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Dealing With Your Own Envy

Genesis 37:11 And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

Joseph had the special love of his father, largely due to being the son of Jacob's deceased favorite wife. Could his brothers have done anything "right" about it? Later, some of them did excel, and were praised by Jacob on his deathbed.

Hatred was the wrong response; serving God diligently was the right response.

How God Destroys Envy

Psalm 106:
16 When they envied Moses in the camp, And Aaron the saint of the LORD,
17 The earth opened up and swallowed Dathan, And covered the faction of Abiram.
18 A fire was kindled in their company; The flame burned up the wicked.

God recognizes the power of envy to destroy His work. It is, of course, possible for a person gripped with envy to repent, and God may well have worked in the hearts of these men before He finally destroyed them. But if that doesn't work, God still has a cure: the destruction of the envious.

If you see someone being blessed by God more than you, you can turn to envy. Or you can ask the person for advice on how to obtain God's blessings.

The Sin of Envy

Some time ago, I did a study on Jealousy and Envy. I was surprised to learn that modern psychology defines both terms the way that the King James Version does.

"Jealousy" is not that big of a Biblical problem. It means "I have something and you don't, and I'm afraid that you will take it from me." King Saul was jealous that David would take his throne, but the word is usually used to describe God.

"Envy" means "You have something and I don't, and I feel that it should be mine." Envy gets a lot more space in God's Word than jealousy, and it is described as more serious, both to the person being envied, as well as the person doing the envying.

I'll be doing a Bible study on envy over the next few weeks.

Should You Trust a Compromiser?

A fellow who had graduated from a good fundamentalist college became an elder in a compromising church. When modernists tried to seize the church, he held on for a while. But when people started leaving, he made a deal with another church. If they would give him a leadership position, he would go to the second church, bringing some people with him.

The deal went through, and he holds a leadership position there now. Folks, you just can't trust a compromiser.

When the Fighting Starts

An interdenominational Protestant church would accept anyone as a member if they claimed to believe the Apostles' Creed. Not all of them really did, but it wasn't enforced. Becoming an elder was fairly easy. The church constitution required twelve elders, and the church rarely ran over 100 in attendance. Almost anyone could be an elder if he wanted to.

The pastor told me that when liberals would try to seize the church and turn it away from God, the fundamentalist elders would usually quit the church because of the criticism they were getting.

The Decline of Christian Schools

As a Christian school teacher, I often would have a lying student in the pastor's office, accompanied by enraged parents, claiming innocence. The standard procedure was that the teacher would tell the truth, the student would lie, the parents would go into a rage, and the pastor would back the student.

But I eventually learned from the students that the pastor already knew that the student was lying, and the parents knew it as well. Both the parents and the student would brag about all the trouble they had caused in getting revenge on the teacher. I went to the pastor, who explained that I wasn't looking at the big picture, and he was, so it was all right for him to lie that he didn't know whom to believe.

The Christian school movement in America has fallen heavily from its heyday in the sixties and seventies. Godly, experienced teachers quit, leaving the ranks filled with inexperienced teachers. My own observation was that less than half of all Christian school teachers would enter their third year. Poor discipline, poor education, and a contempt for the pastor by the parents and the children became more and more normal.

Compromise worked in the short term, but not in the long.