In last night’s mes­sage (“The Char­ac­ter of God”) we began by ask­ing if you have ever heard some­one say some­thing like, “When I think of God, I imag­ine Him to be _________, _________, and _________.”

Nearly all of us have done this at least at some point in our lives, and we’ve prob­a­bly heard oth­ers do it, too. It’s a very strange thing when you think about it. We would never hear some­one say, “To me, grav­ity is like ____________” because no one cares what you think grav­ity is like. All that mat­ters is what grav­ity really is.

We would all agree that while a per­son is free to imag­ine that grav­ity isn’t really a pow­er­ful force that pulls objects toward the earth, if they were to act on their mis­guided ideas (by jump­ing out of a plane with­out a para­chute, for exam­ple) the results would be disastrous. How fright­en­ing it it, then, that mil­lions and mil­lions of peo­ple in our day are per­fectly con­tent to imag­ine what God is like but never actu­ally seek to learn the truth about what He is really like?

Thank­fully, God has not left us to our own imag­i­na­tions. He has revealed Him­self and His will clearly to us through His Word. And in last night’s pas­sage, we learned a fun­da­men­tal truth about God: He is jeal­ous. We read this in Exo­dus 34:12–16:

Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhab­i­tants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. You shall tear down their altars and break their pil­lars and cut down their Ash­erim (for you shall wor­ship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jeal­ous, is a jeal­ous God),  lest you make a covenant with the inhab­i­tants of the land, and when they whore after their gods and sac­ri­fice to their gods and you are invited, you eat of his sac­ri­fice, and you take of their daugh­ters for your sons, and their daugh­ters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.

J.I. Packer has some great words on this pas­sage in his clas­sic work, Know­ing God. He writes:

‘The jeal­ous God’ — doesn’t it sound offen­sive? For we know jeal­ousy, the green-eyed mon­ster, as a vice, one of the most can­cer­ous and soul-destroying vices that there  is; whereas God, we are sure, is per­fectly good. How, then, could any­one imag­ine that jeal­ousy is found in Him?

The first step in answer­ing this ques­tion is to make it clear that this is not a case of imag­in­ing any­thing. Were we imag­in­ing a God, then nat­u­rally we should ascribe to him only char­ac­ter­is­tics which we admired, and jeal­ousy would not enter the pic­ture. Nobody would imag­ine a jeal­ous God. But we are not mak­ing up an idea of God by draw­ing on our imag­i­na­tion; we are seek­ing instead to lis­ten to the words of Holy Scrip­ture, in which God tells the truth about Him­self” (167).

You see friends, all of us would like to serve a god that wasn’t jeal­ous. We’d like to serve a god that didn’t care if we only offered wor­ship to him, or if we offered wor­ship to him some­times and then offered it to other gods at other times. We’d like a god who didn’t care about whole­hearted devotion.

But the ques­tion before us isn’t, “What kind of god would we like?” but rather, “Who is God?” The answer, accord­ing to Scrip­ture, is that God is good, holy, just, righteous…and jeal­ous, among many other attrib­utes. And God is right­eously jeal­ous because He alone is wor­thy of our wor­ship, our whole­hearted devo­tion, and our lives.

What mat­ters most is not what we think about God, but who God really is. Are you wor­ship­ing God for how He has revealed Him­self in Scripture?

But But with respect to who God is and what He is like, peo­ple are per­fectly con­tent to dream up what they would like God to be. And then with­out any evi­dence to believe that what they imag­ine God to be like is actu­ally true, they believe it to be so.

B. But it doesn’t mat­ter what I think God is like, or what you think God is like, or what any­one thinks God is like. All that mat­ters is what God is actu­ally like. And because God is God, any­thing that we know about Him He must choose to reveal.

Tonight’s mes­sage is called “The Char­ac­ter of God” and cov­ers Exo­dus 33–34. In last week’s mes­sage, we saw Israel quickly break their promise to keep God’s covenant. They rebelled against Him and devoted them­selves to wor­ship­ing an idol.

As a result, God became very angry with the peo­ple for their sin. He judged some of them through Moses and the Levites, then dis­ci­plined the rest of them through a plague. The big ques­tion for Israel now was, “What will God do with us?” We’ll learn the answer to that ques­tion in tonight’s mes­sage. We hope to see you at 5pm!