Envy Loves Sloth

Mike Hosey, An Elder

All truth is God’s truth. In fact, non-believers often stumble onto a piece of God’s truth. For instance, the great but pagan philosopher, Socrates, once argued that “envy was the ulcer of the soul.” Just like how an ulcer burns a hole in one’s stomach, he intimated, envy will burn a hole in the centermost part of a person. The Bible talks a lot about envy, and most of it is negative, and quite a bit of it describes the damage that envy can cause to a person (Proverbs 14:30). There are essentially two kinds of envy.  One kind of envy is neutral, depending on whether or not the person who experiences it, keeps himself or herself in control of it.  This kind of envy can be defined as simply a “desire to have a possession, quality or desirable attribute belonging to someone else.”  Depending on the object of the desire, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that kind of envy. In fact, we Christians frequently capitalize on such envy.  Someone lost in the horror of their sins sees a life changed by Christ, and they want to have the same kind of life, and that desire motivates them to seek the truths of God. Ultimately, we want people to envy the joy that a life lived for Jesus brings.

But the other kind of envy is always bad, and even evil.  This kind of envy can be described as “a resentful longing aroused by someone else’s qualities, possessions, luck, or position in life.” In this kind of envy, simple desire turns to an anger or bitterness.  Envy also, very frequently, attracts other sins.  Envy produces strife, rivalry, murder, dissension and many other terrible things (Romans 1:29, Philippians 1:15, 1 Timothy 6:4, James 3:16 NIV).  It is, after all, out of envy that the religious leaders had Jesus delivered up for trial (Matthew 27:18). Bad envy is causal to many problems.

Interestingly, the sin of sloth, or laziness, can contribute to envy, and all the sins it brings.  Proverbs 13:4 and Proverbs 21:25-26 tells us that a lazy man covets and craves what others have, while he has nothing. The fact that he has not spurred on his own industry has created for himself a state of want.  That state of want makes him very susceptible to envying -- in a bad way -- what others have. In the modern world, some people even resent that others have more than they do, even though they have done nothing to acquire their own status, or material, nor taken the time to enhance their own desirable qualities.

 

The best way to avoid the bad kind of envy, is to work diligently to improve yourself by becoming more like Jesus. When you do that, the Holy Spirit gives you anti-envy attributes (Galatians 5:2-23).