Jealousy Ordeal

Num 5:16-24         10/22/2017

One of the strangest provisions of the law of Moses, it’s interesting that this ritual exists in the law yet there is no record in the scriptures of it ever having been used.

The shame of this for a family. A man incensed by jealousy, publicly revealing his fears and failures. A woman guilty or innocent, publicly humiliated. This is a desperately broken relationship.

Jealousy is amongst the most powerful of all emotions.  It is a response to the disvalue of a perceived injustice. The jealous person thinks, “Another has given away what I believe is exclusively mine. I refuse to accept this and demand justice!”

Scripture shows that the uncertainty of the jealous man could be solved with multiple witnesses – if jealousy was a mere thinking error. But that’s just it, jealousy is far more an error of affection.

Fixing your emotional intelligence is different than getting to the truth of a situation. Getting to “What happened?” is always easier than figuring “Why does it matter?”, because; unless we are looking at things from God’s perspective where value is immutable, the value I assign to a situation is always relative to my interests.

People say that “truth is relative”, meaning it’s dependent on perspective. But really that’s nonsense. Reality is what it is – reality isn’t dependent on what I think about it.

What’s really being said is that “Value is relative” – and if I act as is common in this world, nothing could be truer.