most common form of jealousy that men employ.

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You believe you're entitled to some affection or something.

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You've decided you're owed something or a certain quantity of something, and then you don't receive it.

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And now you are logically jealous because you're not getting the affection that you think you're due, or you're not getting the accolades you think you're due, the praise you think you're owed.

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You're not getting treated the way you believe you deserve to be treated deep down inside.

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None of us would say this. Like, literally, none of us would say, well, no,

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I really believe I deserve to be treated better than I am. We just act it out with our jealousy.

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That's why the cure for this one, and basically every sin is humility, it's the antidote.

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But we have a tendency to think that we're owed more than we're getting.

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Some of us have a wife or a husband, and we can get jealous quickly just because they're giving attention to another subject for a minute, right?

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Wives, have you ever been jealous of just the time your husband spends at work or the effort he puts in to do a good job at something sometimes?

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And you think, well, why isn't he putting that effort around here? And husbands, we can do the same things.

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So I don't know everybody's sin issues in here. I don't know anybody in here. I'll just clarify this.

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If I say something that zings you, don't blame your pastor. He didn't say, hey, make sure to mention this thing.

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There was none of that. It's all God's providence in your life if I'm able to say something by the power of the

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Holy Spirit that convicts you of your need to trust Christ more, to forgive you, and to help you to fight your sin.

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Romans 13 is an excellent, excellent chapter about way more than what the government is supposed to do.

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At the end of Romans 13, Paul says, let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness.

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Horrible things we don't want to do. Not in sexual immorality and debauchery.

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Again, things that cannot even be named among Christians. It says not in dissension and jealousy.

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We are warned multiple times. There's more verses I have here that we won't go to now, but we've been warned sufficiently that there is some sinful way that you can be jealous.

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And I'd argue that at the root of your jealousy is probably some form of idolatry of self a lot of times.

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A second thing to consider, if we're not supposed to be jealous, sinfully, we shouldn't try to arouse jealousy in others unnecessarily.

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I got an email this week. I don't remember what it was for, but it was some advertisement for buying.

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It was something I'm supposed to buy, right? It was an ad. And it said, make your neighbor jealous or something like that was the catch line.

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Whatever I was going to buy, my neighbor was going to be jealous, and that was what was supposed to bring me satisfaction.

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You couldn't tell me the high quality of the item that would have helped my life or helped me to serve others.

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My motivation that apparently works, because marketers aren't idiots, except some of the woke ones.

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What works is what people distribute and sell, okay? So the marketing that tells people, make your neighbor jealous, is apparently what at least my demographic is buying.

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And marketers know this. They're not paying for ads that don't work.

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They might try one once in a while that doesn't. So now let's talk about the

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Lord's jealousy. If you turn to James chapter 4, you want to become a growing

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Christian, memorize the first seven verses of James 4. It will change your life.

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But after Paul or James addresses the conflicts and quarrels among these people who are coveting things that they're not getting, well,

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I'll just read the beginning. It's such a good chapter. What causes conflicts and quarrels among you? Don't they come from the passions at war within you?

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So you have a desire that's in you, and you want it, and you're either not getting your desire met or your desire is not being met to the degree that you want it met.

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And he says, you crave what you do not have. You kill and covet, but are unable to obtain it. He says you quarrel and fight.

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You do not have because you do not ask. And when you do ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives.

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You might say, Lord, grant me humility and holiness, and it's only because you want the praise of others in church.

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You can ask for good things with the wrong heart. You realize that, right? That you may squander it on your pleasures.

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But then James gets real interesting, and he goes along with the whole theme of what

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I've been trying to tell you. He says, you adulteresses. He did not mention adultery.

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He didn't mention anybody breaking a marriage covenant. He's using the same analogy that we all understand, which is that when we are seeking our own pleasure more than we're seeking the glory of God, even if our desires are good desires, good things, when we desire those things above the glory of God, we're adulteresses.

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We're idolaters. Thank God. Let me just pause. Thank God Jesus Christ never desired his own passions to be fulfilled rather than to satisfy the mission his father sent him on.

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He says, you adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility towards God?

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Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God.

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And he says, or do you think the scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to dwell in us yearns with envy, but he gives us more grace?

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This is why it says God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. The spirit he caused to dwell in us yearns with envy.

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God's jealous for us. The great theologian, David Crowder, is that his name?

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He said he is jealous for me, right? There's some truth in some of these contemporary songs.

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Not always a lot, but there's some. Hosea 3, verse 1,

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Yahweh said to me, go show love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress.

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This is what God's command to his prophet Hosea was, love a wife that would cheat on him, an adulteress.

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Love her as Yahweh loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love to offer raisin cakes to idols.

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So again, the sin of adultery being completely compared to the sin of idolatry.

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So when we give our devotion, our worship, our adoration, our love,

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I'll even say our veneration to that which is not God, we are committing idolatry.

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I will warn you that you can commit idolatry without a statue. You can commit idolatry to a

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God that you name Jesus, too. The big difference between pagan idolatry and our idolatry is ours is just more hidden in our heart.

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And so we all want to be people who would like to see that rooted out of our lives.

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Turn to Hosea 5. We've established that idolatry is spiritual adultery.

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We've established that there is bad forms of jealousy that we commit and we should repent of, jealousy we would want the

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Lord to cleanse us from. And now we'll talk about the

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Lord's jealousy. In Hosea 5, verse 3, beginning there, he says,

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I know all about Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from me. For now,

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O Ephraim, you have turned to prostitution. Israel is defiled.

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Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God. For a spirit of prostitution is within them, and they do not know

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Yahweh. One of the fears that we have when people indulge in sin, no matter how small it starts, is that sin, submitting yourself as a slave to sin leads to more sin and more slavery to sin.

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And thank God, Romans 6, 19 tells us the opposite is true. Submitting yourself as a slave to righteousness should lead to ever increasing sanctification.

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But God has embedded in the system that we live in that it does seem there's a point that people can sin so much that they've gone past the point of no return.

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Not that he couldn't save somebody if it was his will, but it's his indicator in some people's lives that they are what's called reprobate.

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Or at the very least, if you don't know someone who's reprobate, we should fear the possibility of it.

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Do not submit yourself to sin. He says Israel's arrogance testifies against them.

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Verse 5, Israel and Ephraim stumble in their iniquity. Even Judah stumbles with them.

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I told you the antidote to your sinful jealousy is humility. What's the opposite?

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Arrogance. They go with their flocks and herds to seek

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Yahweh, but they do not find him. He has withdrawn himself from them. It's a striking picture.

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Somebody is described as seeking God and they won't find him because now he's hidden himself because of their iniquity.

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They have been unfaithful to Yahweh for they have born illegitimate children.

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Now the new moon will devour them along with their land. Skip down to 11.

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Ephraim is oppressed, crushed in judgment for he is determined to follow worthless idols.

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Sometimes God's a little redundant. It's not because of his inability to express himself.

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It's because he condescends so that folks like us can understand things better.

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All idols are worthless. This is God emphatically reminding us of that.

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There's a sense where you should worship God and worship God alone because he's worthy. He's perfect.

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It's owed to him and he demands it. Add on top of that that he sent Jesus into the world to pay the penalty that sinners like us deserve and now it should be easy to worship him.

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But even aside from that, God expresses to us the truth that if all you wanted was good things for yourself, worshipping him instead of idols is the right idea.

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It's logical to worship the one true God because he's the only one that has any power to help you anyway.

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Everything is stacked against our decisions to make sin, which is what makes our sin so sinful, and it's what exposes for us how deceived we must be when we do sin.

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So, turn to Deuteronomy 32. We'll give you an advance notice, I'm guessing, as to what you'll be reading next week.

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In Deuteronomy 32, we have this song of Moses that Pastor Owens just introduced.

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I'm going to start in verse 9. Deuteronomy 32, 9.

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Listen to this about the Lord's jealousy. And I want you to, for a moment,

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I want you to imagine in our world jealousy is something that we're surrounded by.

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And I don't know the statistics on these things. I don't know if I can believe statistics sometimes either, but a lot of murders that happen in our society are people who have discovered something that made them jealous.

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Crime of passion. A man walks in on his wife with another man. There's a very real and right jealous response that we can have in this world.

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But because of our sinfulness, oftentimes we don't handle it well.

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I'm going to tell you, murdering someone is not the right jealous response to the jealousy you may feel inside at times.

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But listen to how the Lord is going to deal with idolatry. But Yahweh's portion is

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His people. Jacob, His allotted inheritance. So this is His people. He is owed their affection.

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He found Him in a desert land, in a barren, howling wilderness. He surrounded

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Him. He instructed Him. He guarded Him as the apple of His eye. It wasn't enough that God chose

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Israel as a bride. It wasn't enough that to say maybe, oh,

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Israel is this great nation with lots of righteous people and they were good and beautiful.

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God made it clear that from an

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English idiomatic perspective, He reached into the gutter to find His bride. And if you don't see this,

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He did the same with the bride of Christ. He chose that which is despised in this world.

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But listen, He says, as an eagle stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, He spread His wings to catch them and carried them on His pinions.

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Yahweh alone led Him and no foreign God was with Him. So we have this picture of care and love that God gave to the

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Israelites from whom He demanded worship. He made Him ride on the heights of the land and fed

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Him the produce of the field. He nourished

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Him with honey from the rock and oil from the flinty crag, with curds from the herd and milk from the flock, with the fat of lambs, with rams from Bashan and goats, with the choicest grains of wheat.

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Just abundant gift and blessing. Just good thing after good thing that is undeserved.

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It says, from the juice of the finest grapes you drank the wine. But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked.

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Jeshurun is a neat word because it's this affectionate term that God uses very infrequently to refer to Israel.

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It's a picture of this covenant, covenant love, taking care of someone.

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He says, but Jeshurun, his beloved, grew fat and kicked, becoming fat, bloated and gorged.

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He abandoned the God who made him and scorned the rock of his salvation.

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So you have a picture of God delivering Israel. And Israel's response is, even having started with no other gods, it says here, now

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Israel's going to chase after other gods. It's never enough. They provoked his jealousy with foreign gods.

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They enraged him with abominations. It's a nice reformed church we're in here, so maybe don't have too many problems with this.

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But the reality that God exhibits perfect justice and wrath towards evil is something that a lot of people cannot swallow.

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The belief that God is only love, if you are a

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Christian, will lead you to imitating your father, and you will become a person who can speak to those around you and your culture about nothing but how

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God loves them. And you will have people who will practically dance all the way to their grave, where they will begin their eternal punishment, thinking that God loves them.

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Because some of us have a tendency to preach nothing but love, love, love. Now God is love.

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We all agree with that, and we know it. But God demonstrated his love by sending

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Jesus into the world to die for sinners. Why? Because God is going to punish sinners because of his hatred for all that is iniquitous, for all that is not love.

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And so we have to be able to have a category in our finite minds for a

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God who will display wrath, for a God who will execute justice on all that is unholy, while being a

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God of love at the same time. If you diminish

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God's utter contempt for what is evil, let me repeat that so you understand what

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I'm saying. If you diminish, make less, if you diminish God's utter contempt for all that is evil, you are diminishing the cross of Christ.

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Because why would God punish his own son who came into the world? Why would he crush him so that sinners could be forgiven if sin isn't that bad in the first place?

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If God didn't spare his own son but freely gave him for us all, how will he not graciously give us all things?

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We read in Romans if God didn't spare his own son, he's not going to spare sinners.

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So be honest with sinners about who God is. We'll continue in Deuteronomy 32.

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They sacrifice to demons, not to God. If you interview a hundred people on the street tomorrow and ask them if they sacrifice to demons, maybe three of them will say yes.

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Yeah, hail Satan, they'll say. They think it's funny. They don't believe in Satan, but they'll say it because they know you believe in them.

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Every single time we commit idolatry, we are submitting ourselves to demons.

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Whether it's just demons who are putting thoughts out there in our minds or creating systems that are corrupting, or whether some people actually submit to demons.

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Witchcraft is growing in the United States. Like, witchcraft is growing and it's accepted.

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You can go on Etsy and eBay and you can just buy witchy stuff. That Jezebel publication online, they bragged that they were selling or somebody from Jezebel had purchased a spell against Charlie Kirk a few weeks before he died.

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Witchcraft is submitting yourself to demons openly. Most of the time people realize they're doing it.

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But every time we turn from God to seek our own pleasure, every time we avoid trusting

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God with something that we're supposed to trust Him for, so that we can seek our own comfort, our own atonement sometimes, or just our own desire for pleasure and sanctification in anything else, we're also sacrificing to demons.

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They sacrifice not to God, to gods they had not known, to newly arrived gods which your fathers did not fear.

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He says, you ignored the rock who brought you forth. You forgot the God who gave you birth. Verse 19, when

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Yahweh saw this, he rejected them, provoked to anger by his sons and daughters.

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He said, I will hide my face from them. I will see what will be their end for they are a perverse generation, children of unfaithfulness.

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They have provoked my jealousy by that which is not God. He's a jealous

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God. They have enraged me with their worthless idols. So I will make them jealous by those who are not a people.

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Thank God for that. This is the verse Paul uses in Romans to explain why the gospel has gone to the

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Gentiles. It isn't just for Jews. One of the reasons Gentiles got the gospel was so that the

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Jews would see that and become jealous and seek the Lord. He says, I will make them angry by a nation without understanding.

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God is a jealous God and it is always good, whatever

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God does. And it's super serious. If you skip just down to verse 35, in verse 35 of Deuteronomy 32 still, he says, vengeance is mine.

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I will repay. In due time, their foot will slip for their day of disaster is near and their doom is coming quickly for Yahweh will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants.

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When he sees that their strength is gone and no one remains slave or free, he will say, where are their gods?

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The rock in which they took refuge, which ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings.

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So you may read that question and think, think wrongly.

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If you read it too quickly, God's not asking a question as if he doesn't know. God's mocking people that seek idols for their satisfaction.

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Because the next line, he makes it clear with godly sarcasm.

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Let them rise up and help you. Let them give you shelter on the day of wrath. There isn't an idol in this world that's going to protect somebody from the one true

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God. The only thing that you can flee to refuge in to protect you from the wrath of God is

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Jesus Christ, the son of God who endured the cross and despised the shame so that he could raise from the dead and sit at the right hand of God after ascending into heaven.

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Jesus is our only refuge from God's wrath. He's our only shelter.

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He says, see now, I am he. There is no God besides me. I bring death and I give life.

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I wound and I heal and there is no one who can deliver from my hand. Another practical reason to avoid idols.

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They're worthless to help you in the meantime. They're also going to be detestable to you on the day of Christ's return and on the day of judgment.

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There's other passages about how we'll cast our idols to the ground and animals will defecate on our idols.

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Speaking of the little statues some of us make. So who can stand before jealousy?

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That's what Proverbs 27 asks us in verse four. Who can stand before it?

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If you, the Proverbs would teach you that if you're a man, I use the word man loosely here.

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If you're a man who would lie with another man's wife, that you actually should expect to die.

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Not necessarily because of a good justice system, but because that's what you should expect would happen to you.

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If you would do something to another man's wife on the street, even a good man may end up hurting you.

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So who can stand before jealousy? God's jealousy is extreme.

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So turn back to Zephaniah now. Habakkuk, Zephaniah.

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So you can ask yourself for your own application.

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What are you trusting in? Most often it's kind of secretive to us.

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You know, we have regenerate hearts, so we're not totally depraved if you've been born again, but the heart is desperately sick.

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Who can know it? There is a sense that there's depths of our heart that we don't know.

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And most often what you'll find is that you grow impatient or you become angry.

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And in those moments is when you can start to ask yourself, what am

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I desiring that I'm not getting? Or to what degree am

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I desiring something and it's not being met? So there's a,

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I forget the guy who said it, maybe it was David Paulson who said, we sin, our sinful desires lead us astray in degree or in direction.

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So sometimes we just want something that's wrong. Most Christians are pretty good at knowing when that happened and saying, all right,

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I shouldn't have wanted that thing. Sometimes we want a good thing and we want more of it than what

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God's supplying in the moment. We reveal our covetousness when we're not content in those moments.

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And usually that comes out with a sharp word to someone who you shouldn't be speaking sharply to, impatience, unkindness to a spouse.

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It doesn't really happen on Sunday morning and afternoon at church. These are the things that happen more at home alone with others.

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It happens in high pressure, difficult situations at work, or when there's multiple things going on.

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You didn't sleep well the night before. God has a way of revealing our idols to us.

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And then secondly, you want to think about how you can help those you love. So you have, you have

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Christian friends you can help, but you have your non -Christian people that you interact with, people that you want to lead them to the

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Lord. And so you can think about what are the kinds of idols that they might hold in their heart? Some people, it might be money, prestige.

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For some people, appearing righteous is actually their idol. So there are people in this world who will die having lived better lives than I did.

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And they will die and go to hell because they did it for the praise of others and because they sought righteousness in their own strength and not through Christ.

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And so you help your neighbor by, by being thoughtful about the types of idols that maybe this culture has predominant.

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Helping people see that they desire something good, but they desire too much of it.

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Back to Zephaniah, let's see how God handles things. This is the word of Yahweh that came to Zephaniah, son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hezekiah, in the days of Josiah, son of Ammon, king of Judah.

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I will completely sweep away everything from the face of the earth, declares

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Yahweh. I will sweep away man and beast. I will sweep away the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and their, and the idols with their wicked worshipers.

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I will cut off mankind from the face of the earth, declares Yahweh. I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all who dwell in Jerusalem.

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I will cut off from this place every remnant of Baal, the names of the idolatrous and pagan priests.

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Those who bow on rooftops to worship the host of heaven. Those who bow down and swear by Yahweh, but also swear by Milcom.

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Again, you're not protected from being an idolatry just because sometimes you worship Jesus. And those who turn back from following Yahweh, neither seeking

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Yahweh nor inquiring of Him. So everyone, everyone who is an idolater, he says, be silent in the presence of the

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Lord Yahweh. For the day of Yahweh is near. Indeed, Yahweh has prepared a sacrifice.

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He has consecrated his guests. On the day of Yahweh's sacrifice,

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I will punish the princes, the sons of the king and all who are dressed in foreign apparel.

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So there's a sacrifice. On that day,

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I will punish all who leap over the threshold. It's a reference to idolaters who fill the house of their master with violence and deceit.

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On that day, declares Yahweh, a cry will go up from the fish gate, a wail from the second district and a loud crashing from the hills.

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Wail, oh dwellers of the hollow, for all your merchants will be silenced. All who weigh out silver will be cut off.

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And at that time, I will search Jerusalem with lamps and punish the men settled in complacency who say to themselves,

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Yahweh will do nothing either good or bad. Their wealth will be plundered and their houses laid waste.

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They will build houses but not inhabit them and plant vineyards but never drink their wine.

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The great day of Yahweh is near, near and coming quickly. Listen, the day of Yahweh, then the cry of the mighty will be bitter.

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That day will be a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of destruction and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness.

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Hollywood's tried to make these apocalyptic movies for us. And I don't think eye has seen or ear has heard what the

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Lord has in store for those who hate him. He says a day of horn blasts and battle cry.

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This is horrible. Against the fortified cities and against the high corner towers, I will bring such distress on mankind that they will walk like the blind.

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Just no direction, not knowing where they're going, just stumbling.

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Every step could be devastating because they have sinned against Yahweh.

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Their blood will be poured out like dust and their flesh like dung. Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them on the day of Yahweh's wrath.

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So whatever it is you're trusting in that's not the Lord can't save you from the wrath of the

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Lord. It says the whole earth will be consumed by the fire of his jealousy for indeed he will make a sudden end of all who dwell on the earth.

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There's judgment promised, but he says he's preparing a sacrifice.

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And I want you, when you see the word sacrifice, I want you to think about the

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Lord Jesus Christ. I want you to have experienced the graphic imagery of the devastation that God is going to wreak on this earth, but I want you to have in your mind the idea that all of the wrath and destruction that God said was due to Israel, all of the bitterness of that, flesh poured out like dung, blood poured out like dust, trouble, distress, destruction, desolation, darkness, gloom, clouds, blackness, walking like the blind, that in order for you to be adopted as a son or a daughter of God, Jesus Christ had to endure all of those things.

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That that same destruction that God still must reap on this entire world and destroy it,

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Jesus had to take that on so that you could become

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God's son. I think sometimes in our desire to make

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God seem a bit kinder or gentler to people, or maybe nicer, we want to make

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God seem nice to people and palatable. We want people to be able to take what we say about God, and listen,

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I think sometimes we diminish the fire of His wrath, and thus we diminish the perfect atonement that Christ offers sinners, because Jesus Christ endured all of that hell for you.

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And so don't diminish God's justice and wrath for the sake of pleasing people that hate

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Him anyway. We should actually exalt in God, because His wrath is perfect, and it's good.

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And although it's harsh and devastating, and it's unfathomably mind -blowing, it exalts the perfection of your

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Savior when you think about these things rightly. So speaking of the

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Savior, chapter 3 of Zephaniah, verse 8. Therefore wait for me, declares

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Yahweh, until the day I rise to testify. For my decision is to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, to pour out upon them my indignation, all my burning anger, for all the earth will be consumed by the fire of my jealousy.

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His jealousy is a good thing. He says, for then I will restore pure lips to the peoples, that all may call upon the name of Yahweh, and serve

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Him shoulder to shoulder. From beyond the rivers of Cush, my worshipers, my scattered people, will bring me an offering.

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Are we beyond the rivers of Cush right here? I think so. Has God purified your lips that you might bring

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Him a good offering today? He says, on that day you will not be put to shame for any of the deeds by which you have transgressed against me.

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For then I will remove from among you those who rejoice in their pride, and you will never again be haughty on my holy mountain.

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The whole, another sermon in there, but be assured those who are arrogant in heart will not go unpunished.

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Verse 12, but I will leave within you a meek and humble people, and they will trust in the name of Yahweh.

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Or, as we say in the New Testament, they will trust in Jesus Christ. The remnant of Israel will no longer do wrong or speak lies, nor will a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths, but they will feed and lie down, and no one will make them tremble.

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He leads us beside still waters. Sing for joy, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud,

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O Israel. Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. He's speaking to you.

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Yahweh has taken away your punishment. He has turned back your enemy. Israel's king,

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Yahweh, is among you. No longer will you fear any harm.

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Emmanuel, God with us, right? He's among us. On that day, they will say to Jerusalem, do not fear,

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O Zion. Do not let your hands fall limp. Yahweh, your God, is among you. He is mighty to save.

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He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you with his love.

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He will rejoice over you with singing. Zephaniah 317 should be a memory verse for anyone in here who is tempted to despair.

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Anyone in here who struggles with reminder that God loves you, you should memorize that verse, and you should recite it to yourself over and over.

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Even if you don't struggle with that, memorize that verse and recite it to yourself. The God who is going to do all of the destructive things that I described because of the fire of his jealousy, which is legitimate and which is real and which is cataclysmically horrific, that God actually rejoices, though, over your salvation.

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He rejoices over you personally, and we should bask in that love of his.

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I think some of you imagine Jesus as this reluctant Savior who decided, like, well,

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I guess I'll go and die for these people I hate. And it's not how it works.

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Jesus died for those he loves. It says he loved us with an everlasting love, right?

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Before the foundation of the world. And so what you have to remember is that Jesus endured all of that wrath, all of the justice upon himself, and he did it joyfully because of who he was redeeming.

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And so now we continue to worship him. We continue to come to him for cleansing on a regular basis, and I would say we should continue to proclaim him to others.

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Pray with me. Father in heaven, thank you for your word. We pray that the healing balm of the gospel would be used by you to help us today, deliver us from those times in our heart when we seek our comfort, our joy, or even our salvation anywhere else.

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Help the people here today to worship you with pure lips, that we might give

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Jesus what is due to him, the affection that is due to him for the rest of this service and even this whole