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Charles Spurgeon put it this way:

Covetous men must be the sport of Satan... They are held by their own greed as surely as beasts with cords, or fish with nets, or men with chains.

When we covet what we do not have, we will (somehow) find a way to satisfy this sudden desire. Any satisfaction found (in getting what we think we must have) will be short lived & never worth the grief.

Let me try to simplify the sin of coveting with a short story with you from Genesis 13. It involves Abraham and Lot.

- vs. 5-6 Abraham and Lot were traveling together. They had so many possessions and so many animals that there wasn’t enough space or food and water to support them both. The problem was that he had TOO MANY goods! How many of you have ever complained about not having enough closet or storage space?

- vs. 7 Everyone was fighting with each other over how to feed and water all of their livestock. There was a real problem over limited resources. Kind of like how a big family might fight over who gets the bathroom in the morning before school.

- vs. 8-9 Abraham, was not going to allow himself to become selfish and he approached Lot with a plan to solve this. Abraham gave Lot the option of picking what portion of the land that he would want for himself. He wasn’t going to let food & water come between he and Lot.

- vs. 10 Rather than just arbitrarily picking an area or doing a coin toss, Lot did a little land survey. This verse says that Lot “lifted his eyes and saw”. The area that he surveyed was the flatland around the Jordan river. It was well-watered. In his own mind, Lot considered that land to be so nice that he compared it to the two most fertile pieces of land that he could think of -

· The Garden of Eden

· The land right around the Nile River in Egypt.

Lot already knew the land was going to require less work to farm. Truly, if there was ever time that the grass was actually greener on the other side of the fence, this was that time.

- vs. 11 So Lot decided to take the land in the valley for himself. What he had was simply not enough. He wanted more, and he wanted to work as little as possible in order to achieve it.

- Vs. 12 When Lot got down into the valley, he discovered that the land and the grass, were not the only things that were more desirable about the area. There were two cities there – Sodom and Gomorrah. There would now be more people, more business, more money to be made, and even more entertainment.

So for all of those reasons, the Bible says that Lot “pitched his tent” toward Sodom. He set up his tent in such a way that every morning when he woke up and walked out of his tent, the city of Sodom would be the first thing he saw. He set his heart on Sodom – things of this earth – rather than setting his heart on God.

- vs. 13 Lot’s coveting of material things caused him to compromise.

He knew when he went down into the valley what kind of people lived in the city. They were not godly people.

They were involved in all kinds of sins.

But Lot was willing to put up with the sin and evil in order to get what he wanted. Soon those compromises Lot made became a way of life for he & his family.