Why does the Holy Bible maintain that we must worship God and bow down before Him, for He is a jealous God?

God wants us to love Him, to reign completely over our hearts — not because He wants to enslave us or subdue us, but because He is a “jealous God.” Therefore, He insisted on describing himself thus: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God” (Deut. 5:9). St. John Chrysostom comments on this phrase, saying, “He says, that you may learn the intenseness of the love. Let us then love Him as He would have us: for He sets great store thereby. And if we turn away, He keeps inviting us, and if we will not be converted, He chastens us through His affection, not through a wish to exact punishment of us. And see what He says in Ezekiel to the city that was beloved, yet had despised Him. ‘I will bring your lovers against you, and will deliver you into their hands, and they shall stone you, and shall slay you, and My jealousy shall be taken away from you, and I will rest, and I will not trouble Myself anymore’ (Ezek. 16:37–42). What more than this could a vehement lover have said, when despised by his beloved, and after all again ardently loving her? For God does everything that He may be loved by us, and owing to this He spared not even His Son. But we are unbending, and savage.”²⁹

28 St. Cyril or Alexandria, A Commentary upon the Gospel According to St. Luke: Part I , trans. R. Payne Smith (Oxford University Press, 1859) Sermon 12, on Luke 4:5: p. 55.

29 St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 23 (NPNF I/11:516).

Origen comments on the same verse, saying, “Behold the kindness of God! He himself assumes the weakness of human dispositions that he might teach us and make us perfect … Every woman is either under a husband and has been subjected to the laws of the husband or is a prostitute and uses her freedom for sinning. He, therefore, who visits a prostitute knows that he has visited a woman who is a prostitute and is accessible to all who wish, and therefore, he cannot be angry if he sees other lovers also with her. But he who adopts lawful marriage does not permit his wife to make use of her power of sinning, but is inflamed with jealousy to preserve the purity of his marriage in which he can become a lawful father. By this example, therefore, let us understand that every soul has been prostituted to demons and has many lovers, so that the spirit of fornication now goes into it; when that spirit has left, the spirit of avarice enters, after this comes the spirit of pride, then of anger, then of envy, even later the spirit of vain glory and many others with these. All those thus commit fornication with an unfaithful soul. One does not envy another nor are they mutually moved by jealousy … Just as we already spoke a little earlier about what is written in the gospel concerning that spirit which ‘went out from a man, and when it returned brought with it seven other spirits worse than itself so that they might live in one soul at the same time’ (John 11:26). Therefore, the soul which has been prostituted to demons experiences no jealousy between its lovers.

“But if the soul has been united with a lawful husband, with that husband to whom Paul united and joined souls in marriage as he himself also says, ‘For I established you with one husband to present you as a pure virgin to Christ’ (2 Cor. 11:2) — the statement in the Gospels, ‘A certain king made a wedding for his son’ (Matt. 22:2) is addressed to this same subject — therefore, when the soul gives itself to the marriage of this man and receives lawful marriage with him, even if she was a sinner at some time, even if she has been a prostitute, nevertheless, if she delivers herself to this husband, she is permitted no further sin. It cannot be tolerated that soul which has received a husband again sport with adulterers. The husband’s jealousy is stirred up over her; he defends the purity of his marriage. And ‘God’ is said to be ‘jealous’ because he does not permit the soul subjected to himself to be mingled with demons.”³⁰