Deeper Waters with Duke Taber
I want to tell you about a moment that caught me off guard, because I think the Lord used it to show me something I had been missing for a long time.
I was scrolling, the way we all do now, and I came across a story about someone who had been given an opportunity I had quietly wanted for myself. It was not a sinful opportunity. It was a good thing, a blessing, and it had landed in their lap. And I felt something rise up in my chest that I did not like. It was not anger exactly. It was sourer than that, and lonelier. For just a second I did not want good things for them. I wanted them to lose what they had.
I sat back from the screen and I was honest with myself, which is not always my first instinct. That feeling had a name, and the name was envy. And once I had named it in my own heart, I started to see it everywhere. I started to see it underneath a great deal of what we are calling political passion these days. We keep telling ourselves that our unrest is about justice, about principle, about right and wrong. And sometimes it truly is. But the longer I have watched, and the more honestly I have looked at my own heart, the more convinced I have become that a good portion of what we dress up as righteous anger is actually envy wearing a nicer coat.
A sin that hides better than the others
Most sins, at least, have the decency to look like what they are. Greed looks like greed. Lust looks like lust. But envy is a master of disguise. It almost never shows up announcing itself. It shows up as concern, as fairness, as a noble outrage on behalf of others. It borrows the language of justice because it knows that no one will defend it if it tells the truth about itself.
That is why I think we so rarely catch it. I can stand in front of a mirror and confess almost any other fault more easily than this one, because envy convinces me that it is virtue. And Scripture takes it seriously precisely because it is so good at hiding. James does not mince words about where it leads.
For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. — James 3:16, NKJV
Read that slowly. Not some evil thing. Every evil thing. James traces the wars and the fights right back to the cravings inside of us.
Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. — James 4:1-2, NKJV
I used to read that as a verse about personal squabbles. I have come to read it as a diagnosis of nations. The conflict out there begins with the coveting in here.
Pilate saw it
There is a detail in the Gospels that I had read past for years, and when it finally arrested me I could not let it go. On the day they handed Jesus over to be crucified, Pilate, of all people, understood what was actually driving the crowd.
For he knew that the chief priests had handed Him over because of envy. — Mark 15:10, NKJV
Sit with that. The greatest injustice in the history of the world, the condemning of the spotless Son of God, was powered by envy. A pagan governor could see what the religious leaders could not see in themselves. They had wrapped their resentment in the robes of theology and law. They told themselves it was about blasphemy, about order, about protecting the people. But the man on the judgment seat looked at the mob and saw the truth underneath the slogans. They could not bear that this carpenter from Nazareth had what they did not have.
If envy could do that to the most religious men of their day, men who knew the Scriptures backward and forward, then I am a fool to think it cannot do the same thing to me. The seed that grew into a crucifixion is the same seed I felt stir in my own chest in front of a screen.
Envy would rather destroy than build
Here is what makes this sin so uniquely dangerous to a society. Greed, for all its ugliness, at least wants to gain something. Envy is darker than greed, because envy is often willing to gain nothing as long as the other person loses. It does not always even want the thing it resents. It simply cannot tolerate that someone else has it.
You see it in the very first family. Cain did not envy Abel in order to get something from him. He destroyed his brother and walked away with nothing but a curse. You see it in Joseph’s brothers, who threw away a brother they envied and gained only years of guilt. Envy tears down. It does not build. And a politics fueled by envy will always be more interested in pulling people down than in lifting anyone up, because that is the nature of the thing.
I have watched seasons of unrest where the goal seemed to have quietly shifted. It was no longer that the hurting would be helped. It was that the comfortable would be made to suffer. And whenever I have seen that shift, in others or in myself, I have learned to suspect that envy has gotten into the engine.
The mirror is the hard part
Now I have to say the thing that makes this an honest reflection rather than just another sermon aimed at other people. The most tempting move in the world right now is to read everything I have written and apply it entirely to the other side. To say, ah yes, that explains them. They are just envious. But to do that is to commit the very sin I am describing, because nothing flatters my pride like deciding that my opponents are driven by a low motive while I am driven by a pure one.
So I have had to turn the mirror around. I have had to ask the Lord to show me where my own political feelings are quietly fed by envy, by resentment of people who have what I lack, by a secret satisfaction when those I dislike are humbled. That prayer is uncomfortable, and the Lord answers it. He always shows me something.
Solomon understood what this does to a man on the inside.
A sound heart is life to the body, but envy is rottenness to the bones. — Proverbs 14:30, NKJV
Envy does not rot the people I resent. It rots me. It hollows out my own bones while I am busy keeping score of someone else’s blessings. The most damaged person in any envious quarrel is almost always the one doing the envying.
What actually sets a heart free
I have found only one cure for this, and it is not trying harder to be a generous person. It is contentment, the deep kind that comes from trusting that my Father has measured out my portion with love and has not made a mistake.
When I truly believe that what God has given me is good, and that what He has given my neighbor is also good, the engine of envy runs out of fuel. I no longer need anyone to lose in order for me to be at peace. Paul said he had learned this, and the word he used is important. He learned it. It did not come naturally to him any more than it comes naturally to me.
Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content. — Philippians 4:11, NKJV
And the love that the Spirit grows in us has this same quality woven right into it.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy. — 1 Corinthians 13:4, NKJV
Love does not envy. Of all the things Paul could have listed first, that is near the top. A heart full of the love of God simply has no room left for the resentment of another’s good. It can rejoice when someone else is blessed, even someone on the other side of every line we have drawn, because it is no longer keeping score.
A word before you go
So when you feel that heat rising in you over the state of things, and you will, I would gently ask you to do what I have had to learn to do. Before you name it justice, hold it up to the light and make sure it is not envy in a borrowed coat. Ask the Lord to show you your own heart before you go diagnosing everyone else’s. And then ask Him for the quiet, unshakable contentment that lets you want good things even for the people you find hardest to love.
The unrest out there is real, and some of it is righteous. But a surprising amount of it begins with a small, sour feeling in a single human chest, the kind I felt in front of a screen that day. And that is a place the gospel knows exactly how to reach.
Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. — Galatians 5:26, NKJV
There is a stiller, deeper water than the one the world keeps churning, and it is wide enough for all of us. Come on out to it with me. You will find you can breathe out here.
Duke
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