I invite you to connect with the voices of the Bible, and today we listen to the last of the Ten Commandments in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 17.
“Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s house. Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.” We usually call this the commandment against coveting. And at first it seems like the odd one out. The others govern what we do: do not kill, do not steal, do not lie. This one governs what we want. It reaches past our hands and into our hearts.
And that turns out to be the point. Many readers of scripture have noticed that this final commandment goes back to the root of all the others. Before anyone steals, they first covet. Before anyone betrays a marriage or tells a destructive lie, the desire comes first. The tenth commandment names the seed that all the broken commandments grow from.
The Bible tells this story from the very beginning. In the garden, the first temptation follows a pattern: the woman sees that the fruit is desirable, she desires it, and she takes it. See, desire, take. That same pattern runs all through scripture. A man named Achan sees treasure he is not supposed to take, covets it, and takes it, and it brings disaster. A king named Ahab sees his neighbor’s vineyard, cannot stop wanting it, and arranges to take it, destroying a life in the process. See, desire, take. The tenth commandment is the garden temptation in miniature, named out loud and warned against.
But here is the deepest insight in this commandment, and it is strangely freeing. What we covet is almost never really the object itself. We don’t actually want our neighbor’s house, or car, or life. We want the good life we imagine that thing would give us: the security, the status, the sense that we have finally arrived. We are not chasing the stuff. We are chasing a story about who we would be if we had it. And that is why getting the thing never satisfies. The story was never true. There is always a better house, a newer version, a neighbor one step ahead.
So the commandment against coveting is not God trying to shrink your life. It is God trying to free you from a race that has no finish line. Coveting is exhausting. It keeps the eyes always on someone else’s yard and never on the gifts already in your own hands. The antidote is not a clenched jaw and more willpower. The antidote is gratitude, the slow, daily practice of noticing what you already have, and contentment, learning to say the word that our culture has almost forgotten how to say: enough.
Here is where it touches your ordinary life. Sometime today, you will feel the pull. A screen will show you a life that looks better than yours. A number will tell you that you are behind. When it comes, you might try a small experiment. Instead of asking, “What do I still want?” ask, “What do I already have?” Name three things. The pull does not disappear, but it loosens. And in that loosening, you may discover that you have been rich all along, and that contentment, not acquisition, is where the good life has been waiting for you.
That is the freedom this commandment offers, a God who is more than enough. Thanks for connecting with the voices of the Bible.
This is part of the Voices of the Bible series from Andrew Conard. Each week we explore the scripture passage for the upcoming sermon, helping you encounter the text before Sunday morning.