Deuteronomy 5:6-10: in context

These are the opening words of the Ten Commandments as Moses restates them: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make or bow to any carved image, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Two things in these commandments repay a closer look. The first is the word jealous. We hear it as a flaw, but God's jealousy is not the petty insecurity of a rival; it is the jealousy of committed love, the refusal of a faithful spouse to share the beloved with another. God will not be one god among many in our lives, worshiped alongside the idols we also serve, because he loves us with a love that wants us wholly, and that is what his jealousy means. The second thing is the lopsided arithmetic of the passage. The consequences of hating God reach, it says, to the third and fourth generation; but his steadfast love reaches to thousands, which is to say, to a thousand generations. The two are set side by side deliberately, and they are not equal. Judgment reaches a few generations; love reaches thousands. God's mercy vastly outweighs his judgment; the scale tips overwhelmingly toward love. This is not a God poised to punish, itching for a reason to visit iniquity; it is a God whose love runs a thousandfold deeper than his judgment, inclined far more to mercy than to wrath. The jealous God who will not share us is the God whose steadfast love, held out to those who love him, reaches far further than any consequence of turning from him.

Do I hear God's jealousy as the intensity of a committed love that wants me wholly, rather than as a flaw, and do I know that his steadfast love reaches a thousandfold further than his judgment, tipping overwhelmingly toward mercy?