You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s (Exodus 20:17).

If the first commandment God gave His people (“no other gods before Me”) set the tone for their relationship with Him, then this last of the Ten Commandments summarizes the relationship of a man to his neighbor. Do not covet . . . anything that is your neighbor’s. As we will see, this verse underlies all the sins that have been mentioned before–murder, adultery, dishonor to parents, stealing, false witness. All spring from the heart, and the heart is where covetousness lives.

Desiring Good Things

The word covet has as its root a word that means “pleasant; delight, beauty.” The word itself (Hebrew chamad) generally means “desire.” Most often it is used in a negative or bad sense, though Paul tells the Corinthians to covet, or earnestly desire, the best spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12:31). Notice that the Lord lists things that, at face value, are good. This should remind us of Eve’s experience in the Garden of Eden. After the serpent tempted her, we read that

[she] saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise (Gen. 3:6, emphasis added).

There are those words again: good, delight, desire. The things that Eve desired were good. In fact, as one writer said, she was not tempted by the evil side of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She was tempted by the good things. 

The Root of the Problem

As James says, that desire then gives birth to sin. He tells us,

You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions (James 4:2-3).

As we have said in previous posts, it is the nature of the flesh, of fallen man, to try to arrange for his own satisfaction, security, and happiness. He decides what he needs, then devises plans to get it. Often, he tries to enlist others (willingly or unwillingly). Yet, James points out that we often do not have because we do not ask. And when we do ask, we ask with wrong motives–to satisfy our fleshly desires. Instead of trusting God as a Father who wishes to give good gifts to His children, asking Him becomes simply another way to get what we want.

James calls such things “friendship with the world,” and he says that people who engage in such thinking are adulterers in their heart (James 4:4). How is this adultery? It is adultery because one has turned from God and turned to the world to supply those things that only God can supply. Such a person has now placed the world above God. What we learn here is this: one cannot walk as a friend of the world and a friend of God at the same time.

The Cure for the Problem

What is the solution to this? Like all sins we have talked about, real change must begin with repentance. To repent is to first change our thinking. We have attempted to do things our own way, provide for our own wants and needs, and turned away from God in the process. We must instead see Him as our loving, trustworthy Father, who provides all that we need. Then, we must turn to Him in dependence and trust, instead of the world.

We should also bear in mind that He really is good. In fact, He is so good that He promises this:

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday (Ps. 37:4-6).