Sermonette
Notes 7-7-01
Herman
Melville, best known as the author of the great American novel Moby Dick
about Captain Ahab’s madly fanatical hunt for an albino whale, once wrote: “Is Envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in
hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody
seriously confess to envy?” This
question appears in the short novel Melville wrote late in life, Billy Budd. The story concerns Billy Budd, a handsome
but illiterate and marvelously innocent sailor aboard the 74 ship-of-the-line
HMS Indomitable in 1797. John
Claggert, the master-at-arms, basically the MP (military police) on board who
keeps the men generally in line, envies Billy’s naturally magnetic personality,
which made the ship’s men naturally gather around him. He conspired against Billy, and before the
Captain, Edward Vere, accused Billy totally falsely of planning a mutiny.
So
then, what exactly is envy? How did
this sin help lead to Christ’s crucifixion.
How is it different from jealousy and coveting? Do we ever resent other people’s successes
in life? Can we recognize this sin in
ourselves in its more subtle manifestations?
The
sin of envy is clearly warned against in Scripture. It helped to lead directly to Jesus’ death. It can’t be assumed it will merely go away
on its own when it appears.
S.P.S. We need to be alert to the sin of envy in
ourselves and others, and strive to wipe it out.
Envy
appears frequently on the “sin lists” of the New Testament. Are we passing over it too casually?
Genesis
37:11
Joseph
was resented by his brothers because their father favored him over his other
sons and because of the dreams he had that revealed that one day they would
obey him. They actively sought to harm
him, and even thought to kill him. They
didn’t care about having the many-colored coat for themselves. They figured that by eliminating their
rival, then their father would show equal love for them all. (Notice how Jacob’s own arbitrary acts of
favoritism towards the first-born son of his favorite wife contributed to the
situation).
Because
the meaning of the terms coveting, envy, and jealously naturally tend to
overlap, we should distinguish them carefully.
We don’t want to misdiagnose what our spiritual problem here may be by
accident.
Coveting
is the state of desire in which we intensely desire what someone else has. For example, the man with the broken down,
old junker might covet the Corvette, Lexus, or Cadillac he sees someone else
driving. Greed, the strong desire for
money or material things, has nearly the same meaning. It emphasizes the lack of restraint in the
desire.
Jealousy
is the emotional state in which we demand someone’s exclusive devotion. It makes us intolerant of rivalry or
unfaithfulness. The classic situation
in which jealousy occurs, of course, is when a man, who has a particular woman
as his wife or girlfriend, resents the other man she is flirting with.
Envy,
which is what we’re focusing on today, is one step worse than coveting. Instead of just desiring the car, house,
boat, wife or husband that another person has, we resent and harbor ill will
against the person who has what we want.
Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms (p. 207) described “envy” as to
“regard another with more or less chagrin, repining, jealousy, or hatred
because he possesses something one covets or feels should have come to
oneself.” Hence, if a welfare mother
envies a rich and beautiful actress she sees on TV, she resents that person for
her good fortune in life. She doesn’t
merely desire to be good-looking, rich, famous, etc. herself.
Now
how did envy lead to Christ’s own death, as I mentioned earlier?
Mark
15:10
Since
Jesus could do miracles, and was perceived as being unusually close to God even
by His enemies, they resented Him.
Since this sin helped lead to Jesus’ own death, we should especially be
alert to when we resent other’s successes in life.
One
of Satan’s motives in his revolt against God?
Notice
that this sin doesn’t necessarily mean a person who envies another would be
happy if he himself became rich, famous, good-looking, intelligent, etc. Instead, he really wishes to rip down,
humble, even destroy, the man or woman he envies. It involves a desire to hurt the one envied. It’s not so much about wanting someone’s
physical talents or material things for oneself.
Now
this sin is particularly apt to appear in veiled form in modern politics. If the sin that the pro-capitalist rightwing
caters to is greed, or at least self-interest, the sin that the welfare statist
or socialist leftwing appeals to is envy.
Leftwing politicians typically will condemn the rich, whether or not
they earned what they have, in order to gain the votes of the much more numerous
poorer people.
The
“dog in the manger” view of life. NYC
case of building lockers for homeless denied since not accessible to the
handicapped.
Soviet
dissident Andrei Amalrik’s Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (p.
35):
“For
despite the apparent attractiveness of the idea of justice, if one examines it
closely, one realizes that it represents the most destructive aspect of Russian
psychology. In practice, “justice”
involves the desire that “nobody should live better than I do” . . .
This
idea of justice is motivated by hatred of everything that is outstanding, which
we make no effort to imitate but, on the contrary, try to bring down to our
level, by hatred of any sense of initiative, of any higher or more dynamic way
of life than the life we live ourselves.
This psychology is, of course, most typical of the peasantry . . .
As
I have observed myself, many peasants find someone else’s success more painful
than their own failure. In general,
when the average Russian sees that he is living less well than his neighbor, he
will concentrate not on trying to do better for himself but rather on trying to
bring his neighbor down to his own level.
My reasoning may seem naïve to some people, but I have been able to
observe scores of examples in both village and town, and I see in this one of
the typical traits of the Russian psyche.”
Russian
American philosopher novelist Ayn Rand called this emotional state “hatred of
the good for being the good.” That is,
when someone hates a virtue or value someone else has, one hates that person
and desires his destruction.
The
New Left: The Anti-industrial
Revolution
(pp. 170-71): “Was compassion the
motive of the noted social worker who, years ago, wrote about her visit to
Soviet Russia: ‘It was wonderful to see
that everybody in the streets was equally shabby”? . . . Ask yourself what were
the motives [compassion vs. envy] in the following example. A professor asked his class which of the two
projected [economic] systems they would prefer: a system of unequal salaries—or a system paying everyone the same
salary, but which would be lower than the lowest one paid under the unequal
system. With the exception of one
student, the entire class voted for the system of equal salaries (which was
also the professor’s preference).”
p.
156: “Envy is part of this creature’s
feeling, but only the superficial, semirespectable part; it is like the tip of
an iceberg showing nothing worse than ice, but with the submerged part
consisting of a compose of rotting living matter. The envy, in this case, is semirespectible because it seems to
imply a desire for material possessions, which is a human being’s desire. But, deep down, the creature has no such
desire: it does not want to be rich, it
wants the human being to be poor.”
p.
156-57: “This is particularly clear in
the much more virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess
personal values or virtues: hatred for
a man (or a woman) because he (or she) is beautiful or intelligent or
successful or honest or happy. In these
cases, the creature has not desire and makes nor effort to improve its
appearance, to develop or to use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to
practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or the
mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim
would not endow it with his or her value.
It does not desire the value; it desires the value’s destruction.”
p.
163: “The touchy vanity of these
haters—which flares up at any suggestion of their inferiority to a man of
virtue—is not aroused by any saint or hero of altruism, whose moral superiority
they profess to acknowledge. Nobody
envies Albert Schweitzer. Whom do they
envy? The man of intelligence, of ability,
of achievement, of independence.”
Example: Do we hate Bill Gates? Or some other rich man we’ve never met?
Conclusion: In conclusion, we have to be alert for envy
in ourselves. If we resent another’s
success, especially when it didn’t come at our expense, we may well be guilty
of envy. So now, let’s turn to I Peter
2:1-2: “Therefore, putting aside all
malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn
babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect
to salvation.”