Dennis Tuuri

continue this morning dealing with the seven deadly sins. We spent really three weeks talking about pride and we used Psalm 10 in each of those three weeks and we just sang Psalm 10. That was that big long took us 5 minutes to sing. So you should be real familiar with that. Now today we move on to covetousness. Now when we began our discussion of the seven deadly sins, we talked about how the order of those sins has some significance to it.

Pride being the base is really important as we said it really is the root sin of attempting to reverse God’s order and make ourselves God to exalt ourselves and to debase God and we said then that’s followed by envy and anger and we characterize those first three of the seven deadly sins pride envy and anger as sins of perverted love perverted love loving oneself by harming others perversion of love and then we still talk about sloth which is deficient love that doesn’t give its proper measure.

And then we’re going to talk about avarice or greed, gluttony, and lust. And these are sins of excessive love. Now I bring that up again because covetousness is related to the sin of envy and to the sin of greed. And in the classical lists, the second sin is discussed as envy. And then as we said later in the last three, there’s the sin of greed and covetousness can be dealt with in either envy or in greed and often has been done so in terms of greed.

I have chosen to discuss it in terms of envy. And what we’re going to do is today we’re going to talk about covetousness and then next week we’re going to talk about envy. And I’m going to begin this morning by making some distinctions between covetousness and envy and also greed and also by way of just throwing in there jealousy which is another word that some of these Hebrew and Greek words in the scriptures that are translated covet or envy are also translated sometimes jealousy. And so we’re going to try to draw some distinctions between those words as how we’re going to use those words and how they’re normally used today if we’re going to make some precise definitional differentiations here. Unfortunately, many people just sort of lump these things all in together and don’t realize these are really separate sorts of sins that are being discussed.

I guess the best way to think of the relationship of these is to first of all the difference between covetousness and envy. Covetousness and envy have the same root desire and that is for somebody else’s possessions. Okay, that’s why we’re going to use the word covetousness as outlawed in the 10th commandment of the decalogue is a covetousness of somebody else’s possessions. And when covetousness of somebody else’s possessions leads you to engage in activity to get that person’s possessions illegally. That is covetousness according to the scriptures. And so covetousness says, “You have what I want and I’m going to take steps to get what you have.” Envy on the other hand, we’re going to deal with this more next week, but envy on the other hand says, “You have what I want. I can’t get it, and so I’m going to take it away from you, or I’m going to destroy it.” Okay. In Matthew 27:18, Pilate realized he knew that the Jews had delivered up Jesus because of envy.

Now, it’s the same word used. I’m not saying this is a distinction as it works itself out this sin. The Jews were envious of Jesus’s position, but they couldn’t steal it. They couldn’t attain to themselves his position, his stature as God, of course, and so they turn him over for destruction. Okay, that’s envy as opposed to covetousness. Another example of envy more next week. But for instance, good examples in major cities today is when some people that can’t get expensive cars for instance take a crowbar and just scratch them up or break them somehow. It’s an attempt to hurt what somebody else has that we cannot attain to that thing. So today we’re going to be talking about covetousness which says you’ve got what I want and I’m going to try to—I’m going to engage myself in illegal means to get what you want, get what I want rather that you have. Okay, that’s the difference.

The third of these is greed. Well, first of all, let’s deal with jealousy. Jealousy says, I want to keep a hold of what I have. Now, jealousy in the scriptures is a virtue. And jealousy is given over, is one of the attributes of God himself. He has a people and he’s jealous for those people. He wants to keep those people and keep them to himself. And so, jealousy can be and frequently is and usually is a good thing. In other words, jealousy says, I have legal possessions. I want to be good stewards of them. I want to take control of those, keep control of those possessions. And that’s jealousy is the way we’re going to use the word. So jealousy is okay.

It is interesting that for instance in the Old Testament, there was a procedure whereby the husband could if he was jealous of his wife and thought she had been unfaithful to his covenant, there was an ordeal of jealousy. The husband wasn’t chastised for his jealousy. It was a good thing that he wanted to keep his wife to himself because that’s what God wanted her to be.

Okay, greed is related to all these and I know this gets a little confusing. Greed also is concerned with possessions, but greed isn’t necessarily concerned about your possessions. Greed is concerned about my possessions and I want more of them. Okay? So, covetousness and envy, the way we’re using the term, wants your possessions. Jealousy wants to maintain our own possessions and greed wants to add to our possessions. And that is a bad thing to keep adding and putting our faith in our riches or in our goods. Okay. So what we’re going to be talking about today and next week is covetousness and envy. And then later in this series we’ll deal with greed separately. Not in terms of greed of what somebody else has, which is what covetousness and envy is all about, but rather greed wanting to accumulate more and more possessions.

Okay. So I guess the reason for saying all of that is that the reason why I want to lump covetousness and envy together is that they both have to do with wanting what somebody else has and then either taking illicit means to get it or destroying what the other person has if we can’t get it. And so we’re going to lump those two together. Okay.

Now the first thing we’re going to talk about in terms of covetousness this week and it shares this in it shares this particular first aspect of an illicit desire with the sin of envy. Both of them have an illicit desire for what is somebody else’s goods and services. Okay.

Now, the story of the rich young ruler, the one we just read from Mark, and there are parallel accounts in Luke and Matthew. This rich young ruler comes to Jesus and he wants to know how to get into the kingdom of God. So, this is an evangelism opportunity here. And while we don’t want to stress this today, I do want you to note in passing as we deal with this particular story that Jesus, his method of evangelism was to convict the ruler of his sin. Okay, so you’re asking, “How do I become a Christian? How do I believe? How do I enter the kingdom of God?” And Jesus points them to the commandments. He wants to bring them to repentance. And our evangelism also should be aimed at bringing people to repentance. And the way you do that is by telling them the law of God. And so Jesus cites six of the ten commandments. And he does that for purposes of evangelism.

Now he cites for our particular purposes this morning, we want to focus in on the 10th commandment found in Exodus 20:17 and Deuteronomy 5:21. Now, Exodus 20:17 and Deuteronomy 5:21 are two statements of the 10th commandment. And they are essentially the same, but there are some differences. And I want us to look at those a little bit. Why don’t you turn to Exodus 20:17? We can look at this a little bit here.

Exodus 20:17 reads, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

Okay. Deuteronomy 5:21 reads, “Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

There’s a change of the order used there. And there are two words there—there’s one word that’s translated covet in Exodus 20 and there are two that are translated covet or desire in Deuteronomy 5. What that tells us is that the two words in Deuteronomy 5, desire and covet are synonyms one of another. And they also tell us something very important about these two commandments relative to the family. And again we can’t spend a lot of time on this but what he said in Exodus 20 the one you have in front of you there hopefully. He says you can’t covet your neighbor’s house or household would be another way to translate that. And he goes from the general statement, you can’t covet what is your neighbor’s property or your neighbor’s household. And then he gets to specifics. He says you can’t covet your neighbor’s wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass anything that’s thy neighbor’s. He goes from the general statement of the house to specific statements of what’s involved in the neighbor’s household. And that includes his wife.

Now in Deuteronomy 5, he begins with the wife and then goes on to talk about the house, the field, manservant, maidservant, ox and ass. In Deuteronomy 5, he starts with the wife and then he goes on to talk about two or three rather pairs or couplets of things that go together. Starts with the summary statement of the wife and then he says house and field. He says manservant, maidservant and then he says ox and ass now.

I guess when you take these two together I think this is what these verses teach us they teach us that when we think of a family today we probably think incorrectly because we think just of the people involved where in the scriptures when we think of family or household it involves the people the wife and by extension the children but also involves property a house and a field a dwelling place and a place of production it also involves means of production ox and ass till and to ride around as well and manservants and maidservants what he uses in his production as well.

The concept of the household in Deuteronomy in the 10th commandment is broader than most of us think of when we think of a family. Now I bring that up just briefly. You’re going to get a lot more about that if you go to Greg Harris’s workshop at the reconstruction conference in April. That’s specifically what he’s going to be talking about is building back in our minds this more biblical concept of a fleshed out view of a household.

But for our purposes this morning, I bring it up for this purpose. Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 do not prohibit desire generally. They do not prohibit a wanting something generally. They prohibit wanting what’s your neighbor’s and it thus establishes property rights for the family. You see the husband and wife represent the family and so the wife in Deuteronomy 5 is given at the head of the list because she with her husband control all that property.

And so the Tenth Commandment reiterates family property holdings. Now, there’s a lot of discussion these days about how terrible it is that children are seen as property. I’ve been on radio shows in the last few years where they talk about, well, wives used to be considered property and we finally liberated them and now children are considered property and we got to liberate them. Well, the scriptures do link the wife with the property here.

Okay? The husband does have property rights over his wife. But the converse is also true in 1 Corinthians. Let me find it here. 1 Corinthians 7:4. And I’m going to get a little bit ahead of myself here, but I want to make this point real clear. We read, “Defraud ye not one another, except it be with consent for a time that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer and come together again that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.”

Now, what 1 Corinthians 7 is talking about is Paul says that husband and wife have property rights over each other’s body. And he’s talking about physical relationships here. And he’s saying don’t separate, don’t practice abstinence for an extended period of time, unless it be for a period of time of prayer and consecration to God and then come back together again. He says, the reason I bring that verse up is that while the tenth commandment says that husbands do exercise property rights over their wife. The wife also has property rights over her husband. And it is a violation of husband or wife to give what properly belongs to the husband to another. And it is a violation according to the 10th commandment to desire the property rights over somebody’s husband or wife for yourself. Okay.

Now, it’s interesting that 1 Corinthians 7:4 uses the term defraud, not one another. That’s the same word that Jesus in our passage from Mark uses when he recites the 10th commandment, he doesn’t use the word covet, he uses the word defraud. We’re going to talk about that in a couple of minutes, but suffice to say that’s the exact same word that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 7:4. And what it tells you is by way of application that you cannot defraud the property rights of your husband or your wife over your own body through abstinence either. That’s a violation of the 10th commandment as well because you have property rights one to another.

Okay. So, first of all, this passage, the 10th commandment that Jesus recites in Mark is very important because it establishes household property rights and it expands the idea of property to include the whole household or the whole family. Okay, those are things that are given over stewardship to the covenantal head of the house, the husband and wife, the covenantal heads of the house and the husband of course being directive over the wife.

They’re given over by God to them for their decision-making capabilities. They decide what to do with the ox and the ass within God’s law. And he reminds them in 1 Corinthians 7 that it is not a proper decision. It’s against his law to deprive one another of the rights to your own body in terms of the sexual relationship. Okay. Family property is asserted by the 10th commandment and by the laws prohibiting covetousness.

Now, okay, that’s the first thing. Secondly, I want to point out here that implied in the tenth commandment or specifically stated I guess is a prohibition to desire. But as I said, it’s not a prohibition to desire anything. It’s a prohibition against desiring specifically what belongs to your neighbor. It is not a violation of the 10th commandment to desire a car like your neighbor’s car or to desire a house like his dwelling place. That’s not prohibited here. What’s prohibited is to want your neighbor’s car or to want your neighbor’s house or to want your neighbor’s wife or for the women to want your neighbor’s husband. That’s what’s prohibited.

It is a desire though and it is illicit and against the law of God to exercise that desire. Now, it’s quite important to see here that desire the same words that are used here in Exodus and Deuteronomy can be used in a positive sense in the scriptures. Now, every Sunday today, if you’re doing your job right here at Reformation Covenant Church, you come here coveting. Why do I say that? Because Deuteronomy 12:15 says that you’re supposed to use your rejoicing tithe to pay for whatever your heart lusts for or covets or strongly desires. And hopefully when you brought a meal here or dessert or whatever it is, it’s something you covet. Okay? Coveting in terms of a strong desire for something is not wrong.

The 10th commandment prohibits a strong desire for what your neighbor owns. It’s a violation of his property rights that’s concerned there. Okay. Desire itself is okay. A good way to look at it, 1 Timothy 3:1 tells us that if a man desires, same word that’s used covet in the New Testament, the office of elder, he desires a good thing. You’re supposed to covet that job if you’re headed for that calling. Okay.

A good way to see the correlation to this is in Genesis 2:9 and 3:6. In Genesis 2:9, God plants some trees in the garden. And the trees are pleasant to look at. Okay? Pleasant trees. Let me actually read the verse here. Genesis 2:9, it says, “Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, to be desired.” Okay? And so to desire is an okay thing. God wants to be desirable.

But then in Genesis 3:6, the woman after being tempted by the serpent sees the tree as good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise. She takes the fruit thereof and sins. You see, her desire, her seeing the tree as a desirable thing wasn’t good. Even though God had created the tree to be desired, but her desire was after a tree that was illegitimate for her to desire and to partake of.

Okay? So, the word desire can go either way. And covetousness is not prohibiting any kind of desire. It does prohibit the desiring of something that your neighbor has property rights over. But the third point I want to make this morning is that covetousness also involves and I want to say this real closely also involves linked tightly to it actions.

Now you’ve probably noticed there that I said that Jesus restates the last five—the fourth, the fifth and then the last—the ninth and then the tenth commandment as well in the decalogue in Mark in the passage we read. A young man comes to him and says, “You know, what do we have to do to obtain eternal life?” and Jesus says, “Well, obey the commandments” and then he lists the commandments and he lists the eighth commandment the ninth commandment and then he says “do not defraud” and then he says “honor your father and mother.”

Now some people say that the word defraud there is he’s throwing in a case law. Greg Bahnsen in the Christian Ethics uses that verse as a proof text to say that case laws are intermixed in Jesus’s thinking. I don’t believe that’s true at all. I believe Bahnsen’s point that case laws are enforced in the New Testament. But here it’s very important to recognize that there is an order. He quotes the eighth commandment then the ninth commandment. And then he says, “Do not defraud.” That’s important.

Secondly, what’s important here to realize as well is what Jesus then tells the rich young ruler to bring his sinful covetousness home to him. He says, “Don’t defraud. Honor your father and your mother.” And then the ruler says, “Well, ever since I was a kid, I you know, I raised up in the catechism and all. I knew that stuff. You know, I know about the Ten Commandments.” And then Jesus says, “Okay, then go sell all your possessions.”

Now, there are people who would use this text to say that any coveting is wrong, any desire to have property is wrong, and everybody should be propertyless, get rid of all your property. Well, that isn’t the case. Obviously, there’s so many scriptures to rebut that I don’t even want to mention it partly, but one would do. Zacchaeus gave half of his possessions to the poor and Jesus says salvation’s come to this household.

So, that’s not what he’s talking about. I think what Jesus is doing is he’s driving the point home to the rich young ruler that his goods were goods of covetousness. He had obtained those goods through defrauding other people and he told him get rid of those goods and the rich young ruler says he walks away grieved because he had many possessions. Okay.

So the corrective—in addition to the order “eighth commandment, ninth commandment then defraud”—in addition to that, the corrective that Jesus gives to the man also shows that what he’s really hitting the young ruler at is the tenth commandment. And it would be pretty odd if he was driving home the sin of covetousness if he didn’t quote that from the decalogue. He does quote it there.

One other thing by the way here I want to point out in passing again that we mentioned evangelism. You want to use the law in evangelism. You don’t just quote the ten commandments and assume that people are going to know what you say. Particularly today when they don’t even know what sin is anymore. Sin means nothing to most people you’re going to meet in the street today. They don’t know what it is. Jesus used a practical example here. “Sell your possessions” to drive home to the rich young ruler his covetousness and his sinful wanting and then taking possessions from other people.

Okay? Jesus drove that home and in our evangelism—and now notice it says there if you’ve got that open to Mark 10 there—he says verse 21, “Jesus beholding him loved him and said unto him, ‘One thing thou lackest: go thy way sell our possessions.’” You see, Jesus loves the man. And if we love the people we’re trying to witness to, then we’re going to love them enough to drive home to them that they are in violation of God’s word and they need to come to repentance. And that’s what Jesus’s love and evangelism did. And that’s what ours should do as well. Okay.

Now, however, the main thing I want us to realize here is that when Jesus cites the 10th commandment, he cites a word meaning defraud, which is to enter into an action to take what is illegitimately somebody else’s item. Now, this is not a New Testament concept. This same concept that covetousness prohibits an illicit desire and actions to take what is somebody else’s is found in the Old Testament.

Couple of examples, Micah 2:2. Remember we went through the book of Micah and there was a lot of judgment there. And this is one of the things they were judged for. “And they covet fields and take them by violence and houses and take them away. So they oppress a man in his house, even a man in his heritage.” See the connection there? They covet something and they take it away. The incipient desire and the action to do it is prohibited by the commandment.

Jeremiah 8:10, God says, “Therefore will I give their wives unto others, and their fields to them that shall inherit them. For everyone from the least, even unto the greatest, is given to covetousness. From the prophet even unto the priest, everyone dealeth falsely.” You see, there’s that parallelism in the scriptures again. He says that all these people are covetous and then he repeats himself and he says all these people deal falsely. Okay. And as a result they were coveting other men’s wives and other men’s fields violation of the tenth commandment and the judgment is what? Their wives and their fields are given over to other men. Okay.

So the Old Testament in those two citations and in many more that we could cite the word translated covet in Exodus and in Deuteronomy statement of the 10th commandment. The word translated covet there means two things. It means an illicit desire as we just saw. But it also means an illegitimate taking or a defrauding of someone else of what? Of possessions. Okay? It involves an action, I guess, is what I’m saying here.

Now, just to make sure you don’t think I’ve gone off the deep end here or something, there’s all kinds of commentators that have recognized this over the ages. Matthew Henry, for instance, in commenting on the fact that Mark in that citation uses the word defraud quotes Dr. Hammond who said, “Thou shalt rest content with thine own and not seek to increase it by the diminution of another man’s. It is a rule of justice not to add, not to advance or enrich ourselves by doing wrong or injury to any other.” Citing this importance of seeing this word the prohibition against covetousness as linked to actions.

Additionally, N.T. Vos as quoted by R.J. Rushdoony in his commentary on the 10th commandment and institutes of biblical law. Martin N wrote the following: “The commandment in verse 17 of Exodus 20 is formulated with the verb which is rendered covet but it describes not merely the emotion of coveting but also includes the attempt to take something or excuse me to attach something to oneself illegally.

The commandment therefore deals with all possible undertakings which involve gaining power over the goods and possessions of a neighbor whether through theft or through all kinds of dishonest machinations.” Okay. Von Rad in his commentary on this particular word says, “If in the last commandment the translation of the verb as covet were correct, it would be the only case in which the decalogue deals not with an action but with an inner impulse, hence with a sin of intention.

But the corresponding Hebrew word kamad has two meanings: both to covet and to take. It includes outward malpractices, meaning seizing something for oneself or we could say as Jesus did to defraud somebody of something. Not outright theft. You don’t go into his house and steal it from him. You defraud him through some contractual method or etc. of his property. And that’s a violation of the tenth commandment.

Adam Clark in his commentary said this: “The covetousness which is placed on forbidden objects is that which is prohibited and condemned. To covet in this sense is intensely to long after in order to enjoy his property the person or thing coveted. He breaks this command who by any means endeavors to deprive a man of his house or farm or by some underhand and clandestine bargain with the original landlord. That is called in some countries taking a man’s house and farm over his head. He breaks it also who lusts after his neighbor’s wife.

Now listen to this. This is an example of this: who lusts after his neighbor’s wife, covets her and endeavors to ingratiate himself in her affections by striving to lessen her husband in her esteem. And he breaks it who endeavors to possess himself with the servants, cattle, etc. of another in any clandestine or unjustifiable ways. The commandment prohibits any inordinate desire of anything, but also the actions.” You see, so the violation of the tenth commandment, you desire somebody else’s wife and then you start running down her husband in her eyes to ingratiate yourself to her and put down her husband. That’s a violation of the 10th commandment. That is covetousness.

And apparently in this country, there used to be suits called alienation of affection suits that you could file against somebody in civil court who was trying to alienate the affections of your mate. That was against the law. And it was against the law because the law was rooted in the decalogue. And the decalogue says you cannot engage in improper actions defrauding somebody of what their property rights are. You can’t run somebody else down. You can’t alienate the affections of the spouse.

Very important we remember that, folks. Very important we deal with other families in the church and outside of the church in very discreet ways where we don’t attempt to alienate affections between the husband and the wife in any way, shape or form. Okay.

Point of all this is that covetousness is a prohibition of actions of defrauding. That means a lot of things in terms of the application of the other commandments. The other four of the second tablet that prohibit us to hurt other people by lying stealing etc. Okay I will just point out in passing we don’t have time to spend a lot of time on this but it’s interesting to me I did an extensive word study of all these words translated covetousness jealousy there’s a bunch of them and it’s very complicated but suffice it to say here’s one thing I want you to realize in the scriptures there is one Hebrew word and two Greek words that always have a bad connotation.

Now I said earlier that covetousness, the desire itself can be bad or good depending upon what it’s placed on, right? Well, there are two words in the Greek and one word in the Hebrew that both are always translated with a negative intent. And those three words all refer to actions, not to desires. Okay? Desires can be good or bad depending what they’re placed on, but the actions translated covetousness in the scriptures are always bad.

The 10th commandment has to do in a very large sense with what we do relative to what we want that another person has. Okay. Actions.

Now, covetousness is at root idolatry. It is identified as that in Colossians 3:5 and Ephesians 5:5. Both of those passages Paul says that covetousness is idolatry. And a person who covets is idolatrous. Okay? Well, why is that? That’s because—let’s develop this a little bit first.

The biblical texts prohibiting covetousness are very interesting because many of them have to do with leadership positions. In Exodus 18:21, when the people are told to select leaders for themselves, one of the specific qualifications is they can’t be covetous. Okay. In 1 Timothy 3, requirement of eldership, not a man who is covetous, who involves in—not just stealing, not steal, that’s not the word—it’s not theft, but who would who involves himself in wanting the property of another and then taking means to obtain that property for himself that may be within the law but still an attempt to get that person’s property. Okay? That’s prohibited to leaders.

It’s interesting that both in 1 Samuel when Samuel gets to the end of his reign and then Paul at the end of his charge to the Ephesian elders, both those guys say, “I didn’t covet anything. I didn’t take anybody’s ox ass or money, none of that stuff.” You see, because that was a big deal to the ruler.

Now, some people will tell you the reason for all these prohibitions and the link between covetousness and leaders is because they have more of an opportunity to covet and take over possessions. And that’s certainly true. But I think there’s another factor at work here. You see, remember the leaders represent God and his authority and his order to the people. Covetousness is idolatry because covetousness seeks to go around what God has decided to do with property in this world. Covetousness attempts to displace God’s property rights and the way he sees fit to distribute that property to other people.

Covetousness says, “I’m going to go around God’s law. I’m going to want what I can’t have.” And that’s why it’s idolatry. It places God to the side. And that’s why leaders are commanded not to be covetous because they can see themselves as they can easily in their own minds replace God’s authority with their own authority in the land.

Now, it’s interesting, by the way, in light of all this that Paul himself in Romans 7:7, he says, you know, it’s that section of Romans 7 where he says, “Apart from the law coming, I didn’t know what sin was.” And you know what the example is he uses in Romans 7? It’s covetousness. He said, “If the law hadn’t come to me and told me, ‘don’t covet,’ I wouldn’t have realized I was coveting.” Paul’s sin was covetousness. That was the one he singled out to describe him prior to regeneration. Okay.

Now, it’s interesting too that when Paul is converted, what happens to him? Well, he gets blinded. Covetousness is looking—like Eve looked at that tree she wasn’t supposed to look at or looking at another man’s wife or looking with desire and intent on another man’s property and then doing something about it. Well, Paul says that apart from the law, he didn’t know he was covetous. And Paul then when it comes to conversion, his eyes, he’s blinded. And then throughout his life, his eyes are a problem to him. See, God is dealing with him in terms of his covetousness.

There are some people who suppose, and this is only a supposition, of course, there’s no way to prove it or disprove it, that maybe that rich young ruler in our account in Mark 10 is indeed Paul, that maybe he was the one whom Jesus loved and brought the law home in a way that he understood. He went away grieved because of his possessions. Jesus brought that sin of covetousness home to that rich young ruler. And somehow God did the same thing with Paul and got him to see through an exposition of the law of God what his sin was.

Now it’s interesting as I said before I wanted you to realize that Jesus quotes the first five, then the last five of the decalogue and then the last commandment he tells the rich young ruler before driving home the point is honor your father and mother. And why does he throw that one in?

Well some people say well he wanted to throw in a positive command as well as all these negative commands that he threw in. Well, I don’t know. I mean, that doesn’t persuade me very much of anything. I think probably it’s because of this connection, as I said before, between covetousness, which is defrauding and desiring what isn’t yours, and the rejection of God’s authority in terms of God’s property rights.

You see, he hadn’t really been honoring the authorities. Remember, the commandment to honor your father and your mother is a first tablet violation, I believe, because the parents image God to you. And when you reject mother or father—children that are listening here, and you should certainly let them know this, parents, you should let your children know at home. When they reject you, they’re rejecting God’s authority in your life.

Okay? So, it belongs in the first tablet. And covetousness, the scriptures say, is idolatry. And the rich young ruler had engaged himself in covetousness and defrauding and accumulating possessions apparently through illegitimate means. And the rich young ruler then needed to be reminded was he not only covetous, he was an idolater. He had broken the first commandment. He had not honored the father in heaven. He had usurped his property rights as it were or had attempted to and gained to himself things illegally. Okay.

Essentially then covetousness is idolatry because it seeks to displace God’s providence and God’s property rights and his method of distribution of property. It’s interesting in Matthew 20, Jesus gives this parable and he talks about how he hired various people to go out into the field to work. A master does this. He has this field. He wants to hire some guys to go out and work and he pays the guys in the morning the same price that he pays the workers who come with only an hour left in the day to work. Everybody gets the same wage.

Now, the guys who’ve been hired in the morning get just as much as they had agreed to work for. But when they come at the end of the day and they see the person who only worked an hour getting the same wage as they get they get mad. They get mad. And the master of the land says, “Do you envy me because I show gratitude with my property?” That’s a great story that Jesus told to tell your children, by the way. Drives them crazy when they’re little. Why would that—why is that—why is Jesus saying that’s an okay thing to do? He wasn’t fair to these other workers, right? But no, he was being, he was controlling his property. He had property rights. He was dispensing those property rights as he saw fit. And it is a violation of the tenth commandment to state otherwise. It’s his property and those workers, the other workers were trying to coerce him and break—and they were breaking the tenth commandment.

Now that parable really talks about of course among other things the kingdom of heaven. That’s what Jesus is saying. “This is the kingdom of heaven. It’s like this” and one of the things implied in that of course is that the Gentiles who come in at the end get the same benefits of the kingdom of heaven as the Jews who worked for 4,000 years supposedly and done this thing. And that there’s no merit of our own that gets us into the kingdom of heaven.

But see, in back of all of that, it’s real important to recognize that I think by way of extension then the kingdom of heaven like the field is God’s property. And all the earth is filled with whose property? God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. God distributes property to this person and that person through his providence, through his decree, and then he works out in his providence. And people end up with varying amounts of wealth. And when you kick against the goads and you want what your neighbor has, you want to take it away from him. That’s a violation of God’s—that you’re essentially telling God, I didn’t like the way you distributed that wealth. I want to redistribute it my way. And the same thing in terms of the wives.

Now, we live in a country that is marked by an incredible degree of covetousness. Covetousness today is evidenced in many ways. People want your property and then instead of stealing it from you, do we pass a law? And the law says, “We’re going to tax you at this rate and we’re going to take that property away from you, perfectly legal, and we’re going to redistribute it to others.” That’s a violation of the 10th commandment.

The Land Conservation Development Commission that tells you you cannot do what you want to on your own property is a violation of the Tenth Commandment for the civil state to tell you that you can’t do on your property what you see fit according to God’s law. See, eminent domain. Eminent domain means the state can come to you tomorrow and when it decides it wants your land, it can say, “We’re going to condemn your land and we’re going to take it for the good of the people.” You see, that’s nothing but a pure violation of the 10th commandment.

Ahab was the example of that. He wanted Naboth’s vineyard. Now, the point was he wanted that vineyard for a purpose other than what Naboth, who was the controller that God had placed in his providence over that property, wanted. Ahab wanted that property for another purpose, for the purposes of the king, for the purposes of the state. And Ahab violated the 10th commandment because he then engaged in deception to kick Naboth off the land and actually to murder him. You see, it’s the same thing today.

We live in a land in which the civil government regularly violates the 10th commandment by supposedly legal means of taking away your property rights. T. Robert Ingram in his excellent book, The World Under God’s Law, deals with this at some length in his commentary on the 10th Commandment. “In the crime of coveting, every man’s God-given control and responsibility for himself and consequently all that is his own, a man plunges into the depth of depravity with which he would establish a government regulation of all things.”

And Ingram goes on to cite many instances of government regulation of things. We said that the members, the people involved in the household, the husband, the wife exercise property rights over them as well. Public education, a desire for the state is essentially also a violation of the tenth commandment. The state says we’re going to take away your property rights to your children and we’re going to raise them according to how we see fit. You see, that’s also a violation of the 10th commandment.

We live in a time in which God’s providence and property rights are no longer acknowledged by the civil government. And as a result, we have covetousness reigning in the land. Now, what do we do about all this?

Covetousness has an eschatology to it. I want to touch on briefly here. That eschatology should help us remember to avoid this sin in our own lives and try to avoid it in the lives of our civil state as well.

I’ve listed a bunch of scriptures here for you. The first on that line there, Psalm 73, Proverbs 3:31, Proverbs 23:17. We won’t look at them now. We won’t read them. But suffice it to say that all those talk about the dangers that there’s repeated admonitions not to covet the wicked or evil people. You see, that’s one of the great temptations to the believer is to say the wicked people have all this wealth they’ve built up and we’re going to start coveting that wealth. And God reminds us don’t do that. And the reason he affixes he puts on the end of that warning to us is he reminds us to remember the end of the wicked.

You see those property values that they have are only for a period of time and then the wicked are cut off and come to an end. And so one of the ways in which we should remind ourselves to avoid the sin of covetousness of illegally wanting what somebody else has is to remember the end of the wicked.

Additionally, Proverbs 14:30 rather says that the end of covetousness is death. It says that covetousness is rottenness to our bones. It’s like bone cancer. Okay. Now, you’ve probably known people that think they might have cancer, maybe not. And it’s a big deal, right? You wait for those tests to get back from the doctor. We pray about it a lot. And we really get real involved. If for instance, somebody this week in church thought they might have bone cancer, we’d send a prayer announcement shooting around the church, you know, through the phone tree praying about the test results.

But see, this is just as deadly to a person as bone cancer is what Proverbs 14 says. It says, “Covetousness is rottenness to the bones. It eats you away and kills you eventually and causes you to go into death.” And see, I guess what I’m saying is the sensitivity we have to bone cancer ought to be our sensitivity to starting to desire our neighbor’s property, our neighbor’s wife, our neighbor’s husband, and starting to compare our property to their property and then beginning this covetousness working inside of us.

Very important that we avoid that. I think the biggest thing though I want you to remember in terms of trying to avoid covetousness is first of all its proper definition. Now what I said may have been quite evident about this idea of not all desires being wrong. However, it is important to realize that in the last 50 years maybe 100 years of the church people have routinely quoted the 10th commandment as a prohibition against desiring to better oneself.

And so if you want for instance a better car or a better house or you want to have more children, you say, “Well, you shouldn’t covet.” But see, that’s not what it’s talking about. The tenth commandment is a prohibition of desire for a specific thing. There is a schizophrenia, I think, an impossible thing to live within the church today that defines covetousness as any desire of anything. And of course, that just drives people crazy.

No person can live in the world today and try to root out and see a lack of desire as holiness and then work live up to that standard. So many churches today see all desire as wrong. And as a result, they have people out there who are continually guilt-ridden because they do desire, you know, their car to run a little better or their house to be a little better. And so they end up with this kind of schizophrenic thing going on in their head and they always feel guilty about what they’re doing.

And I think I for one I think it tends to make them doubt the faith at all because if they’ve been taught that the faith says you shouldn’t desire anything and they know that it’s absolutely unworkable with the way God has created us. Then they start giving up on the faith as a whole. And so it’s real important that we have a proper understanding that the definition of covetousness is a prohibition against wanting what somebody else has and taking away their property rights to it.

This is also helpful to us in helping deal with our own possible guilt. In a society that says that all desire and all accumulation of possessions is wicked and a violation of the tenth commandment. In a Christian community that says that, it’s real easy to start feeling guilty if you’ve been blessed by God materially at all.