Seeing Green: Don't Let Envy Color Your Joy

by Tilly Dillehay

• God is the reason that every good thing you experience reminds you of some other good experience that is lost in either the past or in the future. Nostalgia hints at glory. • God is the reason that when you fall in love, you feel like every good thing in you is being called out and forward and up. Love hints at glory. • God is the reason that you still remember the day your sixth-grade teacher told you your paper was “Excellent! You really grasped the material!” God is also the reason that you have spent your entire life trying to get your father to say similar words. Proper praise from a superior hints at glory. • God is the reason that you’ve always longed to go to Paris, and he is the reason that when you make it to Paris you long even more to get back home. Yearning for another land hints at glory. • God is the reason that music moves you as it does, stories swell your soul, and you could easily spend all your weekends gazing at paintings or photography or pretty dresses. Art hints at glory. • God is even the reason that you hate to be cut out of cliques and why there are people who spend their entire lives social climbing. The desire to be “inside” hints at glory.

Without access to the source of the real glory, we go nuts over any little thing that reminds us of it. The personal glories each person has been gifted with—their beauties, their personalities, their creations, their physical talents, their money, their ability to love others—we watch and compare and adore and attack these glories wherever we find them. But even this borrowed glory is somewhat ephemeral. People want different kinds of it, and people see it in different ways.

everything is going to be finally sorted in the end. Not only will everybody not end up with the same portion, but the great divide between people will be widened and finalized. Some will get everything, and others will get nothing. Some will be finally approved, and others will be finally disapproved.

Envy is an emotion that is essentially both selfish and malevolent. It is aimed at persons, and implies dislike of the one who possesses what the envious man himself covets or desires, and a wish to harm him. Graspingness for self and ill-will lie at the basis of it. There is in it also a consciousness of inferiority to the person envied, and a chafing under this consciousness. He who has got what I envy is felt by me to have the advantage of me, and I resent it.3

Jealousy is a feeling of discomfort and anger that something you have is being threatened. This means that jealousy can sometimes be righteous. God himself is a jealous God (Exodus 20:5-6; Deuteronomy 6:15). Envy, in contrast, is distress over something that someone else possesses. It is always sinful, and it is not a feeling ever attributed to God.

Covetousness is the desire for what someone else possesses. It would be satisfied simply to have what the other person has. Envy, in contrast, takes it personally that the other person has what he has, and would be satisfied to see the possession or quality destroyed rather than see the other person enjoying it.

as Christians, is to rejoice in all the glories that God has poured into others. This means that the goal is for us to also enjoy a fine personality—laugh, engage, converse, admire. We can see God’s own glorious fingerprint in it.