Constant Cravings: The Tenth Commandment
Exodus 20: 1-17
I grew up in a house with one other sibling, a brother, Trae. Actually his name is Frank William Houck the Third but we have always called him Trae. He was the one that I fought with, and rode bikes with, and fought with and built forts with, and fought with and well you get the idea.
Growing up in our home my mom always would say “There is a special place in Heaven for the mother of two boys.” And then she would laugh. We didn’t understand, we thought it was just the stress of being a Navy wife.
Well as you know I once again live in a house with two boys, and I think that I am begging to get the idea of my mom’s saying. Now I believe that I have got two wonderful sons, and I wouldn’t trade them or change them for anything in the world. But having a 4 year old and a 15 month old in the house I believe I have learned a little about breaking the 10th commandment.
In our home the cost, or the age of the toy does not matter. What matters is who is playing with it and how much fun does it look like he is having.
For example, when Trafton was younger my mom and Trista’s mom bought him some riding toys. Nothing spectacular, a little push car and a Clifford, the big red dog. Trafton pushed around on them but when he started walking they were placed in the back of the closet. Well Rylan discovered them really for the first time about three weeks ago. It started with the Clifford. Rylan saw it in his closet got on and started down the hall. When Trafton saw him, he ran toward Rylan and pushed him off of his toy. Rylan started crying and Trafton told us it was his toy first and that he wanted to ride on it.
So I pulled Trafton off of Clifford and took him to the back room and found the push car. I told Trafton that he could ride this one, and then patted myself on the back for being such a wonderful and intelligent parent. Well as soon as Trafton hit the hall, with his knees in his chest because this toy is meant for a normal sized 1-2 year old not a Houck sized 4 year old, Rylan went ballistic. He no longer wanted the Clifford now he wanted the car, so he proceeded to walk over to Trafton and tried to push him off. And the brawl ensued.
Three weeks later there is still the rush in the morning to the car of your choice, you are riding up and down the halls with complete freedom and contentment. And then when your brother wakes up the struggle begins.
And it doesn’t just happen with riding toys. There is the struggle over drinking cups, and sides of the tub, and Trista’s lap. The sad part is that this is exactly how we become when we violate the tenth commandment. In children, covetousness is, at worst, an annoyance. But in adults it is, at best, a sign of our fallenness. The landscape of the Bible is filled with of examples of people don’t want what they have but do want what they don’t.
Adam and Eve coveted God’s knowledge and sinned.
The sons of Jacob coveted their father’s favor and sold Joseph into slavery.
Saul coveted David’s popularity and lost his mind, then his kingdom.
David coveted Uriah’s wife, took her and killed him.
Ahab coveted Naboth’s vineyard, killed him and took it.
James and John coveted position and threatened the unity of the apostleship. The other ten coveted their initiative and finished the job.
Judas coveted money and betrayed Jesus.
The Pharisees coveted Jesus’ power and crucified him.
Ananias and Sapphira coveted Barnabas’ reputation and lied.
Even a spiritual giant like the apostle Paul confessed the sin of covetousness. He is led to write in Romans 7:7,8. "What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ’Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment produced in me every kind of covetous desire."
I don’t think Paul was speaking in vague terms here.
The last of the commandments is, in many ways, as comprehensive as the first. Perhaps more than any other, it focuses on the interior of the human heart. It is not concerned so much with what we do, but with what we think. It is less about action and more about attitude. The eight commandment forbids stealing. The tenth says, "Don’t even think about it." The seventh commandment condemns adultery. The tenth warns us about even contemplating it.
But that doesn’t mean that the tenth commandment isn’t interested in behavior. Our actions are the children of our thoughts. This commandment seeks to abort evil actions before they are born. It aims to prevent what James described in James 1: 14-15.
"Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death."
Before a thief ever steals, he has first coveted his neighbor’s possessions.
Before a man and a woman ever give in to adultery, they have first coveted another’s spouse.
Before the first word of slander is ever spoken, the gossip has coveted his neighbor’s reputation.
If the human heart is a womb, then covetous thoughts are the spawn of demon, which, if not killed early, will grow until they are no longer mere thoughts that we entertain, but overruling passions that we cannot control.
The word covet simply means desire and desire by itself, is morally neutral. In 1 Corinthians 12:31 Paul even said, "But eagerly desire the greater gifts."
He uses the same word as covet. He was referring to the gift of love and said that it was right to covet the gift of loving others. There is nothing wrong with desires, goals and dreams. In fact, our ability to imagine and fashion a better world than the one we are given, is one of the things that sets humans apart from animals. It is when we begin to covet the lesser gifts that our desires take us in the opposite direction, away from God into more animal-like behavior.
The commandment makes that clear. It doesn’t just say, "You shall not covet." Then it would be wrong to eagerly desire anything. It is very specific. "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, or your neighbor’s wife or his servants or his ox or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
The focus isn’t on things, but on neighbor. Even the language emphasizes relationships. "Neighbor ... neighbor ... his ... his ... neighbor." In the Hebrew, the pronoun "his" appears twice more than is represented in English.
Reference is made to your neighbor seven times in this one verse. When we covet our neighbor’s possessions, whether they are things he or she owns or relationships they cherish, some sinister things begin to happen in our hearts.
Look with me in Luke 12:13 - 21. Jesus is teaching when, suddenly, a man interrupts him.
Jesus correctly diagnosed this man’s problem as covetousness. He called it greed. This sickness of the heart produced two problems.
First, it destroyed the man’s relationship with his brother.
Notice that Jesus said to him, "Who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you and your brother?" The truth is, something had already come between this man and his brother. An eager desire for things. When we covet what someone else has we lose the ability to see the person. All we can see is their possessions. They are no longer siblings or friends we love. They become rivals. We see them as competitors to be beaten, not relationships to be nurtured. They are no longer beings made in the image of God, but possessors of what we want. The things they have are more important than the people they are.
Which leads to a second sinister development in our hearts. We begin to measure success not by the depth of our character but by the abundance of our possessions.
We define success by how high a pile we can build rather than how deep a soul we can develop. That was the fatal flaw the rich fool made. To him, and to all who are guilty of covetousness, success has less to do with who we are and more to do with how much we have.
One of the problems of living with that definition of success is that we can never quite get there. Someone else will always have a bigger pile of possessions.
A young couple may set their hearts on being the first in their circle of friends to get out of an apartment and into a house. And they may succeed. But then someone else will build a bigger house. Or furnish it more elaborately. Or locate it in a more affluent area. Or park a nicer car in the larger garage. Suddenly, being the first to own a house isn’t enough. It has to be a bigger house with nicer furnishings in a better neighborhood.
The rich fool in Jesus’ story had to have bigger barns in which to pile all his things. The story ends abruptly before this occurred, but you know what would have happened next?
His bigger barns would have made his pile of stuff look smaller. So he would have said to himself, "I have nice big barns in which to store all my goods, but now I don’t have enough goods to fill my barns. What shall I do? This is what I will do; I will buy more fields and raise more crops to fill my bigger barns. Then I will eat, drink and be merry." And then? He would have needed bigger barns. Then more fields. When we define success by the size of our pile, we are sucked into a cyclone of dissatisfaction. We spin around and around, unable to stop, unable to rest, unable to find peace.
Beyond the story Jesus tells there are other problems that come with a covetous heart.
We cherish things more than people.
We live with a wrong-headed definition of success.
And third, we become desensitized to sin.
Satan may be evil but he isn’t an idiot. The Bible shows tremendous respect for his sly creativity and ability to slowly seduce us. He isn’t always a roaring lion. Sometimes he is a sly fox or as sneaky as a serpent.
Remember the story of Joseph and Mrs. Potipher? One day when Joseph was diligently managing Potipher’s house, his master’s wife came on to him. "Come lie with me," she said. It scared Joseph to death. He ran from that woman like he was running from a house fire. He had to get out of there.
Apparently, Joseph had never even entertained the idea of committing adultery with Potipher’s wife. I suspect most of us would react that way in a similar situation. We’d be so frightened and shocked we’d run like the wind.
But what if Joseph had coveted his master’s wife? What if he had developed a resentful heart because of all that had happened to him? Here he was working as a slave in this rich Egyptian’s house. Look at all this man had. What if, in the privacy of his own heart, Joseph had indulged the thought of having sex with his master’s wife? Then what would have happened when Mrs. Potipher made the pass?
Covetousness slowly, but surely, reduces our sensitivity to sin. Back before they were called business consultants, positive thinking gurus used to tell us, "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve." They were trying to get people in business to think beyond the borders of reality, to imagine a different world. The thinking was that before people would try to shape reality in a different way they had to see it differently, in their minds.
In a backhanded kind of way, that’s what Satan does to us. He tries to get us to imagine a different world. But not one where we are faithful no matter what, or honest no matter how easy it would be to get away with stealing. He wants to move us in the opposite direction. So he doesn’t try to get us to steal. He just wants us to think about how good it would be to have the nice things our neighbor has. He doesn’t send a prince who is as emotionally sensitive as he is handsome to sweep us off our feet or a Michelle Pilfer look-a-like who knows how to make us feel like a man. He sends a mental suggestion. A simple, "What if?" A subtle, "I wonder what it would be like?" A sinister, "Why not?"
That’s why, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "He who looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart." We haven’t actually committed the sin, but we have taken a giant step toward it because we are no longer shocked by it. If you can entertain the thought, you can do the deed.
That’s why the tenth commandment is so powerful. It attacks sin at the root.
It seeks to purify the soil of the heart before sin becomes a weed in our lives. I’ve probably said this about all of them, but this may be the hardest commandment to obey. We live in an environment that is especially conducive to covetousness. Coffman writes, "Men’s eyes are entertained by the glitter of things, their ears are dulled by the noise of things, their throats choked with the dust of things, their appetites sated with the feast of things, their energies expended in the pursuit of things, their minds occupied with the thoughts of things."
The Ten Commandments are moral Mt. Everest. And living as we do in the lowest valley, the pinnacle seems all the harder to reach.
G. Campbell Morgan offered this summary. "The study of the Decalogue must therefore be closed with a confession of hopelessness. In it there is found the law of life, but not life. We are undone. It may be possible for man so to live as to escape detection by their fellow men, but when God speaks to them the secret stillness of the inner chamber of their being the arresting word, ’Thou shalt not covet; and when Jesus adds to that His word of exposition; ’Everyone that looketh ... hath ... already in his heart,’ they bow their heads in the dust, and say, ’we also have sinned” and come short of the glory of God.”
And John Locke said, "Every person in his own heart, in the light of the law, into the light of divine requirement, and draw from them the confession of guilt, and leave them waiting for the Deliverer. The commandments without the cross utter a sentence of death."
So tonight we need to close this study of the Ten Commandments with God’s final word on sin, salvation and the possibility of forgiveness. We began this study talking about the Ten laws of Grace or the Ten laws of relationships. They are both brought to us in the very nature of God Himself.
God’s final word was Jesus. He wrote that word in the stone of a hill called Calvary, with a cross-shaped pen, and he punctuated it with the exclamation point of an empty tomb.
