Protestant Ethics Today: The Tenth Commandment
This is the final article in the series on Protestant Ethics Today. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, and part 10.
The last of the Ten Commandments is unique among the ten. It is a commandment focused exclusively on sinful desires. In describing his own life prior to his conversion, the apostle Paul writes in Romans 7:7 that God’s law was the means God used to reveal to him his own sin. Many have wondered why Paul points to the tenth commandment to elucidate his situation prior to conversion: “For I would not have known what it is to covet,” Paul writes, “if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’” Did Paul have a particular problem with the narrow sin of covetousness? Perhaps, but the word “covet” can also be translated as “desire,” which then explains why Paul would see this commandment as capturing the essence of all of the Ten Commandments: at the root of all specific sins is sinful desire. Thus, Paul, when summarizing God’s law, simply quotes the tenth commandment in this abbreviated form. Jesus does not quote the tenth commandment in the Sermon on the Mount, but Paul explicates the true and deeper meaning of God’s law in Romans 7 in much the same way as Jesus does in the sermon. Coveting, or sinfully desiring, something certainly includes an inordinate desire for specific things that one has no godly way of gaining for oneself (Exod 20:17: your neighbor’s house, wife, servant, animals, or anything else that belongs to him), but it addresses much more. It begins with the fundamental problem in every human heart: a longing for something forbidden by God.
In one sense, then, all sin begins here. In another, more specific, sense, the commandment is about “inordinate motions and affections to anything” (Westminster Larger Catechism, Answer 148) that belongs to our neighbor. That is to say: it is about discontentment with what God has given us and a resulting desire to take that which we cannot lawfully gain for ourselves. In Romans 1:21–23 Paul shows where such discontentment begins, namely with a lack of thanksgiving to God that lies at the root of mankind’s idolatrous rebellion against its creator:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Genuine thankfulness to God for all that he has given us is the antidote to covetousness. “The love of money” (or any of the things money can buy), on the other hand, “is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (1 Tim 6:10). I recently heard an old interview with the Beatles’ guitarist George Harrison in which he spoke of how he and his bandmates became fabulously wealthy at a very early age, and very rapidly. And yet he went on to describe what all men have come to find when seeking their happiness in earthly things: those things quickly proved themselves to be unable to bring true fulfillment. Solomon learned the same lesson 3000 years earlier (Ecclesiastes 2:10–11):
And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
The “great gain” all men seek, it turns out, is only to be found in “godliness with contentment” (1 Tim 6:6), “for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world” (1 Tim 6:7). In the same vein the author of Hebrews (Heb 13:5–6) writes to
Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say,
‘The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear;
what can man do to me?’”
In all of these passages, we see the truth of what is stated in the Westminster Larger Catechism (Answer 147), that only with “a full contentment with our own condition” will we be able to keep the tenth commandment truly from the heart.
According to the catechism, there are a variety of ways in which we will either be led to or led away from covetousness. We must, for example, seek to have “a charitable frame of the whole soul toward our neighbor, as that all our inward motions and affections touching him, tend unto, and further all that good which is his.” We must, in other words, begin by loving our neighbors, just as God loved us when we were his enemies (Matt 5:43–48; Rom 5:10; 12:20). Only then will we be able to think rightly about the things that belong to our neighbors. “Against such things there is no law,” Paul writes in Gal 5:23; law has become unnecessary because love prompts desires and affections toward our neighbor that willingly seek “all that good which is his” without external compulsion.
With all of God’s laws, true obedience begins in the heart. The tenth commandment reveals this fact powerfully, which is why the tenth commandment is, just as Paul understood it, a perfect summary of the entire law of God. Covetousness starts with discontentment regarding what God has given us and a lack of love toward our neighbors. The discontented and unloving heart, one not transformed by the love of God in Christ, naturally becomes consumed with “inordinate motions and affections” for anything and everything that God has not granted it. It seeks these things as substitutes for the greatest good, God himself. To this empty quest, Augustine wonderfully shows the way of rescue in the opening lines of his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
