“Be careful not to make a treaty with the inhabitants of the land that you are going to enter; otherwise, they will become a snare among you. Instead, you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, and chop down their Asherah poles. Because the Lord is jealous for his reputation, you are never to bow down to another god. He is a jealous God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the most important things that successful companies put in place when they are being formed are a set of core values. These are the things that define them as uniquely them. They set them apart from every other company that offers the same services or sells the same products. Smart companies understand that these values have to be guarded. If they let the success or failure another company experiences lead them to drift from those values, they will cease to be who they are. God created Israel uniquely and to be different from all the nations around them. Let’s talk about how He helped them maintain their identity.

What we believe matters. Whether or not you believe there is a God whose character governs your behavior (or should) will affect how you live and the kinds of choices you make. What you believe about people will have an impact on the way you interact with the people around you. Your conclusions about what the good life is and how to live it will set the course for many of the decisions you make. Ideas have consequences.

Let me advance that one step further. What or who we worship matters. The real for this is that we become like what we worship. The character of the thing to which we give our greatest and highest devotion, because we devote so much of ourselves to it, gradually shapes our character until we resemble it more and more closely. If you have kids, you’ve probably watched something like this happen in real time. Your kids started watching some show or hanging out with some group of people and began to dress or speak or act like the people to whom they were giving so much of their time and attention. During the Covid lock downs, there was a humorous phenomenon of American kids watching Peppa the Pig so much that they started talking with a British accent.

Now, combine these two facts. The ideas we have about what or who we worship have consequences that have an impact on our character. In other words, not only is it important that the object of our worship is properly selected, but the ideas we have about the object of our worship matter as well. If we get the character of that object wrong, we aren’t actually worshiping that thing at all, but something else while calling the two different things by the same name.

Let me be more explicit. We have to get God’s character right. That is, the ideas that come to mind when we think about God have to be consistent with the Biblical picture, properly understood, or we will wind up worshiping some other god, but calling this other god by the same name. Someone proclaims to worship the Christian God, but when pushed, the ideas they confess to hold about Him are not consistent with the record we have of His character. As a result, their behavior doesn’t line up with the pattern of Christ, and other people are sent the wrong message regarding what He is like resulting in wrong thoughts. At the very best, this creates a world of confusion. More often it creates headaches and heartaches and emotional and relational devastation. Not a few people have given up on the Christian faith and the Christian God entirely because they were sold a false bill of goods whether intentionally or not. The wind up rejecting a bad facsimile that is absolutely worth rejecting all the while thinking they are rejecting the real thing. What a tragedy this unfailingly is.

The people of Israel were at a critical juncture in their development as the people God wanted them to be. If they were allowed to develop false ideas about who God was or what He was like, the consequences of this were potentially devastating. The likelihood was high that they would head off on some religious tangent that would have them giving their devotion to someone or something other than Him, effectively neutralizing all of His plans for them. Of course, He would have still gotten His plans to reveal Himself to the world and to create a pathway back to a relationship with Him anyway because He’s God, but Israel’s role as we know it would have been lost. History would look very different.

Because of this, God gave the people some guardrails to use when they arrived at the place He was leading them. He told them not to make treaties with the people of the land that would allow them to remain and continue practicing their various pagan religions. Instead, they were to utterly destroy all vestiges of their worship practices. God gives them one reason for this here, and we’ll talk about another tomorrow.

The stated reason here is that He is a jealous God. More specifically, He’s jealous for His reputation. Now, this is one of those self-descriptions on God’s part that has given people trouble for a very long time. This is most notably because we naturally think of jealousy as a uniformly bad thing. It appears more than once in various sin lists in the New Testament writings of guys like Paul. Yet here God is claiming it as a personal characteristic. And He seems proud of it. What’s going on here?

Well, while jealousy is often a bad thing, it isn’t necessarily uniformly so. The trope of the evil, jealous husband is pretty common in the stories we tell, and jealousy can certainly manifest itself in awful ways that should be roundly condemned. But a husband – or a wife – is perfectly within his (or her) rights to want his wife’s affections to be only for him. A wife is perfectly within her rights to want her husband’s affections to be only for her. After all, a statement to that effect was probably included in their wedding vows. Well, what do you call it when you want something only to yourself and no one else? You are being jealous for that thing. We don’t think in those terms very often because of all the understandably negative connotations of the word, but it’s still an accurate usage of it.

God knows who He is. He understands His character. And, like you want to be known and understood by others for who you know yourself to be, God does too. In other words, He is jealous for His reputation. Just like you are. And that’s okay. You are entirely within your rights to be jealous for your character. There’s no ugliness attached to this kind of jealousy. Rather, it manifests as a humble insistence that we be treated like we know we should be. There’s nothing wrong with this at all.

When God described Himself as jealous here, what He meant was that He wanted to be recognized not only by the Israelites, but by everyone for who He really is. If Israel made treaties with the pagan people already living in the land He was leading them to inhabit, the odds were disturbingly high that they were going to begin to incorporate some of their religious beliefs into their own beliefs and practices. This kind of syncretism is common when you take people from all different religious backgrounds and cultures and throw them all together into an urban mixer.

What usually winds up happening is that the people who aren’t really invested in the set of beliefs they bring to the table with them find points of commonality with similarly non-invested people from other backgrounds. They assume these points of commonality are because of broad overlap between their respective backgrounds they once thought to be far more different from each other than it now appears up close. Using these areas of commonality as jumping off points, they begin to construct a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a worldview that is a mishmash of different worldviews that a more honest and better informed observer understands to be not very much alike at all. In the end, the hybrid worldview is a poor representation of its various constituent parts that often becomes as antagonistic toward its philosophical forebears as they once were (and still are) toward each other. Very little is ultimately gained by this, and the previously held worldviews are shown the great disrespect of not being taken seriously and on their own terms.

God didn’t want this happening with Israel because in watering down His image and character, they were going to become poor ambassadors, leading people to think wrong thoughts about Him. Wrong thoughts – that is, bad ideas – have consequences, and God didn’t want anyone to face those if He could help it. So, He gave Israel these instructions that seem odd to us today because we are so often so syncretized in our own religious thinking, but which a little bit of thought reveals to make perfect sense on His part.

So then, does this mean that Christians today should cloister themselves off from the rest of the world so that our beliefs don’t get corrupted by what’s out there? Well, that’s one approach. I don’t think it is a particularly good approach, but not a few have concluded it is better than the various alternatives. I think a much better approach is to invest a whole lot more time and attention in teaching people the fundamentals of the Christian faith so that they actually understand what and why they believe. This will enable them to stand firmly in the face of the various challenges the world is going to bring to their doorstep without having their faith watered down or otherwise taken away from them entirely.

God is still jealous for His reputation. And He should be. It’s His reputation. As people who profess to be His followers, it is our job to represent Him well. If we don’t, the understandable rejection of our beliefs and identity will be on our head, not His, and He made pretty clear in His word that He doesn’t take too kindly to being misrepresented by people claiming to follow Him. So, let’s learn what and why we believe, own our beliefs, and represent them faithfully to the world around us. They won’t always understand. They’ll often mock. But at least we’ll be clear. At that point, may the best ideas win. (Spoiler alert: ours tend to.)