And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business, and I want to thank you for joining me today. This particular episode is the 13th of a 30 part series on my book biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders. He sangs from Proverbs. And today we’re going to be looking at the Proverb that talks about making sure that we don’t envy the wicked.
And this is actually mentioned three times in this section of Scripture, so it’s going to come from Proverbs chapter 23, verses 17 and 18, and then again from chapter 24, verses one and two, and finally in the same chapter 24, verses 19 and 20. But before we get started, I just want to suggest that not only that you pick up my book biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders, but that you also pick up my book, a Christian Theology of Business Ownership an Introduction for Christian Entrepreneurs and what the Bible Says About Owning a Business. That book is really intended for business owners to help business owners understand what the Bible says. What does the Bible say about owning a business? I think business owners have a unique stewardship responsibility before the Lord, and so they should invest themselves in learning to understand what the Bible actually says about their role as a business owner.
And then finally, the latest book that I’ve just recently published, it’s titled Working for a Difficult Boss lessons from the Life of Daniel. Here I wrote for the mid and upper level manager in for profit businesses, but also in ministries to talk about how you handle yourself if you have a really difficult boss. A boss that basically is just a horse’s backside, right? And so if you want to learn from Daniel, who served a number of difficult kings at the very upper levels of Babylon and yet was effective for God and produced an excellent work product, then this book is for you. Working for a Difficult Boss lessons from the Life of Daniel So let’s go ahead and get started here.
Let’s read the Scriptures, proverbs 20 317 and 18, do not let your heart envy sinners, instead always fear the Lord, for then you will have a future and your hope will never fade. In Proverbs 20 419 and 20, the sage writes, do not fret because of evildoers or be envious of the wicked, for the evildoer has no future hope, and the lamp of the wicked will be snuffed out. And then finally, in the same chapter, verses one and two, do not envy evil men do not desire to be with them, for their hearts talk of violence and their lips speak of mischief. So we have the sage saying basically the same thing in several ways here. First of all, the sage is saying that we do not want to envy evildoers, nor should we worry about them.
That’s really the kind of the two core messages here. And the reason that we don’t envy them and we don’t worry about them is because their future is uncertain and our futures as followers of Yahweh, followers of God, our future is certain. We know where we’re going to go, and we know who wins at the end. That’s why we don’t worry about them. And really we don’t envy them.
These three passages in Proverbs do remind me of the first eleven verses of Psalm chapter 37 fret not yourself because of evil doers. Do not be envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and befriend the faithless. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord and trust in Him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the noonday. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him. Fret not yourself over the One who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices. Refrain from anger and forsake wrath.
Fret not yourself. It tends only to evil, for the evildoers will be cut off. But those who wait for the Lord will inherit the land in just a little while. The wicked will be no more. Though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.
But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace. When you kind of look at all of these texts and you pull them together, there’s a pretty good summation here. First of all, we are to trust in the Lord and do good, and we are to take time to befriend the faithless. In other words, make friends of those who are doing evil. We are to delight ourselves in the Lord, commit our ways to Him, and be still before Him.
Let’s not be agitated before the Lord, wondering when he’s going to act, but let’s be still. And I think the idea of contentment is also there. Let’s wait patiently for the Lord, and let’s not get angry. Let’s not be provoked to wrath. In fact, let’s forsake wrath and forsake anger, even when the evil people are successful in what they do, and they’re successful in committing evil and injuring other people.
Instead, we are reminded in the Psalms that fretting leads only to evil, that we will inherit the land and that we will live in abundant peace. Now, I have to admit that some of this is a little bit difficult to hear because it goes against our sense of justice, and it goes against how we naturally want to respond to evil when it is around us. That phrase do not fret doesn’t mean some minor worry. Don’t concern yourself. What it really means is do not get yourself infuriated over evildoers.
It’s kind of this hot anger that really is behind the Hebrew word there. Do not get burned up emotionally. Do not make yourself hot. Don’t let it consume you. And get to the point where you’re just so angry that it’s just consuming you.
Don’t let the evildoers and their evil deeds and their success at being evil cause you to be hot with anger or to be incredibly consumed by what they are doing and how they are succeeding. Do not work yourself into a state of passionate anger because of the actions and the influences of those who do evil. And this is going to be hard sometimes because evil people are sometimes successful at committing evil and it hurts other people and it hurts the innocent and it violates our sense of justice and we want to step in and take care of things, right? God says, yeah, there’s a place for us to do that, but don’t let it get you to the place where you’re highly angry and you’re consumed by it. That is not where God wants us to be.
Instead, what God is suggesting in these passages is that we trade our anger and envy for a healthy fear of God and for a certain future, and you’re going to go, well then how does that help the cause of justice? Well, hang on, let’s continue to look at this. Look, we may rightly discern that the evil’s prosperity is undeserved and that our righteous anger is an appropriate response to a violation of one’s sense of justice. Indeed, there are a lot of people out there who are very evil, who sin with impunity. And this is the assumption that we sometimes arrive at, that they are more successful in worldly terms than those who follow God.
And their success comes sometimes because of their sin and sometimes despite their sin. We still have to remember that we are being taught here that the Lord’s righteous indignation is also kindled. I don’t have the verses here, but I’ll refer you to Exodus 22, verse 24, Numbers 32, 2nd Samuel six, and that we must not sin in our anger. That’s ephesians 426. So yes, injustice is going to make us angry and we’re going to envy, and sometimes we’re going to envy what the unrighteous have, and sometimes we’re going to be very mad at them.
But at the same time, we have to remember that God’s righteous anger and his indignation is also kindled by their actions, and we should not let the sun go down on our anger. Okay? So as one scholar said, or wrote about this passage in these passages in Proverbs, he said, the burning envy of the wicked success is foolish because their prosperity is vapid. In other words, it’s going to go away very soon. Their ability to harm other people is going to go away very soon.
So envying their success is not something we should do and becoming highly angry to the point where it consumes us about their evil and the injustices that they are committing. We can’t let ourselves get there. So our temptation here is to think that the world’s system of sin offers more than our future hope. So when the unrighteous are successful because of or in spite of their sin, our temptation here is to think that the world system offers more than our future hope. But there’s another temptation here that I think is even more alluring.
And it’s this, is that if we imitate the wicked, if we do what they do, then we can have it all. We can have all of God, and yet we can have all that this world has to offer. If the righteous can or if the wicked can have all of these things that the world offers in spite of their sin, and sometimes, like I said, despite their sins, then can we have that too? US Christians, us followers of Yahweh, why can’t we have that? And so there is this temptation for us to live with 1ft in the Jesus camp and 1ft in the world’s camp and to try to have the best of both worlds, to have all of God and yet to have all of the world.
But the Bible warns against this. It says you’re going to have to choose between God and the world. Look at one John, chapter two, verses 15 through 17. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, for all that is in the world.
And here he describes it the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life, those things are not from the Father, but they’re from the world. And the world is passing away along with all of its desires. But whoever does the will of God abides forever. And so what we’re really faced with here is this notion that we should not be trying to have all that God offers and all that the world offers. At the same time, we’re going to have to choose between God and the world.
Even though there are times when the evil are highly prosperous and they seem to have it all. They seem to have great lives and these beautiful homes and lots of money, and the guys get all the hot girls and the hot girls get all the hot guys, and they just seemingly have no problems.
Let’s not be envious of that when they commit injustices and harm other people. Let’s not let our anger get to the place where it totally consumes us. And instead, let’s set those aside and say, I’m going to choose God and his ways. I’m going to recognize that God will make sure that they don’t prosper in the long run and that I understand that God’s righteous anger is kindled by their sin and that I just need to let God act in his own time.
Now, this whole idea of being envious, that’s what this longer. This episode is a little bit longer than most. That’s what this that’s what this episode is about. It’s about, you know, not being envious of the wicked. Envy is really the enemy of contentment.
I define contentment as wanting what you already have. Envy is desiring what you don’t have but yet what somebody else has. And it’s always based on comparisons. We look at the seemingly effortless and fulfilled lives of the pagans and we want what they have. We want to do what they do.
We compare our situation to theirs. And frankly, if we were to be honest, we find God’s provision lacking. God, you just haven’t given me enough. You haven’t given me what I deserve. I’ve worked really hard and I haven’t been given what other people have been given.
And so we’re envious and we’re also not content with what God has given us. So in kind of a paradoxical way we have a simultaneous admiration for the evil and a resentment for what they have. We want what they have and yet we might actually resent them for having it not because they have it, but because we don’t have it. The sage comes in through these verses in Proverbs and it reminds us that such comparisons are senseless because we’re focused entirely on the present and not on the future. We’re focused on the temporal, not on the eternal.
Our understanding of our present situation is not informed by our future hope and their inevitable demise. But once we take the future into account once we realize that the pagans have no future hope but we do. Once we look up and look beyond the present and we understand that what the wicked have today, what the evildoers have today is their reward and that’s it and then we realize that our reward for being faithful to God is in the future, not the present, then I think we’ll be okay. I think we’ll have a more balanced view. Our comparisons need to include an eternal perspective here, not just a temporal here in the now perspective, right?
What we don’t see today is the future rewards that we will have. We don’t really even understand them. When I read through the rewards that those who are faithful to God are given in Revelation chapter two, three and four I will tell you I don’t understand those rewards but they must be highly valuable or God wouldn’t have put them in the scriptures to say hey, this should motivate you to stay faithful to me. We are not fair to ourselves, my friend, and hear me on this. When our comparisons about ourselves versus those who are evil and are highly successful do not include an eternal perspective.
We are not being fair to ourselves when our comparisons against those who do evil and cause injustice do not include God’s kindled anger and do not include their future demise and that whatever gain they get by injuring other people, that is all the reward they’re going to ever get from that. When we don’t have that future and that eternal perspective, we are not being fair to ourselves and we’re not being fair to the situation. So rightly so the sage points us to the future. So, in conclusion, in the short run, trusting God can be demanding and may even seem preposterous, given our present circumstances. But by fixing our eyes on Jesus and our future hope, we can be confident that in this life, we’ll never lack for anything.
And in this life and after this life, we will enjoy his presence for an eternity. Plus we will enjoy whatever treasures we have stored up for ourselves in heaven. So you know what? Let’s not envy those who have more than us. That’s their reward and that’s all they’re ever going to have.
They have nothing in the future to look forward to. Let’s not get angry at God for his patience when the wicked prosper. God is God and he is incredibly patient sometimes. And we need to understand that God will deal with those people in the right way and at the right time. Instead, let’s focus on fearing the Lord and setting our eyes on our future hope, our hope that will not be cut off.
In our next episode, we’re going to be in three verses proverbs 20, 319, 20 and 21. And we’re going to talk about kind of a difficult topic. Control your eating and your drinking. Thank you for joining me today. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business.
If you’d like to get a hold of me, just send me an email at bill@bibleandbusiness.com. I’d love to dialogue with you about what’s going on in your business or what’s going on on your project and team and see if I can’t pay it forward with you a little bit and see if I can’t be of help. But until we either talk by email or phone or until you come back, I just hope that you go out and make it a great day. Take care.