5 The Envy Trap
5
Cat had been her most long-term and very best friend ever. They had known each other since grade school. They had participated in all the same high school activities. They had enrolled in the same college, declared the same major, and were roommates for three of their four years. They had found jobs in the same city and rented a place together, but in a moment on a horrible night, it all changed. Jude was on her way home from an office party when she was hit head-on by a drunk and unlicensed driver. She was in critical care for three weeks, then in a rehab facility for six months, and finally spent months as an outpatient learning how to live as a paraplegic, manage her wheelchair, and make the necessary arrangements for returning to work.
Cat was very gracious, loving, and supportive throughout the entire ordeal, practically living at the hospital during those first few weeks, but as Jude got better, it became clear that the place Jude had rented with Cat would no longer meet Jude’s needs. Cat decided she didn’t want to relocate with Jude because she was in a serious relationship, saw marriage on the horizon, and didn’t want to move twice. It was a huge blow to Jude.
Those first few weeks in Jude’s disability-appropriate loft were dark and lonely. She couldn’t wrap her brain around what had happened to her life, she couldn’t deal with the challenge of even the simplest of tasks, and she couldn’t deal with the fact that it probably would never be different. Cat visited her often those first weeks, and those visits seemed like the only bright spot in Jude’s life, but as Cat’s relationship with George got more serious, the visits got more infrequent. At first Cat called if she hadn’t visited, but the visits and the calls grew increasingly rare.
Jude felt incredibly alone, forsaken, and powerless. Meanwhile Cat’s life became more and more fulfilling and exciting. George was a good man, and he loved Cat dearly. There was probably no harder day for Jude than the day of Cat’s wedding. Locked in her wheelchair, she asked not to be a bridesmaid, and at the reception it killed her that she couldn’t get out on the floor and dance. The night of Cat’s wedding, Jude’s discouragement morphed into something more dangerous—anger. It wasn’t just the anger of discouragement and loneliness; it was the anger of envy. It had been nipping at her for weeks, and now it had her heart in its grasp. In the drama of her life-altering injuries, Jude made the huge spiritual mistake of looking horizontally instead of vertically.
Because Cat had been such a huge part of Jude’s life, it didn’t seem strange or dangerous to think about her all the time. But doing so was progressively destroying her hope and weakening her faith, and she didn’t know it. There wasn’t a day when Jude was free of thinking about Cat. She would be alone in her wheelchair in her kitchen and imagine that Cat was in her new house with her new husband enjoying breakfast. The more Jude compared her life to Cat’s, the more she was eaten with envy. She envied Cat’s marriage, her new house, her ongoing career, and, most of all, her ability to walk.
It wasn’t long before the envy that had been reserved for Cat spilled over to everyone everywhere in her life. The more Jude looked around, the more she longed to be anybody but herself. The more she examined the life of others, the more she hated the wheelchair that she would never escape. She was angry that everyone around her seemed to have all the things she would never have. But it wasn’t just generalized anger; Jude’s anger had an object. In ways she didn’t understand, Jude was deeply angry at God.
It’s important to understand that envy never rests. Envy never lives in the heart as just envy. Envy quickly morphs into anger, the anger looks for an object, and finally envy shuts the heart off from trust in God. It wasn’t long before Jude was no longer thinking about Cat; she was thinking about God. Why had God so richly blessed Cat while he had forgotten Jude? Why did he seem to hear the prayers of everyone but Jude? It made no sense that people who never paid God a bit of attention were blessed with better lives than she, who had followed him sincerely. To Jude, God now seemed distant, uncaring, and partial. She felt she could trust him no more.
Jude is not the first person to struggle in this way. The temptation to assess your life by looking horizontally rather than vertically is graphically depicted in one powerfully diagnostic psalm, Psalm 73. This psalm is a treatise on the heart-debilitating dangers of envy. Take time now to read through it carefully.
Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death;
their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them as a garment.
Their eyes swell out through fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
Therefore his people turn back to them,
and find no fault in them.
And they say, “How can God know?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?”
Behold, these are the wicked;
always at ease, they increase in riches.
All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.
For all the day long I have been stricken
and rebuked every morning.
If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
I would have betrayed the generation of your children.
But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God;
then I discerned their end.
Truly you set them in slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!
Like a dream when one awakes,
O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.
When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you.
Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
that I may tell of all your works.
In your suffering, can you find yourself in this psalm? Is there evidence that you have fallen into envy’s trap? Consider what this psalm, which gives warning to everyone who suffers, teaches us about envy.
1. Envy Is Natural
Since every human being is an interpreter, every day we all do situational, moral, spiritual, and personal calculus. We are constantly adding up the details and circumstances of our lives to see the sum total of our beliefs, decisions, and actions. We’re all spiritual accountants calculating the return on our faith investments. We all long for our spiritual investments and personal decisions to be worth something. Here are the big questions we all tend to ask: “What have I gotten in return for my heart commitments and life decisions? Has it all been worth it?”
Because these questions are in all of our hearts and minds, it’s natural to look around at how others have done, but this is where we get into trouble. We’ll never know the worth of our faith commitments and life decisions by comparing our lives to the lives of others. When we do this, we don’t end up assured that we’ve made the right commitments and decisions; we invariably end up wishing for the life of those other people. We fall into thinking that the trials of others are easier and that the blessings of others are greater. So the natural response of those mistaken conclusions is to want what they have and what seems to have evaded our grasp. And wanting the life of someone else is never good for your heart and doesn’t motivate you to continue to seek and do what’s right.
2. Envy Makes You Question Your Allegiance to God
Thousands of disgruntled believers with envious hearts have spoken some rendition of the words of Asaph, the author of Psalm 73:
All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence. (v. 13)
It’s so easy in the pain, travail, and exhaustion of suffering to throw up your hands and say, “I’ve obeyed for this? I’ve been a committed follower of God, and this is what I get?” There are moments in suffering when we’re tempted to think that it’s all been one big moral rip-off. We look around and it seems that the good guys are being hammered and the bad guys are being blessed. It seems that justice and morality have been turned upside down.
The flaw in this thinking is that it looks at faith and obedience as payments. It’s as if we buy blessing by doing the right thing and avoid hardship by refusing to do the wrong thing. Our blessings are never payment for the good we’ve done, and our trials are never punishment for the wrongs we’ve done. This cause-and-effect equation is always bad spiritual math. We’ve all had blessing heaped upon us that we could never earn, and the hardships that God’s children endure are the result of his love, because they are being used as instruments of his rescuing and transforming grace. Every good father does hard things with his children, not because he hates them but because he loves them and gives them what they need, which is not always the comfortable thing they want.
3. Envy Is a Wearisome Burden to Carry
Asaph says that his horizontal evaluation-envy syndrome was a “wearisome task,” and it always is. It’s adding pain to pain to allow yourself to fall into thinking that not only have you been chosen to endure hard things, but you’re enduring those hard things because you’ve been wronged, that is, because someone else is enjoying the blessings that you deserve. It’s impossible to think this even for a moment and not be angry. It’s impossible to carry this anger for a while and not be spiritually depressed. Not only has your physical, relational, and situational world come crashing down, but you feel that you can no longer reach out for the thing you once thought offered you hope and rescue. Suffering becomes all the more burdensome when it becomes an indication that you’ve been wrong. Envy has never lightened the load of any sufferer.
4. Envy Ignores the Impermanence of the Comforts of the Present
Again, the words of Asaph are so helpful here: “Like a dream when one awakes . . .” (v. 20). That dream that seemed so powerfully real is gone the moment you open your eyes in the morning. The comforts and sorrows, the times of ease and the times of travail, and the easy roads and the paths of trouble are all fleeting. What is will not last forever. What seems inescapable will not hold you forever. What seems to last forever will someday end. Envy paints the comforts of others as if they will be enjoyed forever. Envy forgets that all the things you envy are temporary.
Forgetting this is so dangerous because it distorts your value system. Forgetting the temporary nature of present physical comforts allows you to value them as much as or even more than the eternal blessings that are yours as a child of God, even when you are suffering. Envy tempts you to crave what is temporary while you devalue what is eternal. This never leads you anywhere good.
5. Envy Embitters Your Heart
Envy preaches a false gospel of favoritism and injustice, and because it does, it never comforts your heart. People who’ve been captured by envy seldom have peace, seldom have hope, and seldom find rest in God’s care. The real burdens of suffering are made significantly more difficult when you carry them in a heart spiritually weakened by bitterness. Asaph confessed that he was bitter. His travail was not just the result of the hardships he faced but also of the bitterness of heart that made them all the more difficult to bear.
Bitterness is the long-term resentment that captures your heart when you think you’ve been treated unkindly or unfairly. The words of Job are a helpful definition of what bitterness is and what bitterness does:
I loathe my life;
I will give free utterance to my complaint;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. (Job 10:1)
First, bitterness turns suffering into a personal worldview. So Job isn’t saying just that he found his suffering to be very hard; he’s saying something much more foundational. He’s looking around and saying, “I hate everything about my life.” Bitterness now colors the way he looks at everything.
Bitterness so obstructs your view of blessing that you can’t see it anymore. Bitterness in your heart is like being in the darkness of your basement on a day when the sun is shining and saying, “I hate the fact that I live in a world of darkness.” You don’t actually live in a dark world; rather, the structure around you and above you is obstructing your view of the sun. When envy becomes the soil in which bitterness grows, your suffering will become a lens through which you look at everything.
But Job says something else here that should get our attention: “I will give free utterance to my complaint.” Bitterness not only shapes your personal worldview; it soon becomes an attitude of your heart. You no longer carry an attitude of hope, joy, or expectancy into the situations, locations, and relationships in your life, but an attitude of complaint. Bitter people don’t have much joy. They expect and look for the worst and often find it. Bitterness puts a dark cloud of negativity over your life, and because it does, it robs you of your hope, and because it robs you of your hope, it erodes your motivation to do the good and constructive things that every sufferer needs to do so as not to lose his way in the midst of his difficulty. And a person without hope is not about to greet painful things with the courage of faith.
6. Envy Underestimates the Goodness of God
I sat with Sally and William as they told their story. They had been through terrible difficulty. There were moments when their story brought me to tears as I thought about what it would be like to live in their circumstances. Not only had life been hard, but it had been hard for a very long time. And not only had it been hard for a very long time, but it seemed that there was no way out. They were both depressed, discouraged, hopeless, and quite cynical. They didn’t mind telling me that they thought that there wasn’t much I could do for them. William said, “We’ve gotten a lot of advice, but nothing really helps, and nothing has really changed.”
But as I listened to them, I noticed something missing from the way they told their story. The longer they talked, the more evident became this missing piece. It was so glaring that at some point, what they didn’t say became as important to me as what they did say. Sally and William were committed Christians. They were theologically knowledgeable and biblically aware. They hadn’t turned from their faith or rejected God in any self-conscious way, but when they told their story with great detail, there was no God in the telling. Years of comparing their lives to the seemingly easy lives of the people around them had completely blinded them to the presence and goodness of God. But as I listened to their story, I saw the goodness of God all over the place. From that time on, I was convinced that my job as their helper was to be a “goodness-of-God tour guide.” I would lead them back through their story, and as we walked through it, I would point out all the places where God’s presence and goodness were evident.
What could be more important for a person who’s enduring the unplanned, the unexpected, and the unwanted than to remember the beautiful reality of the constant presence and ever-flowing goodness of God? When you feel unprepared, alone, overburdened, and besieged, what but God is able to give you reason to hope again, to believe again, and to live again? When hope in yourself, others, and circumstances has failed you, you need a rock on which to stand and a hand of help for which to reach. There is no rock so firm as the rock Christ Jesus, and there is no hand so strong and caring as the hand of the Father. Blindness to God’s presence and goodness and to the caress of his grace only makes the heavy burdens of suffering seem even more impossible to bear.
7. Envy Forgets Eternity
It’s hard for us. Suffering is so real, so physical, so emotional, and so life-dominating that it’s hard to think of anything but the present moment of pain. Pain in your body can be heart- and life-dominating. It greets you in the morning, it nags you throughout the day, and it pulls the last groan out of you before you fitfully sleep. You can’t run from it, because you have no ability to escape your own body.
The death of a spouse or a close loved one can kidnap your mind and hold it hostage. Everywhere you look, you are greeted by painful reminders of the person who once was. Everywhere you go seems to be dotted with memories of times shared together. A piece of clothing, a favorite book, a tree he planted, the song she loved, that picture, the piece of jewelry, or that thing that you just can’t let yourself get rid of grabs your attention and pulls the grief out of you once again.
The pain of divorce can imprison your heart. Every morning you awake in that same big bed only to be confronted with the devastating reality that you really are all alone. You constantly feel awkward around old friends because you were friends as couples, and you feel as if you no longer fit.
All this pain tempts you to spend too much of your emotional and spiritual time and energy wishing for what once was and craving what others have that you’ve lost. Your physical pain reminds you that the people around you don’t seem to have any pain. The death of your spouse causes you to notice all the couples that are growing old together. The shock of divorce causes you to wonder why they’re all still together while you’re cursed with being alone.
You’re not aware of it, but your envy of others and the pain it produces lock you into a view of life that has a disastrous past and a painful present but is functionally without a future. It feels as if what is will always be. It’s as if life has winners and losers, and you’re on the losing team, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But here is what’s vital to understand, to believe with all your heart, and to preach to yourself again and again: what is will not always be. The biblical story is not an endlessly repeating cycle; the biblical story has a perfect beginning, a dark and painful middle, and a glorious end. There is a bright light in that dark and a painful middle in the form of the only perfect man who ever lived. He came as the second Adam to succeed where the first Adam failed. He won an eternal victory on a criminal’s cross for you. This tells you that you’re on the winning team. His victory is your victory, and that victory guarantees that the pain that now seems inescapable, you will not have to live with forever.
Thousands of years into eternity, as you’re living in a perfect world that has been made new in every way, you’ll look back on what now seems unbearable and inescapable as a brief flash of difficulty. It’s hard to grasp, but try; there will be a day when you will look back at this huge and horrible thing, and it will look to you like a little thing. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16–17, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”
You see, you and I only ever really understand the painful trials of this moment when we look at them through the lens of eternity. This is one reason that envy is so devastating, because to the degree that it locks you in the cycle of daily comparing your life to others, to that degree it robs you of the glorious, hope-giving comforts of eternity. Eternity tells you that you aren’t cursed with less but guaranteed gloriously more than anything you look around and envy in this present world. No matter what the next day brings, your future is bright, because a victory has been won for you. You can’t let patterns of envy rob you of the comforts of eternity.
8. Envy Never Tells the Truth
It is so tempting, when you are suffering, to look around and compare what you are enduring to what others seem to be enjoying. And as you do this, it’s so easy to fall into wanting the life of someone else. But as you can see, envy never produces a good harvest. Envy adds layers of trouble to the trouble you’re already facing. Envy robs you of hope and destroys your ability to trust. And worst of all, envy steals away the hope that is only ever found when you’re convinced of the presence and goodness of God. (I’m going to write much more about this in the second half of this book.) Envy does all this because envy never tells you the truth. It distorts your view of your life, the life of others, and the character of God. Envy whispers dangerous and debilitating lies into your ears. Envy never takes your suffering hand and leads you to the light. Envy never causes your heart to sing. Envy never points you to places where you are being graced. Envy points out all the bad things and puts its hand over your eyes so that you can’t see the good things. Envy is a punch in the stomach when you’re already out of breath. It’s bad news when you already feel that you can’t bear anything more. Envy is the enemy of hope. Envy is a mortal danger to be avoided.
When you’re tempted in your suffering to look around and calculate, you must determine to look up and celebrate. When all you feel like doing is complain, you must require yourself to find reasons to praise. When you feel abandoned and alone, you must preach to yourself the gospel of the boundless, eternal, and unshakable love of God. For a sufferer, a heart free of envy is a spiritual war, and we must all cry out to God for the willingness and strength to be good soldiers. The battle for an envy-free heart is big and dramatic for every sufferer, but the grace of God is infinitely bigger and more than up to the task.
Review and Reflect
1. How is envy connected to suffering?
2. Why does a horizontal focus result in envy?
3. Where in your life is there evidence that you have fallen into envy’s trap?
4. Explain what Paul Tripp means when he writes: “Our blessings are never payment for the good we’ve done, and our trials are never punishment for the wrongs we’ve done”?
5. Where in your life is there evidence that are you “theologically knowledgeable and biblically aware” but your heart isn’t fully engaged?
Heart Reset
Job 10:1
Psalm 73:1–28
2 Corinthians 4:16–17