Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Ecclesiastes 4:1-6

Sermon scripture is found in Ecclesiastes 4:1-6. Ecclesiastes 4:1-6.

So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter. And on the side of their oppressors, there was power, but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praise the dead, which were already dead, more than the living, which are yet alive.

Yay, better is he than both they which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. Again, I considered all travail, and every right work that for this a man is envied of his neighbor. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit. The fool foldeth his hands together and eaeth his own flesh. Better is an handful with quietness than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.

At this point in time the children can be dismissed to go downstairs to their Sabbath school if their parents desire that. We were speaking on the way in, how nice it would be to worship outside today. One of the dreams that some of us have kicked around in years past for a church building, maybe for our children or their children, our grandchildren, would be one that would have a roof that could roll back on days such as this and have an outdoor service inside. That’d be real nice.

At the core of my voice today, I seem to be finally having my voice change or something. These are sins for which God condemns us. Apart from other sins that the scriptures tell us if you keep all the law and yet offended one point, one small point, you’re guilty of breaking the whole law. The Bible says the wages of sin are death. Any sin, the wages of that sin in God’s sight is eternal death.

So they’re not deadly in that sense. They’re also not deadly in the civil sense. These are not capital crimes. There are no civil statutes recommended in the scriptures for pride or for envy, but rather for the deeds that pride and envy carry out. So they’re not deadly in that sense. They are deadly and have been called deadly in the centuries of the church because they lead to many other sins.

I guess in terms of the blackberry patch, they’re like the big root blackberries. If you’re going to cut blackberries, this is a nice time of year to do it because you can see where the big stalks are at the base where all the rest of the things grow out from. You got a huge patch and very few main stalks. Blackberries go underground, then they grow up, they go down underground, and pretty soon they creep all over the place just like sin. These seven deadly sins are like the root sins of the blackberry patch of many other sins.

And I suppose that in terms of our talking about pride as the base sin of all other sins, a rejection of God, claiming for ourselves to be God, that pride’s kind of like the ground of the blackberry patch. And these last six sins we’re talking about and today specifically envy are some of these main stalks that come out of that blackberry patch. And this analogy is a good one. There’s lots of things you can think about in the blackberry patch.

It is like sin and that sin overwhelms people. If you leave blackberries go, and I know this from experience, they will overwhelm buildings and structures and trees and kill them and break the building. We used to live in a house, my wife and I when we were first married, where the garage was a separate garage and was totally except for one end overgrown with blackberries and they were eventually killing the garage itself and causing the structure to begin to collapse.

Sin does that. And so, it’s real important to root out these seven deadly sins in our lives to work hard at it. Well, you got to work hard at the blackberry patch. Now, working in the blackberry patch causes a lot of pain. And I suppose there’s lots of nicer things we could be talking about on a beautiful sunny day like this in terms of some of God’s attributes that might be more pleasant. Some of the things we’re going to talk about today may be somewhat painful to you, but it’s necessary work if we’re going to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

We have to work and work hard to root out that pain. The blackberry patch almost seems to fight back when you cut blackberries. You ever noticed that? It’s like the blackberries are attacking you and you get in your clothes. Maybe I’m just lousy at it. Maybe you guys never have any problems with blackberries, but for me it’s like the blackberries are fighting back. And these sins are that way, too.

They’re not easily cut out of our lives. Very hard work. Long-term project. You don’t want to get discouraged fighting blackberries because there’s so many of them. It’s a long-term project to roll them back out of your area or out of your house. Same thing’s true with sin. They’re persistent and we must wage a long-term war of crimination on them. I am pleased to say that in my striving against blackberries this last yesterday, I did strive to the point of shedding blood.

We began what we’ve done, we have the same outline today we’ve had for a couple of weeks. And what we did was we really started this with the talk on covetousness, the tenth commandment. So we started in the ten commandments and then we looked at examples from biblical history of envy which is covetousness gone bad. Covetousness plus impotence in terms of getting the thing yields envy rather.

And so we looked at covetousness and we looked at the examples of envy in biblical history. By the way, there’s a new book out by Pratt called God Gave Us Stories and it’s very important that God does give us stories to flesh out these principles and these laws of his and help us to understand them. We did that. We took some time going through those. We looked at some New Testament examples of envy as well.

We’re going to look at wisdom literature here in a couple of minutes and epistle references and then we’re going to draw application. Remember that’s a good way to study something in the scriptures to start with God’s law. See how that law is developed in God’s history that in his inspired history he gives us then see how it’s brought into the New Testament and what effect it has there. Envy is on all the lists of the sins of the flesh, the terrible sins. Envy in Romans 1 is placed right in juxtaposition with murderers and very important to see that relationship. Okay, so that’s what we’ve done.

One other example I had yesterday from working outside. My two younger children, two boys were with me and Benjamin is a sweet lovely young boy. He’s about what is he three going on four now and just a real sweet and lovely little amiable three-year-old most the time. But he found a little doll out there in the black gray brambles. And he found two things: that and a sheath of an old sword they had. And Elijah, my other son, found a little chunk of rope, right? But Benjamin wanted the chunk of rope. I think because Elijah had it. He was coveting. See? And he was throwing a fit.

And I said, “Well, Benjamin, if I give you this choice, which would you rather have? If I either let Elijah keep that piece of rope that you want, or I take the piece of rope and put it up in the cupboard, which would you rather have me do?”

He says, “Put it up in the cupboard.”

See, even sweet, amiable little Benjamin fell into the terrible sin of envy. He wanted to get rid of that thing from his brother’s possession. If he couldn’t have it, he didn’t want Elijah to have it either. And that’s what we’ve talked about.

By the way, I wanted to mention too that when we talked about the covetousness, I talked about the importance of God’s law in preaching and proclaiming the gospel. And Tony, years ago, did this pamphlet. It’s not little really, it’s a nice little pamphlet on what’s the verdict. He’s used this as an evangelistic tool and it goes through the ten commandments and it shows where we’re guilty of violating those ten commandments as a prelude to talking about the good news of Christ paying the price for those sins. Excellent example of integrating law and gospel together in one presentation.

So, I’m sure Tony has lots of these. If you want one as sample, just let him know and he’ll bring one for you. They’re excellent tools to use and help us get our evangelism more biblical.

Okay. All that way of introduction. Let’s move now into the wisdom literature, in terms of envy, moving through our outline: wising up, envy in the wisdom literature. And I haven’t done this on your outline, but in my thinking, Proverbs—you might circle these on your outline: Proverbs 3:28-30, 14:21-22, not 30. Circle those. And Proverbs 21:10—they kind of are lumped together into a category of invidious proximity.

Proverbs 3:28 says, “Say not unto thy neighbor, go and come again, and tomorrow I’ll give it when thou hast it by thee.” Verse 29 says, “Devise not evil against thy neighbor, seeing he dwelleth securely by thee. Strive not with a man without cause, if he have done you no harm.” Now, this is really repeating again. Devise not evil against thy neighbor, seeing he dwelleth securely by thee. That reiterates a part of the cursings found in Deuteronomy 27:24.

Deuteronomy 27 is a list of curses that people would say. And you remember when we had our service of malediction about abortion a couple weeks ago, we went through those curses. I read, “Cursed be he that does such and such.” And you all said, “Amen.” One of those curses in verse 24 of Deuteronomy 27 says, “Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbor secretly, and all the people shall say, Amen.”

And that’s what Proverbs 3 is saying. Don’t do damage against your neighbor. Just like Deuteronomy 27, don’t smite your neighbor secretly.

Proverbs 14:21 is the same category. “He that despiseth his neighbor sinneth, but he that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he. Do they not err that devise evil? But mercy and truth shall be with them that devise good.”

Finally, Proverbs 21:10: “The soul of the wicked desireth evil. His neighbor findeth no favor in his eyes.”

Now, the common thread in all those passages, those verses from the Proverbs and in Deuteronomy 27:24, the curse is people doing harm against their neighbor, doing it secretly. And I think that the root problem going on in many of these passages being addressed, at least in part, if not in total, these passages speak to the sin of envy. Remember, we said that envy is invidious proximity. It is envy that looks upon one of its equals, your neighbor. And that’s where you’re normally going to find people falling into envy—against his neighbor.

And envy strikes out at your neighbor then since you can’t have what he has. And all these Proverbs literature here that we’ve cited as well as Deuteronomy 27 tells us over and over again, don’t strike out at your neighbor and it adds the qualifier secretly often because that’s usually how we attack our neighbor. Not a frontal assault but secretly.

We’ll talk about that a little bit more when we get to the relationship of envy to slander. But see, the Proverbs literature here warns us about this tendency to strike out at our neighbor. The root motivation for that often times will be envy and it will be deceitful as well.

Now in Proverbs 24:17, we have what I would call the second category here that I’m breaking this out into. The first was invidious proximity. Here we have enemy envy that’s warned against.

Proverbs 24:17: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.”

Okay. And then it goes right on to say in the very next verse, “Fret not thyself because of evil men, neither be thou envious at the wicked, for there shall be no reward for the evil man. The candle of the wicked shall be put out.”

So here in this wisdom literature, God says, “Don’t rejoice when your enemy falls.” And then he goes right the very next verse says, “Don’t be envious at the wicked. God will take care of him. His light will be put out.”

So what this piece of wisdom is warning us against is enemy envy. Now, it’s easy for us to avoid envy of good people within the context of a Christian fellowship. But sometimes, this is maybe one of the areas that we’re all prone to sin in, is wanting the bad guy to get it. Not so much to vindicate God’s justice and righteousness in the land, which is a proper motivation for wanting his destruction, but rather because we don’t like him because he’s got something we don’t have. He’s got riches we don’t have. We know he got them through ill pains and then we’re happy when God brings judgment to him. Not out of a righteous concern, but because we have become envious of him and really want what he has. We know we can’t take the wicked steps to get there. So, we want God just to wipe that guy out.

Enemy envy is warned about here in the wisdom literature and it’s wise for us to take that admonition to heart.

In the very latest issue of the Chalcedon Report, there was an article in the ten biggest news events according to Joseph McAuliff and the one he put at the bottom of the list was the conviction of Leona Helmsley. Now Leona Helmsley was a very rich woman who didn’t pay taxes and was quoted as saying only the poor people pay taxes, something like that. She deducted lots of stuff for business expenses which may not have been business expenses. She was tried a couple of months ago on the East Coast, found guilty and they sentenced her to jail for a long time if I remember correctly. And McAuliff brings this up because he says it’s a symptom of a great evil in America, greed.

Well, it is a picture of greed and there’s no doubt that Leona Helmsley was greedy. And you know, that’s true. But I think that a bigger picture—what I was struck with when I saw the Leona Helmsley story on TV, particularly when they showed the crowds who had come to the courthouse to make sure this woman got sentenced to jail. To me, the big story was envy. People hated Leona Helmsley. And Christians can hate people like Leona Helmsley because she ends up with a lot more money than us. And we have the added motivation that she got it illicitly probably. And so we want to say, “Yeah, throw her in jail. Do that terrible thing to her.” You know, people were driven by envy to want to block that woman up.

Now, I’m not saying she shouldn’t have gotten punished, but you know, obviously if we understand the scripture, she shouldn’t have been thrown in jail cuz jails are unbiblical. She should have made restitution in some form. But anyway, I’m trying to warn you here that with the wicked who prosper. It’s easy for the righteous—it was a temptation to David and to his son Solomon—to fall into envy of those people and want their destruction, not because of God’s justice being vindicated, but for our own personal envy being worked out.

Okay? And God says here that if that’s your motivation and if you, for instance, if you prayed the imprecatory psalms with us a couple of months ago in terms of abortion, the pure motive is one that says we want God’s justice and righteousness vindicated and demonstrated to the world. That’s a good motive for wanting the destruction of the wicked. And David says, the psalmist says, we should be happy at the destruction of the wicked for that reason. But if you prayed those prayers because some abortionist was just getting rich and you’re poor and you want to take away his wealth because you can’t have it, that’s this envy thing. And God says that he may well at that point in time not bring judgment upon that person. He’ll let him step there for a while longer until you deal with that sin.

Okay, enough said. Enemy envy is a real temptation. So, the wisdom literature warns us against it.

And then the third set of Proverbs here, Proverbs 14:30 and 27:4, those two go together talking about the awfulness of envy.

Proverbs 14:30 says, we talked about this before, “A sound heart is the life of the flesh and envy the rottenness to the bones.” Envy is like bone cancer. It’s rottenness to your bones. It has the picture of having no support left to stand up. All your structure is taken away through envy. Envy is a terrible thing that eats up the person who succumbs to that sin. And we looked at that of course with Saul and other examples from the stories we looked at in the scriptures.

And in Proverbs 27:4, “Wrath is cruel, anger is outrageous, but who’s able to stand before envy?”

The unholy three here is talked about. Envy translated this as the madness of anger, the overflowing of wrath and before jealousy who keeps his place—worse than anger, worse than wrath. Envy broods, continues on. A quote I got out of Helmut’s book says that jealousy or envy is a passion that not only rages but reckons calmly. It puts into operation all means both secretly and openly to injure the enemy. That’s why it’s so much more destructive than wrath or anger. Those things can kind of flare up and then they flare back down. Envy continues, keeps going, plotting quietly, silently seeking the destruction of the other person.

There’s a couple of movies recommended, Jean de la de la Fontaine and Manon of the Springs, which are a sequel French subtitle movies. Very good. Well, there’s sad, very sad. I’ll warn you: if you don’t like to cry, don’t watch them. But it is a good study of covetousness and envy being worked out over a long period of time in the lives of some people in a small village. And that’s what envy does. It’s terrible for that reason.

It’s interesting. We’ve got some old books that we’ve used on occasion for devotions in our household, you know, about 100 years old or so. Big thick books about, you know, the right way to live and the path of life and that sort of stuff. And this one’s called Religious Emblems. And again, you can’t see it. I’ve done this before to you, haven’t I? But if you want to look at it later, it’s got a picture. It says, “The three-fold demon are envy, hatred, and malice.”

And it quotes this verse, and it shows this demonic person walking about which is the picture of these three-fold things together. And chewing on the flesh of a viper in the mouth there. So, it’s blackening the heart of this person. This demonic character is trampling underfoot the character of other people. It has a pack of slanders on the back that it throws out to the wind and there’s big brooding black clouds behind it. And that’s a picture of what envy does. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. The relationship of envy to slander. And she is destroying good names as she walks along here, wreaking her havoc.

People understood these things in times past and warned about them. Today we’re not too up on these things, but that’s a good picture of the destructive force that envy is to society and to ourselves in those two proverbs from the wisdom literature taken together.

Okay, let’s move to the book of Ecclesiastes then and the text we read as a sermon text: Ecclesiastes 4:1-6. And of course the central verse we want to focus on is verse 4 where it reads that a man works hard and is profited and everything but it only leads to envy by his neighbors.

You go ahead and turn to Ecclesiastes 4. We’ll spend a little bit of time on this. Ecclesiastes 4:1-6.

Verse four says, “Again, I considered all travail, and every right work that for this a man is envied of his neighbor. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.”

Hagenberg in his commentary on this passage talked about how gave a little verse that apparently was popular in his time. He said, “When any man has good fortune and good days, then envy is sure to rave and rage.”

So what’s being talked about here is a guy applies himself to his work. He’s prospered, but the only result of that is envy by his neighbor and destruction on the man because of that envy. I think that Hagenberg is correct in looking at these verses together as a whole. And Hagenberg comments that verse five and six shows two different approaches in relationship to the problem of verse four. This invidious proximity.

Remember I said that the term invidious proximity comes from a Vulgate translation of Ecclesiastes. Well, here’s the verse where it comes from. A man is envied of his neighbor. And the Vulgate in the Latin version of that, it says invidia proxima, envied of neighbor. And so invidious proximity comes from this specific verse, that term in our language today.

And in relationship to this envy that the neighbor exerts against us, some people and cultures have done this in the past. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. Some people may want to just go into complete slothfulness to avoid that envy. And so in order to avoid envy, we may be tempted to throw ourselves into the arms of inactivity or sloth to avoid the envy of other people.

And verse 5 tells us that’s not a good idea. “The fool folded his hands together and eated his own flesh.” That’s an improper response to envy.

Verse six says that you should be satisfied. You should work with one hand and not with two. “Better is an handful with quietness than both hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.”

And there seems to be here in the thinking of Hagenberg and I think he’s probably correct a warning to people that if you try to accomplish too much and you try to accumulate to yourself too many gains and prosperity and particularly material wealth, you may well end up with a life full of travail and suffering because the envious neighbor you have is going to strike out against you.

And so there’s contentment essentially. Hard work is taught by these verses in response to envy of our neighbors. Don’t give up on that. But also a contentment to realize that to strive too hard for things could lead to a life of trouble.

Now the relation to the bigger context for verse four is verses 1 through 3 as well. And it is important to notice here that certainly I think that the author is speaking somewhat using hyperbole. He says it’s better if people had never lived. It’d better to be dead than live this way. But it’d be better yet, of course, never even been born into such a situation as what he’s going to hear described. This envy of the neighbor against all goodness that people perform.

Now, he’s using hyperbole, but it’s an important point and a real message here that we have to strike home in us is the misery again that envy wreaks upon a man and upon a society as well. Terrible havoc to the point of it would be better almost not to have even lived than to live in a situation like that. And if you watch that movie, those two French movies I mentioned, you’ll see maybe why that could be accurately applied to those movies as well.

Matthew Henry in commenting on Ecclesiastes 4 in this particular portion says that for every right work by applying himself to his own proper business and managing it by all the rules of equity and fair dealing. Yet for this he is envied of his neighbor and the more for the reputation he has gotten by his honesty. It just stirs up the envy even more—the fact that he does through hard work and honesty.

Matthew Henry says that let us behave ever so cautiously. We cannot escape envy. Therefore, we must expect our praise from God and not from men. So here in this part of the wisdom literature in Ecclesiastes, we see the pervasiveness of envy. Again, the destructive reality of what envy is and what it can do to you and society. And it also encourages us to what we can do in response to that. Continue to work, but expect envy nonetheless. And as Matthew Henry said, rely for praise coming from God and not from your neighbor. He is going to envy you for what you’ve done. Right.

Moving on to the book of James. James chapter 3. I won’t spend much time on this. Richard preached two sermons on this portion of scripture last year and you might want to go back and listen to those. But remember Richard gave us this excellent kind of things to hang this passages on: wisdom from above, wisdom from below using the words from the text itself. These kind of organize the passages in James chapter 3.

James chapter 3:14 says, “If you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not and lie not against the truth. This wisdom sendeth not from above, but as earthly, sensual, devilish.”

It’s wisdom from below. So wisdom from below, devilish wisdom is characterized as having bitter envy and strife. And remember we talked about how Milton talked about Satan being envious of Christ and envy is a sin. And so you can see where envy is characterized by James in the third chapter as coming from below, from the satanic pit as it were of hell itself.

And then verse 16 says, “Whereas envying and strife is there’s confusion in every evil work.” All these blackberry vines go out to hurt people coming from that one stock of envy and strife.

James 3 says on the other hand in verse 17, “the wisdom that’s from above is first pure and then peaceable. Apart from envying and strifeful, it’s pure and peaceable. It’s content with God’s order. It affirms his moral order and God’s right to dispense his good gifts how he sees fit.”

And the purity then leads to peacefulness. So, we’ve got wisdom from above, wisdom from below. Envy comes from below, and opposition to the purity and peace that’s produced by a lack of envy and the purity of heart that’s admonished to us in verse 17.

Later in James chapter 5, he warns us, “Don’t complain against one another that you may not be judged. The judge is right at the door.” After warning the people from a wisdom perspective that envy is wisdom from below and not above, he then warns them eschatologically in James 5:9 that envy has its judgment and the judge is right at the door. When you start to be tempted to go envious, think of the wisdom of not doing that and then think of the fact that God’s judgment’s at the door. And so turn yourself around.

Okay. Now, let’s talk about applying this to our world around us. We’ve done it a lot along the way. But now, let’s do it in a little more detail. First, we’re going to talk about three things: envy and egalitarianism, envy and revolution, envy and slander, and then we’ll finally look at the cures to envy as the fourth point of this application.

So, first three relationships: envy to egalitarianism, revolution and slander.

First: egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is a big word according to Schlosberg in Idols for Destruction. It’s really the French pronunciation or the French word. A better English word would be equalitarianism. It has the idea that everybody should be equal. You know, one of the most hackneyed political phrases that we hear time and time again in the media today is one man, one vote. That’s a symptom of egalitarianism or equalitarianism. One man or one woman. I guess today would be the slogan: one man, one woman, one vote. And I guess if we’re talking about Nicaragua’s election, it’d be one boy or one girl, one vote since the voting age in Nicaragua is something like 16 or 18 or something like that.

Now, we live in the land of equality. And it’s very important to recognize that what’s happened here is a movement from the perception at the beginning of the founding of our country of equality of justice, equality of rights before the law, that being transmitted into equality of everything and an equality of results today.

“All men are created equal.” It says the Declaration of Independence. And depending on how you want to read that phrase and why it was put in, the right way to think of that is that all men are created equal before God’s bar of justice. Equal justice as of course taught by the Old Testament and New Testament and equal rights to come to the bar of justice as it were and that man is created equal in that sense before God.

But today that phrase has become twisted to say that all men are equal in fact in all areas and that increasingly is what egalitarianism is all about. Herbert Schlosberg in his wonderful book, Idols for Destruction, commented very astutely in that book that equality of opportunity guarantees inequality of results because people aren’t equal. We don’t have equal giftings. We don’t have equal giftings from God and we don’t have equal perseverance to do what’s right and avoid doing what’s wrong. People aren’t equal. So if you guarantee equality of opportunity, that is going to absolutely ensure inequality of results.

Okay? And the result of that today is that as equality of opportunity has been promulgated in the political arena for a number of years now without equality of results—and it couldn’t get equality of results—now the whole political line is changing to one of equality of results. And so for instance last week in Portland I don’t know how it ever came out but apparently they were having different test scores to be able to become a policeman in Portland whether you were a white man or a minority or a woman. They didn’t want equality of opportunity anymore; they want equality of results.

And egalitarianism is not content with equality of opportunity or equality of justice. It essentially wants to say that we should have equality of results in all of our lives. It wants everything equaled out. The point is that equality of results is not an extension of equality as it was known to our founding fathers of this country. It is in diametric opposition to what they taught. They taught equality of opportunity which would guarantee inequality of results.

And today’s politicians have done 180 out. They have moved revolutionarily so to speak toward equality of results and away from equality of opportunity.

Now I have some quotes I wanted to read from a book called The Seven Deadly Sins Today by Henry Fairley as we consider this.

Okay. Fairley quotes in this book from a man named William May. William May said that we live in a society that perhaps as much as any other has pitted equals against equals in this idea of egalitarianism, this idea of competition or whatnot. But Fairley, I think correctly corrects May’s statement. He says what we really have in this society is not a society that pits equals against equals. It pits unequals against unequals and then tells them the result should be equal.

Okay? And so you take somebody who is not equally fitted through his giftings or whatever, have him go on a track to get a position as a policeman or some other thing against somebody that he is not equal to. And yet you tell them that the end result should be that we all come out at the same place.

Fairley says that we—let’s see—he says to pit unequals against unequals as if they are equals is to make a breeding ground for envy. Envy comes from comparisons and it comes from impotence. Remember we looked at that many times and when you compare unequals with equals you guarantee the impotence of them to be equal and so it’s really a breeding ground for envy.

One of the ways in which this is accomplished is the idea of self-expression. Children today are taught to express themselves in any way they see fit. They’re encouraged from their very youngest days to think they can be anything. And if they feel like being a painter or an artist rather, whether or not they have the gifting for that particular calling is somehow beside the point. They if they’re encouraged to express themselves and to think that if they want to be an artist, they can be an artist.

But the point is that God may not have gifted that particular child to become an artist. It isn’t true. They can’t be anything they want to be. You can’t tell a kid who is 5’3″, a boy, that eventually if he wants to and applies himself, he can be a center in the NBA. It’s not going to happen. Now, that’s real obvious to us. But some of these other things aren’t quite so obvious about encouraging a child to just think up whatever he wants to be, aim for that thing, and then only to realize after years that he never was gifted to do it at all. That’s terrible.

But even more terrible is the situation we have in this country where that scenario is played out and once the person gets there, we pass laws so that he can do that thing even if he’s not gifted for it. I mean, it’s only a matter of time, I suppose, before that boy who’s 5’3″ is guaranteed a particular part on a basketball team. Maybe, you know, every NBA team will have to play a child who’s only who’s under six or an adult who’s under six foot at center so many minutes in view of this equality or egalitarianism we’re talking about.

You see, it’s not bad enough the child ends up frustrated. Society then moves through regulations and bureaucracies to level out results mandatorily by the imposition of laws and regulations.

So the idea of self-expression. Christian radio—it isn’t quite so bad today, I don’t think, but in the last half a dozen or dozen years, the idea of the great potential movement, you know, you could turn on the radio there for a while and every other show is about how you can be anything you want to be. And if you’re stuck in some job you’re not particularly enamored of anymore and it’s kind of boring, well, maybe you should be an author or maybe you should be a screenwriter or something. There was this constant barrage in the advertising and in the shows themselves preaching to get people to be discontent with the calling that God had given them to because it wasn’t as glamorous as another calling for which they are totally unfit.

And so this sort of thinking all begins with this idea we should have equality of results out there. A misapplication of that statement from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal ends up creating, as Fairley says, it’s just a breeding ground for envy because people really aren’t equal and even though the 5’2″ guy may be able to play in the NBA, he’s never going to play that position like a 6’10” center could. He’s going to hate that. He’s going to be tied by his impotence into this rage of envy and he’ll probably move then to somehow destroy the taller player.

So that’s kind of what’s going on in our culture. Dorothy Sayers, and we’ve quoted her before in this, but she says that envy begins by asking, “Why shouldn’t I enjoy what others enjoy?” And she said, “It ends by demanding why should others enjoy what I may not?” Envy is the great leveler, she said. And if it can’t level things up, then it levels things down.

It starts in this culture with this promoting of egalitarianism, saying that everybody can be president. And then if everybody can’t be present then nobody can be that thing. And that’s the way the society is moving now as it moves from covetousness and self-expression to envy. And as a result of this our egalitarian and envy-ridden society as a result just can’t wait for someone to fall. A politician, somebody a big person, a politician, a preacher, a rich person. Society just waits out there for something like that to happen and then they attack because this envy is built into our society.

Now, and in the case of the politician, we had John Tower, a man who seemed eminently qualified to do a job and yet envious people tore him down. Jimmy Bakker was the preacher. And any other preachers, as soon as you see a preacher who enters into that kind of sin, society just reacts violently against them. Now, Jim Bakker is an anathema to the Christian faith, don’t get me wrong. And what McAuliff makes some very astute statements about him in the latest Chalcedon Report, but he did nothing to warrant a 46-year jail term as opposed to people that routinely in Oregon go to prison for two or three or five years for murder or rape.

I mean, what’s the motivating factor here? The motivating factor is the judge is epitomizing the society that envies those that they can’t attain to positions of wealth or authority like they have and wishes then to destroy them. And I mentioned the Leona Helmsley example earlier as well.

There’s a consuming desire to have everyone as unsuccessful as you are in a society where envy is bred through this rich soil of egalitarianism. That’s why gossip columns are so popular today. That’s why in the television shows now there are many of these gossip sort of shows out there on all the major networks now because people want to know the dirt on some famous person. They want to be able to rip them down in their own understanding of your image of them at any event.

Now, this is a tendency for us as well. When you get to the age where most of us are in this church, 30, 35, 40 years old, the differences between us and our peers are becoming more and more fine drawn, more and more clearly drawn to us. So, in other words, if you’ve got a classroom full of six-year-olds or ten year olds and they’re all told you can all do this, that, and the other thing, it’s pretty easy to convince them into believing that. But when you get to our age, we know we’re not going to be successful as somebody else. Perhaps Reverend Rushdoony, he said they used to have this poem that all school kids were taught. I think it went if you’re not strong at 20, handsome at 30, rich at 40, or wise at 50, you never will be.

And most of us are, we passed some of those milestones. And we know now that we’re not going to be for some of us handsome or rich or strong. And so the temptation to envy those people that are handsome, rich, and strong begins to well up in us. And you’ve got to know that and you got to take account for that, particularly in a culture that spread this egalitarianism.

Now, this phenomena, which we’ve been talking about, while being somewhat underreported in the media, is certainly not overlooked by the power brokers of our day. Politics today is largely the result of the application of the principle to secure political office. When you run for office you don’t have to have a program. You hear all this whining about negative ads on the TV today. The fact is negative campaigning has always been the way the campaigns have worked in this country for the last hundred years and it’s an attempt many times it becomes the attempt to stir up envy in the part of the people against what the other guy will do for the rich or what the other guy will do for the businessman that you can’t participate in that sort of thing. And so politics is largely driven.

The next time you see a race being developed, and we’ll see many, is this next election year, look for this. Look for the way that envy is whipped up by these politicians in an effort to secure political office. Most votes are votes against somebody. If you’ve got an incumbent, you know, the only way to get him out of office is for him to be looked bad somehow. And so envy attempts to do that by stirring up that he gives advantages to particular people. And you won’t get those advantages and so in your envy you want to rip him down.

Politics today is largely the result of a belief as well that if all things were made equal then envy wouldn’t exist. That’s the lie out there that’s commonly promulgated. In other words, the reason we have crime in the streets today is not because people choose to sin. It’s not then to be punished. It’s because there’s not equality of opportunity and these guys grow up really just subject to their environment. The idea is that if everything was equaled out then this poor guy wouldn’t want what this rich guy has and therefore he wouldn’t steal and there’d be peace in society.

The idea of entitlements today in welfare programs is an application of this in the political arena. Food is now a right to people. These welfare programs are no longer seen as welfare or as altruism or as gifts to people. No, they’re as entitlements because society says that you’re entitled to the same result that the guy next to you on the block has, not just the same opportunity or the same justice, the same results. And so you’re entitled to a certain level of food. Now, it may start low, but if you’re entitled to some amount of food and some amount of housing, then why should the other guy next to you have any more than you do?

If everything really is, if we’re all equal, let’s equal everything out. And that’s the way the society tends more and more as it moves down this line.

Some people have referred to this as the de Tocqueville effect. de Tocqueville visited America 150 years ago and he predicted then that as a society erases social distinctions and moves toward a leveling of income, the demand for equality is not satisfied, it is intensified.

Okay. He said that as society tries to level out these differences and as America does, he said this 150 years ago, tries to level out income, the demand for equality isn’t satisfied. It is intensified. It gets worse. Why is that? A lot of guys don’t know why that is. You should know now why that is. Because remember we said that envy is invidious proximity. It’s based on perceptions of differences between yourself and your neighbor. And though the economic differences may be obliterated, there still may be some there to cause you to be envious. And if the economic differences are obliterated, there’s some other difference with your neighbor that you’re going to focus on instead. A societal difference, a class difference.

Now, this is all obvious—has tremendous ramifications for the Christian faith because the Christian faces insurmountable differences between the believer and the non-believer. Totally different lifestyles, totally different callings, not calling I suppose, totally different realities. One person is cursed, another person is blessed. But society cannot bear that kind of thought.

Well, anyway, de Tocqueville predicted it. It’s coming the past. There’s an excellent book that talks about this that Helmut spends some time on in his book called Envy. This book was written by a man named L.P. Hartley in 1960. The book was called Facial Justice. And by the way, the subtitle under Facial Justice quoted from the book of James, the quote we read a couple of weeks ago: “for the spirit of man lusteth to envy,” St. James.

This book is a fictional work. It’s set after World War II. A dictator has come to the throne, so to speak. The dictator believes that all societal ills are caused by envy. And envy is one of the two ewords—the two big ewords—that in this society. The two ewords are equality and envy. One is a good eword—that’s equality. One is a bad eword. That’s envy. But envy isn’t bad when you do it. The envier isn’t punished. It’s the one who causes somebody else to envy that is punished in the book Facial Justice.

And so after this dictator takes over to wipe out envy. He tries to level people economically. Does away with all economic distinctions. Does away with all societal distinctions. But then the dictator realizes that people now are envying each other for their speech. And so the government then passes regulations on speech and they get involved in having everybody speak exactly the same way with exactly the same accent so that people don’t envy one another.

Well, that works for a while, but that doesn’t take care of the problem either because now people look at each other and notice that some people are more beautiful than I am. And so, you guessed it, the name of the book Facial Justice comes from the fact that the last thing they do is they implement mandatory plastic surgery. If you got an alpha face, you got to have it…

[Transcript ends at this point]