For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. (Psalm 73:3 KJV)
Meaning
“The foolish” is the general title of all the wicked: they are beyond all others fools. In this context, being envious at the foolish means being envious of the wicked – especially the prosperous wicked person.
William Crouch
I was envious at the foolish, etc. If we consider with ourselves how unlikely a thing it is to grow big with riches, and withal to enter through the eye of a needle, how unusual a thing it is to be emparadised in this life and yet enthroned in that to come, it will afford us matter of comfort if we are piously improsperous as well as of terror if we are prosperously impious.
We should be taught by the precept of the prophet David not to fret ourselves because of evildoers, nor to be envious against the workers of iniquity; for “The prosperity of fools shall but destroy them,” saith Solomon, and “the candle of the wicked shall be put out.” Pr 24:1-2, Pr 24:19-20. Prosperity it seems is a dangerous weapon, and none but the innocent should dare to use it. The psalmist himself, before he thought upon this, began to envy the prosperity of wicked men. William Crouch, in “The Enormous Sin of Covetousness detected.” 1708.
John Willison
I was envious at the foolish. Who would envy a malefactor’s going up a high ladder, and being mounted above the rest of the people, when it is only for a little, and in order to his being turned over and hanged? That is just the case of wicked men who are mounted up high in prosperity; for it is so only that they may be cast down deeper into destruction. It would be a brutish thing to envy an ox his high and sweet pasture, when he is only thereby fitted for the day of slaughter. Who would have envied the beasts of old the garlands and ribbons with which the heathen adorned them when they went to be sacrificed?
These external ornaments of health, wealth, pleasure, and preferments, wherewith wicked men are endowed, cannot make their state happy, nor change their natures for the better. Whatever appearance these things make in the eyes of the world, they are but like a noisome dunghill covered with scarlet, as vile and loathsome in God’s sight as ever. How quickly is the beauty of earthly things blasted? “The triumphing of the wicked is short.” Job 20:5. They live in pleasures on the earth for a while, but God “sets them in slippery places,” from whence they soon slide into perpetual pain and anguish. They have a short time of mirth, but they shall have an eternity of mourning.
John Calvin
For I was envious at the foolish. The sneering jest of Dionysius the younger, a tyrant of Sicily, when, after having robbed the temple of Syracuse, he had a prosperous voyage with the plunder, is well known. “See you not,” says he to those who were with him, “how the gods favour the sacrilegious?” In the same way, the prosperity of the wicked is taken as an encouragement to commit sin; for we are ready to imagine that, since God grants them so much of the good things of this life, they are the objects of his approbation and favour. We see how their prosperous condition wounded David to the heart, leading him almost to think that there was nothing better for him than to join himself to their company, and to follow their course of life.