QQ79-81. Which is the tenth commandment and what is required and forbidden by it?

A (79). The tenth commandment is, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

A (80). The tenth commandment requireth full contentment with our own condition, with a right and charitable frame of spirit toward our neighbor, and all that is his.

A (81). The tenth commandment forbiddeth all discontentment with our own estate, envying or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.

In the second installment of C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, called Perelandra, there is a profound dialogue that ensues between the Green Lady, who represents an “Eve” character on that primeval planet, before any fall into evil, and the devil character, Weston, who tempts her to take her stand on the “fixed land,” which was like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And so he says, “God wants you to disobey. God wants you to realize your full self: to ‘get older.’” She replies, “Surely what you’re saying is like fruit with no taste … to walk out of his will is to walk into nowhere.”1

Our outline will be as follows: (i) Covetous desires are inordinate desires [or concupiscence]; (ii) Covetous desires of the First Table are for another ultimate Good in object, manner, speech, or time. (iii) Covetous desires of the Second Table are for another ultimate Good in authorship, sexuality, life, property, truth, or anything else in reality.

Covetous desires are inordinate desires

Or, in other words: some other ultimate good. God has given ordered desires to man. Turretin writes that, “God has planted two principles in the mind of man: the avoidance of evil and the desire of good … Viewed in the genus of being and physically, these are neither good nor bad” Very well, then, what makes desires either good desires or bad desires, if desire as such was created good? Turretin completes the thought: [They draw] “all their moral goodness and evil from the quality of the objects about which they are exercised.”2 And what that “quality” will come to mean is “Has God made the object of that desire your lot?” The Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes states the problem from the perspective of God making us for ultimate things, yet we find ourselves in the world “under the sun,” like chickens with our heads cut off in Adam, scrambling around by habit for ultimate good, but looking in all the wrong places. 

“God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (Ecc. 7:29)

“he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecc. 3:11)

God has ordered desires by an infinite happiness. All finite joys that are good are good just insofar as they lead one to the Maker of their happiness. In a few of his writings, Augustine compares human beings in relation to God to a pilgrim ordered back to his home country. But even in order to get there, we must make use of things. But we run into a problem, and it’s just like Bunyan’s pilgrim in Vanity Fair. The sights and sounds and supplies of the place cast their worldly spell. 

A desire is disordered when it is not a means to the end of God. It can be all the same things desired, and now be bad. How so? Augustine divided things in the world between those that we enjoy and those that we use. Some of what we enjoy, we also use in order for some higher good. So I enjoy going to church because I enjoy the fellowship of the saints: that fellowship being a greater end than the location. And so there is a hierarchy of goods. But that has to terminate on some ultimate Good, enjoyed for the sake of no other, a Good that orders all lesser enjoyments to be merely uses in relation: a good that can never be lost. Each other good is seen to be good in order to attain one’s final and unlimited Good. Augustine confesses to God that, “He loves you too little who loves anything together with you, which he loved not for your sake.”3 So where does desire go wrong? How does the pilgrim get diverted from the course of his ultimate Joy?

There are two basic ways our desires become disordered. These two ways correspond to the Two Tables of the law. Either we get God wrong (and so sever our souls from the fountain of delight), or else we begin to pursue other good things below, but now in wrong ways (because they are out of order). Jeremiah calls attention to this total process in some very picturesque language about Israel:

“Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:11-13).

What is the imagery? Here is what the imagery is not. The imagery is not: “Water is bad!” Your thirst (i.e. human desire) is not evil. God created human beings as desiring beings. But note the comparison. Israel is pictured, face down, on its knees, groveling on a parched desert ground, searching for the slightest drop of spit to lick up, when the back of his whole body is drenched from the raging fountain of pure and infinite waters flowing behind him! So the Lord calls the inanimate objects of the universe to witness against this so-called “living,” “desiring,” thing. As Lewis wrote elsewhere,

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”4

So Israel there, groveling on the ground was not a picture of desire awakened, but of the suicide of desire. But we see this more clearly in the light of the specific commandments. So let’s look there.

Covetous desires of the First Table are for another ultimate Good in object, manner, speech, or time.

Sin covets a distortion of God himself. So it attacks the first commandment. It is for good reason that Paul says that coveting “is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Not only to want something that God has not given, but whenever we do that, we really want a different kind of God, because we instinctively know that he is the ultimate Giver. And in growing tired of that which is most familiar—God himself—we recapitulate the pride of Lucifer from the first fall. 

Sin covets a subjective religious form. So it attacks the second. When pragmatic mobs form in the church with the constant refrain, “It’s not working!” This is a coveting for pagan worship. There was the a warning, “that you do not inquire about [the neighboring nations’] gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods?—that I also may do the same’” (Deut. 12:30). But why the temptation? One example was Baal, who was god of fertility, including fertility of the land. So Israel was often tempted to turn to what they perceived would “work.”

Sin covets a cheapened theological speech. So it attacks the third. There are many offenders here, but one that I always run into is the young “seeker” of truth, the self-proclaimed “free thinker.” And what he covets is either exhaustive knowledge, which he mistakenly calls “certainty,” or else he covets an uncompromising masculine final solution, and only a language which boasts in it. I call this the goddess “Base” (which you may never heard of), but it is the new adjective for this virtue. But if I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a hundred times. The young man is always running into that next objection, that next YouTube debate, that next mocking from a classmate, or that next puzzling conflict in the biblical text, and he gets impatient with God’s word or else God’s way of fighting through the church. The young man has never rested where it says that, 

“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29).

And so he lashes out against this “lack” of exhaustive knowledge which belongs to no one but God, or else or this “lack” of cultural response; and he carries on about his free thinking and his baseness, floating from here to Rome to Eastern Orthodoxy to bizarre combinations of the mystical, to anarchy, to the most obscure conspiracy theories, and all the while throwing around the name of God as if it were an accessory on his intellectual trip. 

Sin covets a dispensable time of assembly. So it attacks the fourth. People are reluctant to go to church for parallel reasons that they are reluctant to tithe. Chick-fil-A has more faith than most Christians, closing on Sunday! What’s the connection? It could be the sports one will miss on Sunday, or food or sleep. But Israel was more honest about their lack of faith: 

“They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved. They spoke against God, saying, ‘Can God spread a table in the wilderness?’” (Ps. 78:15-16)

Now that isn’t about tithing or the Lord’s Day, but it is their grumbling about the food that we are told later represents the Word of God coming down from heaven. But what’s the disbelieving question? “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?” In the unbelieving heart, that’s a rhetorical question that is already loaded with the answer, No. He has not. My cup does not runneth over! Goodness and mercy have not followed me all my days! I will make my own days. The refusal to understand the Lord’s Day is a coveting to remake time itself. 

Covetous desires of the Second Table are for another ultimate Good in authorship, person, sexuality, property, truth, or anything else in reality.

Sin covets a different storyline than God’s appointed authors. So it attacks the fifth. Egalitarianism in the church and home is 100% coveting the general’s position in a war that the brochures for Egalitarianism don’t tell you is even going on. “War? Generals? What! Typical toxic masculinity!” But God has ordained a story in which he put enmity between the promised Seed and the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). There has never been a real world, in this world, in which the home and the church were not battleships sailing toward eternity and under fire by the pirate vessels of hell. And God designed a grown man to author that course in a way that he hasn’t designed women, or children who are still growing for. So we might think of 1 Timothy 2:12-14 as Paul’s statement against coveting the male office, or, switching gears to another different office, 1 Samuel 8, where the mob made it clear to Samuel that their reason for wanting a king was to be just like all the other nations. 

Sin covets what some life either guards or obstructs. So it attacks the sixth. James poses the question in this way, 

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (Jas. 4:1-2).

Sin covets a body to use for one’s own momentary gratification. So it attacks the seventh. What was Samson’s rationale for the first Philistine woman to his parents, after they pleaded with him to take a wife from the daughters of Israel? He said, “Get her for me, for she is right in my eyes” (Judg. 14:3). 

Sin covets the material resources that God has entrusted to another. So it attacks the eighth. One does not know “want” to the degree that his needs have been met. Even in this cursed world, the Christian can say, “I have been given more than enough and better than I deserve.” What need do I have of other property? Paul tells us,

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be acontent. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Phi. 4:11-12).

Sin covets the definition of the facts in a particular case. So it attacks the ninth. It covets the applause of getting the truth first, exalting oneself as more clever than our neighbors. And as we saw, it was out of Ahab’s lust for Naboth’s vineyard that Jezebel set her false witnesses in motion (1 Kings 21:10). Our sermon in Matthew’s Gospel last Sunday was partly the outworking of that flow of idolatry. We can get a better sense of the words of Jesus, that, 

“out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Mat. 15:19).

The verses already looked at in Colossians 3 and James 4 show us why idolatry is the root of these—“the heart that is set on the flesh is hostile to God” (Rom. 8:7). All of the objects we seek to obtain in breaking any of these commandments have become ultimate. They have become our gods. 

APPLICATION

Use 1. EVANGELICAL USE. The answer to Heidelberg Q.113 uses the words “NOT EVEN THE LEAST INCLINATION OR THOUGHT.” This is why the Tenth Commandment lends itself so much to the probing evangelical use. It is designed to search down into the heart of inordinate desires. Obedience to it says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me” (Ps. 139:23-24). And the Westminster Larger Catechism, answers the Question (148) about what is forbidden, as “discontentment with our own estate.” By ESTATE here it means our whole lot from God’s hand. The Puritan Thomas Manton called “grumbling … scum of discontent or the bold complaints that flow from a polluted mind.”5 or in other words like the dirty foam that is cast up from wave after wave of discontentment of the heart. The law here presses down to the heart. Grumbling is the symptom, but a lack of love for our lot is the disease. 

Paul’s secret to contentment (Phi. 4:11) is to be learned by all Christians. What makes us see that our hearts are not like this is the law. Paul says, “I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead” (Rom. 7:7-8). Paul’s words here are saying, not that the law made you covet, but that the light of the law “produced,” or in other words, illuminated that grumbling heart that was already lashing out blindly in the dark.

Use 2. CIVIL USE. How do we know that our own social involvement or thoughts about opposing evil are idolatrous thoughts? That is a persistent question when applying the civil use. The idea of coveting what is outside of God’s providence and calling for us, in my view, is the best measure of this. Coveting a different country or regime, or a different outcome to the latest election, or an unrealistic end to the next—all of this can lead immediately to irresponsible behavior in relation to the public square. One historian of the American founding era wrote about the dire moments of 1776, and about the defining qualities of one of its great leaders, that, 

“Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.”

Things as they are is really a synonym for things as God has given. Ideology is the modern world’s alternative to real whole-world thinking. Ideology is the modern enemy of providence. Instead of thinking God’s thoughts after Him, in the infinite sea of what He has chosen to reveal and to order, the modern mindset is not a mind after truth or justice at all. It is a grasping at something temporal and trying to explain all things by it. It is not just a harmless, childish utopianism, but it is James 4:4 on the grand scale: an exaltation of one mind’s ideal state of affairs. Every ideologue his own benevolent dictator. 

Listen to an ideologue. Try to reason with one. In fact, try to change the subject. You can never do it. Everything comes back to a psychologizing of race or sex, or to the revolution, or to markets, or to genetic engineering, or to the latest conspiracy, or the latest crisis that the media informs us to panic over. We all long for a time which is not here. And before long, we long not as ones who are waiting on the Lord’s times and seasons, but as ones with an inordinate desire for that “fixed land” of Perelandra, which can lead to zealotry and violently grasping at change, or even (its opposite), to retreat in denial and numb the moral sense in a vat of sports and entertainment and video games and shopping and endless small talk. But we ought not fool ourselves: all of these extremes are born out of coveting.

Use 3. DIRECTIVE USE. In every area of life coveting is not a victimless crime. Clearly we cannot effectively love our spouses or nurture our children if we are consumed with thoughts of what might have been, let alone what we wish were here now. Even at work, we can see this, that we will be most ineffective in our task to the degree that we spend our energies on coveting another job. Our sinful natures are a bottomless sea of sin, and coveting is that anchor cast off to another shore that isn’t real, but which will sink us down, and sweep us off the deck, where God has called us to steer the ship of our loved ones (and our own souls), onward to that eternal shore. This is the meaning of the Proverb, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you” (4:25).

______________________

1. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra.

2. Turretin, Institutes, II.11.21.1.

3. Augustine, Confessions, 10.29.40.

4. Lewis, The Weight of Glory,

5. Thomas Manton, Jude (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1999), 186.