Provoked to Jealousy

In his Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths , Gerald McDermott notes that Edwards saw “provocation to jealousy” as a recurring pattern of history:

“God, he discovered, uses jealousy as a redemptive tool to disseminate knowledge of redemption and to stimulate revival . . . . Much of the religious truth possessed by the heathen, for example, was borrowed from the Jews, whose religion and way of life seemed attractive. Jewish idolatry made God jealous, but in disciplinary response God ‘will move them to jealousy in like manner by casting off them and taking other people that had not been his people in their room’ (HWR, 189). God transferred his covenant to the Gentiles because the Jews’ idolatry had made God jealous, and the Gentiles were jealous of the privileges of the covenant. At the end of the church age, just before the millennium, the Jews will become jealous of the Gentile church, and all Israel will be converted” (97-8).