< Helaman 13 >
v. 1: And now it came to pass in the eighty and sixth year, the Nephites did still remain in wickedness, yea, in great wickedness, while the Lamanites did observe strictly to keep the commandments of God, according to the law of Moses.
The Lamanites, when taught the truth, are "firm and steadfast in the faith" (Helaman 15:8), while the Nephites, who had every advantage — scriptures, prophets, generations of witnesses — are chasing riches and rejecting prophets. The point in chapter 13 is that the Nephites' hearts are set on wealth, and their riches will become "slippery" and cursed. What is your heart set on?
The Lamanites, when taught the truth, are "firm and steadfast in the faith" (Helaman 15:8), while the Nephites, who had every advantage — scriptures, prophets, generations of witnesses — are chasing riches and rejecting prophets. The point in chapter 13 is that the Nephites' hearts are set on wealth, and their riches will become "slippery" and cursed. What is your heart set on?
v. 22: Ye do not remember the Lord your God in the things with which he hath blessed you, but ye do always remember your riches, not to thank the Lord your God for them; yea, your hearts are not drawn out unto the Lord, but they do swell with great pride, unto boasting, and unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities.
Remembering the wrong thing
The problem isn't having riches, it's the direction of memory and attention. They do remember — constantly — just the wrong object. The blessing displaced the giver of the blessing. And Samuel traces a chain from that one misplaced focus: forgetting God → pride → boasting → envy → strife → violence. It starts as an attention problem and ends as a social collapse.
Remembering the wrong thing
The problem isn't having riches, it's the direction of memory and attention. They do remember — constantly — just the wrong object. The blessing displaced the giver of the blessing. And Samuel traces a chain from that one misplaced focus: forgetting God → pride → boasting → envy → strife → violence. It starts as an attention problem and ends as a social collapse.
v. 22: Ye do not remember the Lord your God in the things with which he hath blessed you, but ye do always remember your riches, not to thank the Lord your God for them; yea, your hearts are not drawn out unto the Lord, but they do swell with great pride, unto boasting, and unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities.
Envy
Envy and boasting are the same disease viewed from opposite ends. Both are fundamentally comparative — they only exist in relation to other people. The boaster says "I have more than you"; the envier says "you have more than me, and I can't stand it." Neither one is actually about the thing itself; both are about relative position.
C.S. Lewis nailed this in Mere Christianity(the chapter "The Great Sin"), in a passage Benson quotes in "Beware of Pride": "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone."
Envy is what that same competitive impulse feels like when you're losing the comparison. Benson calls it "pride from the bottom looking up" — faultfinding, gossiping, coveting, and resentment of others' success being its symptoms, versus the "top looking down" versions like boasting and contempt. The common root is enmity: keeping score against your neighbor rather than being drawn out toward God.
There's a difference between the pang and the dwelling. Noticing someone's success and feeling a flash of "I wish that were me" is close to universal human experience — that's more like an involuntary signal than a settled sin. It can even be useful: sometimes that pang is just pointing at something you legitimately want and could work toward. Admiration and aspiration ("they did well, I want to grow like that") aren't pride at all.
It tips into the pride Benson describes when the feeling curdles into resentment — when their success starts to feel like your loss, when you find yourself hoping they stumble, minimizing what they did ("well, they had advantages"), or feeling diminished by their win even though it took nothing from you. That's the scorekeeping heart: their gain registers as your defeat only if you're measuring your worth against theirs. That's the enmity Benson identifies as pride's core.
Envy
Envy and boasting are the same disease viewed from opposite ends. Both are fundamentally comparative — they only exist in relation to other people. The boaster says "I have more than you"; the envier says "you have more than me, and I can't stand it." Neither one is actually about the thing itself; both are about relative position.
C.S. Lewis nailed this in Mere Christianity(the chapter "The Great Sin"), in a passage Benson quotes in "Beware of Pride": "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone."
Envy is what that same competitive impulse feels like when you're losing the comparison. Benson calls it "pride from the bottom looking up" — faultfinding, gossiping, coveting, and resentment of others' success being its symptoms, versus the "top looking down" versions like boasting and contempt. The common root is enmity: keeping score against your neighbor rather than being drawn out toward God.
There's a difference between the pang and the dwelling. Noticing someone's success and feeling a flash of "I wish that were me" is close to universal human experience — that's more like an involuntary signal than a settled sin. It can even be useful: sometimes that pang is just pointing at something you legitimately want and could work toward. Admiration and aspiration ("they did well, I want to grow like that") aren't pride at all.
It tips into the pride Benson describes when the feeling curdles into resentment — when their success starts to feel like your loss, when you find yourself hoping they stumble, minimizing what they did ("well, they had advantages"), or feeling diminished by their win even though it took nothing from you. That's the scorekeeping heart: their gain registers as your defeat only if you're measuring your worth against theirs. That's the enmity Benson identifies as pride's core.
v. 22: Ye do not remember the Lord your God in the things with which he hath blessed you, but ye do always remember your riches, not to thank the Lord your God for them; yea, your hearts are not drawn out unto the Lord, but they do swell with great pride, unto boasting, and unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities.
Envy: The gateway sin
Look at where envy sits in Samuel's sequence — it's not random ordering. The chain runs: hearts not drawn out to God → pride → boasting → swelling → envyings → strifes → malice → persecutions → murders.
Everything before envy is self-regarding. Boasting and "swelling" are inflation — obnoxious, but contained inside the proud man.
Everything after envy is other-harming: strife, malice, persecution, murder. Envy is the hinge. It's the precise moment pride stops being about elevating yourself and starts being about diminishing your neighbor. That's why it belongs in that company — it's the doorway the rest of the list walks through.
Scripture makes this causal link relentlessly. Cain and Abel. Joseph's brothers — "his brethren envied him" (Genesis 37:11), and within a chapter they're plotting murder. Saul eyeing David after the women's song (1 Samuel 18:8–9). And most pointedly, Pilate understood the crucifixion itself: "he knew that for envy they had delivered him" (Matthew 27:18; cf. Mark 15:10). The worst act in history gets diagnosed with one word, and the word is envy.
James gives you Samuel's list in miniature: "For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work" (James 3:16). Nearly the same pairing, same conclusion — envy and strife open the door to everything.
Why envy in particular is so corrosive:
It's the one sin that offers no pleasure. Gluttony, lust, greed at least deliver a counterfeit satisfaction. Envy delivers nothing but misery — it is, classically defined, sorrow at another's good. It punishes its host. Proverbs puts it bodily: "envy the rottenness of the bones" (14:30).
It also hides better than any other sin. Boasting is audible; everyone can see it. Envy disguises itself as fairness ("that's not right"), as discernment ("I'm just noticing their flaws"), even as humility. You can carry it for years without ever naming it.
And the relation to pride: Envy and boasting are one disease seen from two ends — both require a scoreboard, both are enmity. But here's the sharper point. Envy is proof that losing the comparison doesn't make you humble. The envious man is simultaneously lowly and proud. Which means humility was never about your position on the scoreboard — it's about walking away from the scoreboard entirely.
The Book of Mormon makes that explicit in its own definition of charity: "charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up" (Moroni 7:45). Both faces of pride negated in a single breath — don't look up with resentment, don't look down with contempt. And without charity, Moroni says, "ye are nothing" (7:46).
So envy is bad not merely as a private feeling, but because it's the exact inversion of the one thing that endures — and, per Samuel, the seed from which strife, malice, and murder actually grow.
Envy: The gateway sin
Look at where envy sits in Samuel's sequence — it's not random ordering. The chain runs: hearts not drawn out to God → pride → boasting → swelling → envyings → strifes → malice → persecutions → murders.
Everything before envy is self-regarding. Boasting and "swelling" are inflation — obnoxious, but contained inside the proud man.
Everything after envy is other-harming: strife, malice, persecution, murder. Envy is the hinge. It's the precise moment pride stops being about elevating yourself and starts being about diminishing your neighbor. That's why it belongs in that company — it's the doorway the rest of the list walks through.
Scripture makes this causal link relentlessly. Cain and Abel. Joseph's brothers — "his brethren envied him" (Genesis 37:11), and within a chapter they're plotting murder. Saul eyeing David after the women's song (1 Samuel 18:8–9). And most pointedly, Pilate understood the crucifixion itself: "he knew that for envy they had delivered him" (Matthew 27:18; cf. Mark 15:10). The worst act in history gets diagnosed with one word, and the word is envy.
James gives you Samuel's list in miniature: "For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work" (James 3:16). Nearly the same pairing, same conclusion — envy and strife open the door to everything.
Why envy in particular is so corrosive:
It's the one sin that offers no pleasure. Gluttony, lust, greed at least deliver a counterfeit satisfaction. Envy delivers nothing but misery — it is, classically defined, sorrow at another's good. It punishes its host. Proverbs puts it bodily: "envy the rottenness of the bones" (14:30).
It also hides better than any other sin. Boasting is audible; everyone can see it. Envy disguises itself as fairness ("that's not right"), as discernment ("I'm just noticing their flaws"), even as humility. You can carry it for years without ever naming it.
And the relation to pride: Envy and boasting are one disease seen from two ends — both require a scoreboard, both are enmity. But here's the sharper point. Envy is proof that losing the comparison doesn't make you humble. The envious man is simultaneously lowly and proud. Which means humility was never about your position on the scoreboard — it's about walking away from the scoreboard entirely.
The Book of Mormon makes that explicit in its own definition of charity: "charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up" (Moroni 7:45). Both faces of pride negated in a single breath — don't look up with resentment, don't look down with contempt. And without charity, Moroni says, "ye are nothing" (7:46).
So envy is bad not merely as a private feeling, but because it's the exact inversion of the one thing that endures — and, per Samuel, the seed from which strife, malice, and murder actually grow.
v. 22: Ye do not remember the Lord your God in the things with which he hath blessed you, but ye do always remember your riches, not to thank the Lord your God for them; yea, your hearts are not drawn out unto the Lord, but they do swell with great pride, unto boasting, and unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities.
Boasting
Boasting is pride made audible.
In Samuel's chain in 13:22, pride comes first ("hearts... swell with great pride") and boasting is its first symptom, the point where the inward condition goes public.
Though it's worth noting the reverse doesn't hold: you can be full of pride without ever boasting. The quieter forms — comparing, resenting, needing to be above someone — don't require saying a word. That's the core of Ezra Taft Benson's "Beware of Pride" (April 1989 General Conference), which leans heavily on Helaman: "The central feature of pride is enmity... Pride is essentially competitive in nature."
Boasting is just the loudest version; envying and strife (the next items in Samuel's list) are the same root wearing different clothes.
Boasting
Boasting is pride made audible.
In Samuel's chain in 13:22, pride comes first ("hearts... swell with great pride") and boasting is its first symptom, the point where the inward condition goes public.
Though it's worth noting the reverse doesn't hold: you can be full of pride without ever boasting. The quieter forms — comparing, resenting, needing to be above someone — don't require saying a word. That's the core of Ezra Taft Benson's "Beware of Pride" (April 1989 General Conference), which leans heavily on Helaman: "The central feature of pride is enmity... Pride is essentially competitive in nature."
Boasting is just the loudest version; envying and strife (the next items in Samuel's list) are the same root wearing different clothes.
v. 22: Ye do not remember the Lord your God in the things with which he hath blessed you, but ye do always remember your riches, not to thank the Lord your God for them; yea, your hearts are not drawn out unto the Lord, but they do swell with great pride, unto boasting, and unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities.
Social Media and Envy
The structural features that make it envy-optimized:
Krasnova et al. (2013), "Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction?" — 584 users across two studies. Over a third reported negative feelings from use, with envy the dominant driver. The top triggers were others' travel, relationships, and professional success. The pathway they identified: passive following → envy → reduced life satisfaction.
The most theologically interesting finding is what people do about it. Krasnova found the most common coping response wasn't withdrawal — it was further self-promotion. Envious users post more impressive content, which triggers envy in their audience, who then self-promote in turn. That's Samuel's "boasting" and "envyings" locked into a mechanized feedback loop.
Verduyn and colleagues established the causal direction: passive use predicted declines in well-being, active use did not, and the effect was fully mediated by envy — with lagged analyses supporting a causal path. A 2023 Scientific Reportspaper triangulated this across correlational (N=482), experimental (N=185), and experimental-diary (N=168) designs, again with envy as the mediator.
For the strongest causal evidence, Allcott et al. (2020, American Economic Review) ran an RCT paying 2,743 users to deactivate Facebook for four weeks: subjective well-being increased, along with more offline time with family and friends. A 2024 replication scaled it to ~20,000 Facebook and 15,000 Instagram users with similar though somewhat smaller effects.
Scientific Truth: "Social media is a meaningful contributor to comparison-driven unhappiness" is well supported;.
Back to Helaman 13:22. Samuel's charge was that they didn't remember God but "always remembered" their riches. Social media is, functionally, a machine for always remembering other people's riches — hours a day, thousands of comparison targets, algorithmically curated for maximum enviability. The diagnosis is 2,000 years old; the delivery system got an upgrade.
Social Media and Envy
The structural features that make it envy-optimized:
- Asymmetric information. You compare your unedited interior life against everyone else's curated exterior. Chou and Edge titled their 2012 study precisely this: "They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am." You know your own disappointments; you see only their highlights.
- Unbounded scale. The comparison set is now thousands of people plus professional influencers and celebrities, algorithmically sorted so the most enviable content surfaces most.
- Quantification. Likes, followers, and views are literal scoreboards. Lewis said pride is about "having more of it than the next man" — social media supplies the number.
- Passivity. Scrolling is consumption without reciprocity, which turns out to be the mechanism that matters most.
Krasnova et al. (2013), "Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction?" — 584 users across two studies. Over a third reported negative feelings from use, with envy the dominant driver. The top triggers were others' travel, relationships, and professional success. The pathway they identified: passive following → envy → reduced life satisfaction.
The most theologically interesting finding is what people do about it. Krasnova found the most common coping response wasn't withdrawal — it was further self-promotion. Envious users post more impressive content, which triggers envy in their audience, who then self-promote in turn. That's Samuel's "boasting" and "envyings" locked into a mechanized feedback loop.
Verduyn and colleagues established the causal direction: passive use predicted declines in well-being, active use did not, and the effect was fully mediated by envy — with lagged analyses supporting a causal path. A 2023 Scientific Reportspaper triangulated this across correlational (N=482), experimental (N=185), and experimental-diary (N=168) designs, again with envy as the mediator.
For the strongest causal evidence, Allcott et al. (2020, American Economic Review) ran an RCT paying 2,743 users to deactivate Facebook for four weeks: subjective well-being increased, along with more offline time with family and friends. A 2024 replication scaled it to ~20,000 Facebook and 15,000 Instagram users with similar though somewhat smaller effects.
Scientific Truth: "Social media is a meaningful contributor to comparison-driven unhappiness" is well supported;.
Back to Helaman 13:22. Samuel's charge was that they didn't remember God but "always remembered" their riches. Social media is, functionally, a machine for always remembering other people's riches — hours a day, thousands of comparison targets, algorithmically curated for maximum enviability. The diagnosis is 2,000 years old; the delivery system got an upgrade.
v. 31: And behold, the time cometh that he curseth your riches, that they become slippery, that ye cannot hold them; and in the days of your poverty ye cannot retain them.
Psalm 73
Psalm 73