“Do not covet your neighbor’s house. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In the world of preachers, there is a phrase that occasionally gets thrown around when someone says something that is particularly profound or is worded in an especially memorable way. “That’s preach.” The idea is that you could take that line and build a whole sermon around it. Of course, a sermon built around an idea that isn’t directly informed by Scripture isn’t a sermon at all, but we won’t get into homiletical nitpicking right now. I say all of that to say this, one of the most preachable ideas I’ve ever heard (and which came out of a serious engagement with the Scriptures) was this big idea from Andy Stanley: “There’s no win in comparison.” He was talking about the dangers of comparing ourselves to others, but this danger is rooted in a sin whose prohibition in the Law of Moses is the caboose of the Ten Commandments. Let’s talk for a few minutes about coveting.

We’ll start with defining our terms. To coveting is to want something that isn’t currently yours and which belongs to someone else. It isn’t simply that you want your own copy of it. Simply seeing that someone else has a new toy or tool or useful household item of some sort and thinking to yourself, “You know, that looks really handy to have. I’d like to look into getting one of those for myself,” is not coveting. Coveting goes beyond that. When you covet something, you want exactly what it is this other person has. You want it instead of them. You want to have it, and you want for them to not have it anymore. And this isn’t some fleeting desire either. It’s all you can think about. It becomes consuming of your attention and even your time. Everything in your life begins to revolve around getting this thing for yourself. Whether or not it is something you are supposed to have doesn’t matter. You want it and that’s that.

In thinking about where this longing might pop up in our lives, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to thinking only about things our neighbors might have. This could be a corporately focused desire. You see something at the store and make getting that thing the whole focus of your life until you have it. You put other, more important, things to the side, and even make unwise financial decisions in order to get it. It could be that you covet a particular experience someone else has had. This can manifest in ways that are a little more interesting. Here, they’ve perhaps already had the experience. In coveting what they had, we will often seek to not simply have it for ourselves, but to have it better than they did. We’ll do more, find ways to convince ourselves we enjoyed it more thoroughly than they did, and make sure they know we had it better than they did.

Are you starting to get the picture? God didn’t want His people Israel to do any of this. He didn’t want them thinking any of this. That second part is key to coveting. Coveting something can result in actions when we finally act on our desire, but it starts in the heart and mind. In that sense, this is the first of the others-focused Ten Commandments that is more concerned with internal matters than external ones. The others all deal with actions. This one deals with thoughts. This final commandment is a pointer in the direction God was ultimately going to be leading them and which Jesus expanded for us in a great deal more detail.

Nearly all of the laws on the books anywhere in the world at that time were focused on external things. That’s still the case with laws all over the world today. And that makes sense too. When it comes to governing ourselves, behavioral control and modification is all we have. We can’t see inside someone’s heart. We don’t know what they are thinking. We only have access to those things after they have acted in some way. And even then, we don’t know with 100% certainty. Because of that, we don’t even try to get at what’s going on inside somebody’s heart or mind. We only concern ourselves with governing their actions. God wanted His people to understand, though, that what comes out of us starts with what is inside of us. Jesus would make this explicit during His ministry (see Matthew 12:33-37).

From a textual detail standpoint, there are a couple of things worth noticing. This command is structured as a chiasm. That’s a common biblical literary form using the pattern ABA (read more about it than you probably wanted to know here) by which the author helps to direct our focus and in ways that go against our natural assumption. Usually, we imagine the most important thing will be at the end. With a chiasm, the author will either put the emphasis in the middle of a section or spread it throughout the passage in such a way that the passage has to be taken as a whole rather than broken down into bits or ignored except for the last sentence.

In this case, the middle of the passage gives us several specific things not to covet. We are not to covet our neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey. That seems like a pretty easy list to avoid. From a very wooden interpretive approach this makes coveting really easy to avoid. My two neighbors are married, but I don’t have the slightest bit of interest in either of their wives (or anybody else’s wife, for that matter), and they don’t have any servants or beasts of burden. Ta-da! No coveting for me. And someone could come to such a conclusion except for the first and last part of the command. Don’t covet your neighbor’s house…or anything else that belongs to your neighbor. Those bookends help us understand that what we read here is not an exhaustive list. This really is a general prohibition on wanting what we don’t have.

Perhaps of greater significance than its literary form is its location in the list. It might be tempting to think of coveting as the least significant of the commands because it got stuck at the end. I don’t think that’s the case. I also don’t necessarily think God saved the best or the most important for last, but this one does tie all the rest together. Coveting can serve as a gateway for breaking all of the other commands. If you steal something from someone else, you probably covered it first. The same goes with committing adultery. And murder for that matter. A motivating factor for dishonoring your father and mother could be coveting the power and position they have over you. And the first four commands can be broken when we either want another god or else want god’s position over us. By going beyond the surface of our lives to focus on our hearts, this prohibition of coveting gets to the core of why we do any of the things we do.

Okay, but what does any of this mean for us? I mean, if none of these commands apply to us today as followers of Jesus, who cares about any of this? Well, coveting is closely related to envy which is prohibited several times across the New Testament. So, the idea here is certainly repeated for us to follow. Even more than that, though, coveting will lead to our violating the one command we do have to follow. Jesus’ new command was for us to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. If you are focused on wanting what someone else has, you aren’t going to be intentionally committed to seeing them become more fully who God made them to be. You are going to be intentionally committed to getting your hands on whatever it is they have that you want. In other words, coveting prevents love. Love starts in the heart. If what is in your heart is an illicit desire for what they have, then there won’t be room for a self-sacrifice desire to see them have more.

So then, the right response to this command for us is to check our hearts. What’s going on in there? Are you filled with a sense of contentment with what God has provided for you through your own hard work and the generosity of others? Or are you constantly discontent and striving for more? And I don’t mean a godly striving for more righteousness and justice, more love and generosity. Is your aim the advancement of the people around you, or their losing something so that you can gain it? The distinction between one and the other here can be pretty subtle. You’ll have to think hard about this one. If you let coveting take root in your heart, though, you will cease to love the people around you. Don’t take that path. There is a God who loves you and will generously provide all you need if and as you trust in Him and do life His way.