Yesterday, in his Sunday morning sermon about “abounding in thanksgiving,” Jordan reminded us how our emotions are dumb and simply respond to our will. Fear and hate, he said, draw us away, whereas their opposites—confidence and love—put us in a state of open engagement.

Whenever the anatomy of human emotions is explored, I always think back to my favorite journalism professor at Ohio State, Henry H. Schulte, who asked on the first day of our 202 beginners’ reporting class, “What do you think is the strongest emotion?” Nobody got the answer, which he said was jealousy.

If you’ve ever listened to Oprah Winfrey’s testimony about how she “advanced” out of her Christian upbringing into her current “enlightened” state of consciousness, she boils it down to the fact she couldn’t buy into the Bible’s jealous God.

She’s quoted on a news website as having once told her TV audience, “I was raised a Baptist (in Mississippi) and we were too hung up on traditional ways. I was sitting in church and heard that God is a jealous God. I asked, ‘Why?’ Come on—let's get over it!”

Relating a “jealous God” to an insecure God, Oprah reasoned, “I don’t think God is hung up on what you believe about God—whatever that ‘force’ is, it doesn't care what you call it. He doesn't have an ego problem.”

Most likely the Bible reference Oprah heard that day is from Exodus 34, where God, in giving Moses the Ten Commandments atop Mount Sinai, ordered, “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves:
[14] For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:
[15] Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods , and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice.”

By saying He’s jealous, God is saying exactly what the Apostle Paul says in II Corinthians 11:2: “For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.” The message is God’s fierce love makes Him abhor the thought of any of His children going astray to worship other gods to their own destruction.

*****

Here’s a great outtake from a sermon Jordan gave some time after 9/11 entitled “God and the gods”:

“The pendulum is going over to the total spiritualization of our culture, but the problem is we’re having a re-spiritualization of our culture without the God of the Bible.

“Watch Oprah Winfrey. Oprah’s into being spiritual. In the ’80s, when Phil Donohue was on, you couldn’t have talked about God on his show and got by with it. Why, he had (Christian theologian) Francis Schaeffer on and heckled him out of the studio.

“The first time Francis Schaeffer and James Dobson ever met was on The Phil Donohue Show. Dobson got so angry about how Donohue ridiculed Schaeffer that they got to be friends. I saw the show.

“Donohue asked him a great question. Francis Schaeffer was supposed to be a Christian philosopher and he asked him, ‘Dr. Schaeffer, is God a Christian?’ That’s a pretty good question, isn’t it? How would you answer that?

“See, that’s a trick question trying to set somebody up and Dr. Schaeffer said, ‘No, Phil, God’s God.’ DUH! I’m thinking, ‘Hmm, that’s a good answer. Wish I’d thought of that!’

“You get on Oprah and try to quote Scripture and it’s, ‘Ugh, here’s a Bible-thumper.’ A friend of mine was on a chat room on the internet the other day. Somebody asked a question and he just typed in a verse. He didn’t say anything, just typed in a verse. On the screen it came up. ‘I smell a Bible-thumper in the room.’

“My point is you can believe in God, and you can have your culture getting in touch with its spiritual self, but it doesn’t mean a lot of good things.

“James 2:19 says, ‘Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.’ Now, that’s an interesting verse. There’s a lot of people who believe in God and they aren’t even up with the devils. The devils believe in God and fear Him. There’s a lot of people believe there’s a God and don’t worry about Him at all.

“My point to you is the Bible recognizes there’s Almighty God and then there’s all these other creatures in the spirit world. There are various races of angelic and spirit creatures and they are often called gods with a little ‘g,’ and this terminology is used a lot of times in the Bible.

“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Well, the great world religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam . . .’ Every great world religion is monotheistic; that’s what allows it to become great and take over, because it isn’t divided with all the polytheism; the various gods. They all believe in one god and this guy said, ‘See, isn’t that wonderful they all believe in the same God?’

“Walter Cronkite said that. He got all mad after Jerry Falwell ran off at the mouth about the Trade Center and talked about God ‘chastising America.’ It’s fascinating—guys like Walter Cronkite, when they blew up the Trade Center, you know who he got mad at? Christians. Jerry Falwell. He said, ‘Don’t get mad at the Muslims,’ and then he got mad at Jerry.

“Now, I’m not a politician, but I got sense enough to look out there and say, ‘You know, there’s something screwy about that,’ and the so-called ‘most honest man in America’ . . . he’s a multi-millionaire living in upper Manhattan in a cloistered little refined area up there in an elitist society and we’re all supposed to believe everything he says?!

“That guy’s just nuttier than a fruitcake philosophically. And he’s mad at Jerry Falwell, saying, ‘Well, don’t you know they all worship the same God.’ They do?! Believing in one god is what any demon-possessed lost man would do, according to James 2:19.

“I mean any demon-possessed maniac could believe in one god! But to believe in the God of the Bible is something different. I’m trying to say, believing in god with little ‘g,’ and believing in God with a big ‘g,’ is a different can of worms here.

“Deut. 10:17 says, ‘For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward.’ You see how He says that? Big ‘g’ never has an ‘s’ on it. There are all kind of gods, all kind of lords, all kind of idols and images, and they’re ALL wrong.

“The Ten Commandments tell you this. Now, the Catholics take that one out (about graven images), of course, and then in order to have 10, take the last commandment and divide it up into two.

“But God said, ‘Don’t put any of these gods before me. Don’t put any of these spirit creatures ahead of me.’ You see, you start dabbling in the spirit world, and the occult and all that kind of business, and you get in connection with things out there, and you’re liable to think just because you had contact with something in the spirit world it was god with the big ‘g,’ and what you really got in touch with was god with the little ‘g.’ ”