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Top X June 10, 2025 Devotional

by David Joynt on June 10, 2025


EXODUS 20:5a | 5a You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God...

 

The word jealous in English has negative connotations. Jealousy includes a type of insecurity. It is the green eyed monster that unseats reason and leads to behaviors that are desperate, usually controlling and sometimes violent. That is not the sense of the word as we find it in the second commandment. His desire for Israel’s exclusive love is rational and necessary for a number of reasons.

 

First, He has exclusive rights to the creation and its creatures. Just as an artist has the right to his own sculptures or paintings, until they are sold, so God as Creator owns that which He creates. We belong to Him, we are the sheep of His pasture, and for anyone else to claim us would be manifestly unfair.

 

Do you sense you belong to God, as His treasured creation?

 

 

Gracious God,

You are my source and designer. Help me remember the vested interest You have in my welfare and the natural right to direct me.

Amen.

 

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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