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Exodus 20:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.
What does this mean?
We should fear and love God so that we do not scheme to get our neighbor’s inheritance or house, or get it in a way which only appears right, but help and be of service to him in keeping it.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
What does this mean?
We should fear and love God so that we do not entice or force away our neighbor’s wife, workers, or animals or turn them against him, but urge them to stay and do their duty.
Introduction
Today we conclude our study of the Ten Commandments with the 9th and 10th commandments.
Both deal with desiring something that is not ours.
The Ninth deals with matters of property; the tenth deals with matters of relationships.
You’ll notice that Protestants number the commandments differently than we do.
They separate “you shall not make for yourself a carved image...” from the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods”, making it their Second Commandment.
In doing so that throws the numbers off from the way that the Church has historically numbered them.
So our Fourth Commandment is their fifth.
Lutherans number the Commandments in the same way as the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
Of course, the Bible never assigns a number to the Commandments; we do it as a point of reference, just as the writers of the Bible never assigned “chapter and verse” numbers to their writings.
That was added later to help us find things in the Scriptures rapidly.
If you want to get technical, the true First Commandment given by God in the Bible is “I am the Lord Your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
In the Protestant tradition, the Ninth and Tenth Commandments are taken as one: You shall not covet.
Here is where our tradition splits them into two separate commandments, but applying the same concept to both.
Our outline today will be the word WANT: We WANT Things that are not ours; ALL Sin stems from Coveting; God gives us what we NEED, and we are called to be THANKFUL for His provision in our lives.
We WANT things that are not ours.
As we heard last week, the first lie in the Bible was Satan’s lie to Eve.
But after Satan lied to her, something stirred in her heart.
She desired to be like God.
She wanted to be more than she was, and that desire clouded her understanding of who she was.
And so she falls into temptation, sins, and Adam readily joins her because he, too, wanted something that was not his own.
A synonym for Coveting is “Jealousy” .
The Bible speaks about this a lot:
Romans 7:8
James 4:12
We want something that doesn’t belong to us.
Our neighbor’s house is a lot bigger and a lot nicer than our own.
Our relative makes three times what we make at work and have no money problems at all.
The new car in the driveway next door is the one we’ve always wanted.
The new woman at work is so beautiful that she distracts us like Bathsheba distracted David.
The man next door is fit, trim, and actually listens unlike our husband.
Sometimes innocent thoughts, but following through with them can develop into full blown sin.
James charts out the progression for us:
We want something that doesn’t belong to us.
Our neighbor’s house is a lot bigger and a lot nicer than our own.
Our relative makes three times what we make at work and have no money problems at all.
The new car in the driveway next door is the one we’ve always wanted.
The new woman at work is so beautiful that she distracts us like Bathsheba distracted David.
The man next door is fit, trim, and actually listens unlike our husband.
Sometimes innocent thoughts, but following through with them can develop into full blown sin.
James charts out the progression for us:
Coveting is when we want something that doesn’t belong to us.
Our neighbor’s house is a lot bigger and a lot nicer than our own.
Our relative makes three times what we make at work and have no money problems at all.
The new car in the driveway next door is the one we’ve always wanted.
The new woman at work is so beautiful that she distracts us like Bathsheba distracted David.
The man next door is fit, trim, and actually listens unlike our husband.
Sometimes innocent thoughts, but following through with them can develop into full blown sin.
James charts out the progression for us:
James 1
The bottom line is this: when we want something that is not ours it can lead to sin, which can lead to death.
All Sin Stems from Coveting
Coveting is a sin of the heart that leads to all other sins.
Isn’t it amazing that these two commandments are almost never cited?
The other ones in the Second Table of the Law are easy to spot at times: Disobedience, hurting or harming our neighbor, abandoning the sanctity of marriage, taking something not belonging to us, gossiping and lying.
But coveting has no outward action of its own.
It is always a sin of the heart.
When acted upon, another commandment is broken.
And, of course, when one commandment is broken they all are broken.
Isn’t it amazing that
Strange, then, that we hardly every speak about Coveting.
And yet, we all struggle with this perhaps more than with any other commandment.
Wanting something not our own causes us ultimately to take it, whether it be our neighbor’s property, income, house, possessions, marriage, or maybe even life.
We are a jealous people.
In the close of the commandments, God says,
Exodus 20
Here is the deal:
God is the only one who can be jealous without sin.
Our jealousy leads to death.
His jealousy leads to life.
His is not a sinful jealousy but a righteous desire for our faithfulness.
First, God is jealous of other gods.
For there are truly no other gods.
Yet we chase after them.
Remember, anything that is more important to us than God is a god to us, and God the Lord is jealous of that because nothing or no one else can save us but Him.
Second, and closely related to this is that God is jealous for our love.
We are His.
He made us.
His Son redeemed us, saving us from our sins by His death on the Cross.
He covets our love.
The Church is Jesus’ Bride.
He doesn’t want us sharing that love with those who try to take His place.
When we have another god, when our love is misplaced elsewhere, His warning stands: [He visits] the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me… God hates sin.
God hates death.
God punishes sin.
You are not your own.
You are His.
He is jealous about you because of His love for you.
But hear again what the blessing is for those who are faithful: [He shows] steadfast love (mercy) to those who love Him and keep His commandments.
God is so jealous of your love, that He went to all extremes to empower you to love Him as your First Love.
He was so jealous of you and your salvation that He gave up His only Son for you and for your salvation.
If you want to see the righteous jealousy of God in action look at the Cross.
Because there He took away all of the sin of unfaithfulness, all of the coveting of your heart, and all of the commandments you broke because of your jealousy so that you could be restored to Him and love Him alone.
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