When Envy Enters the Sanctuary: What This Changes Between Us

The greeting line after the last song is where the second set of books opens. Someone's child got named.

Someone's marriage looks easy from row four. Someone's ministry got thanked from the platform. The person who smiled and said God is good is already doing math on the way to the coffee table. Envy in a church rarely announces itself as envy. It sounds like silence toward the person God just honored.

Psalm 73 was written by a worship leader who almost lost his footing on those closed books. Asaph could recite the right sentence about God's goodness. Then he looked at the arrogant and the math in his head started lying. The psalm does not treat envy as a private mood that stays inside one chest. It treats envy as a way of seeing other people. Once that seeing enters the sanctuary, it changes what happens between us.

Preach this psalm as a scolding against jealousy and you will miss the people who already feel ashamed of noticing an unfair pew. Preach it as a promise that the envied will stumble by Friday and you will lie to a church that has to live with those people on Tuesday. Preach it as wisdom poetry that names a communal danger: envy distorts the books we keep on one another, and only God's presence tells the truth about the account.

Text

Hear Psalm 73:1-28, from the World English Bible: "Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet were almost gone. My steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no struggles in their death, but their strength is firm. They are free from burdens of men, neither are they plagued like other men. Therefore pride is like a chain around their neck. Violence covers them like a garment. Their eyes bulge with fat. Their minds pass the limits of conceit. They scoff and speak with malice. In arrogance, they threaten oppression. They have set their mouth in the heavens. Their tongue walks through the earth. Therefore their people return to them, and they drink up waters of abundance.