“Thou shall not covet your neighbour’s house; thou shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbour’s.”
There are not two commandments here though interestingly enough those in the Roman Catholic Church and our brethren in the Lutheran Church number these as two different commandments since there are two “Thou shalt nots,” in the passage before us. The Reformed community, and Protestantism in general, as well as the Orthodox church community ha not agreed with this counting style because the NT itself combines the commandment as one.
Romans 7:7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
The same unified speaking of the 10th commandment is seen in Romans 13 as well. So, it is a small thing but this is one of the differences we would have with some other “Church” communities.
As we consider coveting we would note that while 6-9 (Murder, Adultery, Theft, False Witness) all have to do with the act. The 10th Word has to do with the sinful inclination behind the sins of adultery or theft or idolatry.
Indeed it would not be too much to say that coveting is the sin behind all sin, if we understand coveting to include that we sin in order that we might satisfy our coveting for ourselves to be preeminent in all things.
We see clear connections of coveting in Scripture that allows us to see the sin of coveting in its obvious manifestation
Genesis 3,
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
Achan’s sin,
Joshua 7:21 when I saw among the spoil a beautiful mantle from Shinar and two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold fifty shekels in weight, then I coveted them and took them; and behold, they are concealed in the earth inside my tent with the silver underneath it.”
Ahab desiring Naboth’s vineyard (I Kings 21)
These three are perhaps three of the most obvious examples of coveting with find in Scripture. But I would contend that coveting (misplaced sinful desires) is the sin behind all sin. It is the sin of motivation that drives the behavior that violates God’s Law.
Even the primordial sin of all sins was connected to coveting. Satan fell because he acted on his coveting of God’s position,
Isaiah 14:13 You said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;[a]
14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
So the argument might be made that in coveting you have the prohibition against the sin of disposition that is always present before the actual act in willful sin.
Listen to James on this
James 4 From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 2 Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. 3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
So, with the 10th commandment we find the mother lode of sin.
Indeed, it may not be a stretch to see the 1st and 10th as bookends having a certain symbiosis.
What is the consequence every time of taking other gods? Answer — Coveting.
What is the consequence every time of coveting? Answer — Taking other Gods.
The 1st commandment gives you the theocentric beginning of Sin. The 10th commandment gives you the anthropocentric beginning of sin.
This is why, I believe there is such a close connection between greed and idolatry in Scripture. If we understand greed as a subset of coveting then God establishes the same close connection between coveting and idolatry that I have established here,
Colossians 3:5 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
5 For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
Clearly there is an intimate connection between coveting and idolatry and I suggest that they are much the same sin viewed alternately from the Theocentric and the anthropecentric perspective.
So, every time you meet someone guilty of coveting you meet an Idolater and every time you meet an idolater you meet someone guilty of coveting. The violation of #1 and #10 go together like marriage and children. They are bookends.
Moving on, when we talk about the desire that is implicit in coveting we must make distinctions here.
Keep in mind that it is not desire itself that is coveting.
God has built us to be a people who desire and so our goal in dealing with coveting is not to somehow (as if we could) cease desiring.
Were we to pursue that course of action in conquering covetousness — the course of action that would have us seeking to eliminate all temporal desire — we would by necessity become Buddhists. Buddhism teaches the necessity to have freedom from everything temporal and the complete suppression of all desires. The desireless person who is free of everything temporal as arrived at Nirvana.
(Buddhism, of course, is a contradiction in as much as it teaches you to desire the end of desires. Buddhism teaches one to pursue the end of all desire and yet in teaching that is sets up as the chief desire the end of all desires. Even if one is successful as a Buddhist, one fails.)
It is not proper desires that God prohibits in the 10th commandment but improper desires.
An improper desire (a coveting) is when you desire anything but God and His Kingdom so much that its fulfillment becomes God to you. But as our temporal desires find their proper place in the context of God and His revelation those desires are perfectly God honoring.
So, not all desire is coveting though all coveting is desire (misplaced).
The prohibition then against coveting is not a prohibition against being passionate and desirous. It is a prohibition against being passionate and desirous about the wrong things, or if you prefer, it is a prohibition against being a passion and desire that does know its proper place.
The kind of passion and desire that is acceptable before God, our Savior, lies in placing our passions and desires so that they are in service to the desire and passion to glorify and serve the Lord Christ, which should be the animating passion and desire of all other Christian passions and desires.
The Scriptures teach us that God and His Kingdom is to be our ultimate desire.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be given you.
Let us press just a little more beneath the surface regarding this matter of coveting.
Calvin and other Reformed men distinguished between the idea of passing desire for something which they did not count as coveting and the desire that wasn’t passing but give birth to plans on how to secure the thing to be desired.
For example — Very recently in the Midwest there was a former Pastor convicted in a court of law of seducing several women in his congregation. He will be going to jail. Now, that Pastor at some point, obviously had a desire but that desire could have been confessed as sin and resisted without the kind of harm that came to be to the women, his family, himself, and the Church. But instead the passing desire moved into concrete planning along the way. According to Calvin and others, it was the planning out wherein the covetousness lay. What is happening with the planning is that the will co-operates with what otherwise might have been a mere fleeting desire (still sin in itself) in order to work together to disobey God.
And, in order to reinforce what was said earlier this is obviously Idolatry as well as covetousness, in as much as the idol god in charge is now the self and not God.
So some of the older writers suggested that there are stages of desire and James 1 might be appealed to for that,
13 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
You see the lust starts with being enticed and it moves from being enticed to full conception and once you have lust conceived sin in birthed. The full conception part would be the planning part and the birth of sin would be the act itself.
So, a desire is nursed, the will is surrendered to the desire; a plan is developed to satisfy the desire and the plan translates the desire into a deed. According to Calvin, the commandment focuses on the first two stages of desire.
However it must be said here that there is outward behavior that is being condemned by the 10th commandment. The planning itself is a outward behavior. In the illustration given earlier about seduction, a plan was made, there were arrangements made and matters attended to that led up to the actual act itself and all of that previous action was outward acts which were sin.
Contrary to Calvin, it is better to hold that all inordinate lusts as coveting and are necessary to be repented of and the sooner the better. The minute a covetous desire for something that is not ours to be had we would be wise at that very moment to confess as sin and ask for contentment.
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Cure for coveting
1.) Admit your inordinate desires to yourself
That may sound funny but people lie to themselves all the time. They have desires that they know are inordinate and yet they will not admit that to themselves and so since they will not admit that to themselves they follow through on those inordinate desires.
2.) Confess your covetous inordinate desires as sin to God and ask both for forgiveness and for the ability to put off these sinful desire and to put on Christian contentment.
3.) Talk back to yourself. We see this kind of behavior in the Psalms frequently. One example,
Psalm 43:5 Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.
The example here has the Psalmist talking back to himself regarding his discouragement. But the principle holds true across the board. We need to talk back to ourselves when we see matters in ourselves that are not right. We need to remind ourselves that we are a Christian people and that certain desires, behaviors, and internal dispositions are not meet for a Christian people. We need to remind ourselves of God’s promises and and of God’s sufficiency.
Once you’ve admitted these inordinate desires take yourself in hand and remind yourself that the getting is never so pleasurable as the wanting. Remind yourself that sin is always a cheat and that the fulfilling of your desires never delivers that which it promises.
4.) Praise God for what He has provided and return to seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, being confident that God will continue to give you what you stand in need of.
5.) Thank God for the forgiveness that we have in Christ. Yes it may be true that we are great in coveting … that we struggle with coveting … but we can be confident despite the covetous desires we see in ourselves we stand as beloved by God because of the acceptability of our Elder Brother — The Lord Christ — who has put to our account His 10th commandment keeping righteousness.
