Finally, we arrive at the tenth commandment. We are accustomed to rules and lists of rules. Every home has its rules; every family has its rules; every institution has its rules. We go to school, and whether the first grade or in kindergarten or wherever we begin, we began with understanding the rules. If you join the Boy Scouts (and I presume if you join the Girl Scouts), you get a list of rules. In school everyone has to follow the leader, everyone has to walk quietly in line, everyone sits in his own desk. In the Boy Scouts you cannot go swimming without a buddy.

When we want to drive and we cannot wait to get the learners permit, the first thing we have to do in order to get the learners permit in order to learn how to drive is we have to show that we know the rules ahead of time. You have to go in to get a learners permit, and the test you take is a test of rules. You may not know anything about the feel of a steering wheel, you may not know anything about how the braking system works, but you have to know the rules. You have to know what the yellow line means. You have to know what the double yellow line means. You have to know what the stop sign means, and you have to know what all the signals mean.

We go to college or graduate school, and living in a society like ours, one of the things you have to publish as an institution is a handbook, and the handbook comes including rules. There are more rules. It is not exactly the same anymore (seminary students are not told the walk quietly and silently in line!), but still, it seems there are a minimal number of principles and rules that are absolutely necessary to regulate our life together. Without them we would be left with chaos and subjectivity and incivility and worse. By the inclination of our fallen hearts, we incline ourselves towards a rule-based culture. And a part of what makes a rule-based culture very comfortable for us is that we feel like we are just fine so long as we are inside the rules. If we can just see the list and understand that we do not break these rules, then we can feel like we are at home and we are at peace and all is well with our souls. It is a lie, of course, because the rules can't save us.

When we come to the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, we are not merely looking at ten rules. They do regulate, they are to serve certainly with the force of a rule, but they go far beyond rule. This is law; this is divine revelation; this is divine command. And yet, there is this sense, even as we read the Ten Commandments (and this is one of the reasons why Luther had something of a double-minded approach to the Ten Commandments), it is easy to read these commands and say, “Well, I don't break that one, and I don't break this one, so I must be fine.” It is an illusion! It is a lie and it is wrong! And it does not work when you get to number ten. Because when we come to the conclusion of the Ten Commandments, we find that command which we all must admit we break, we have broken, and we will break in the future. The tenth commandment:

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 belongs to your neighbor.Exodus 20:17, NASB

This is the first of the commands that directly addresses itself to the internal life. Out of all of the Ten Commandments, this is the only command that gets to the interior. This is the only command that reaches to the intention of the heart. This is the only command that (more like what we read in the Sermon on the Mount) takes it not only to what we do, but to even what our desire might be and where our wants might lie. We are reminded that unlike the teacher in kindergarten or the first grade who can read our behaviour but cannot read our minds, and unlike the scoutmaster and unlike the dean of students, and unlike all the rest who can read only the externals, God, the One who gave us this law, reads the soul and reads the heart. He knows our covetousness.

Thou shalt not covet. This word itself is very strange to our modern ears. Just think about the process of parents raising children. The usual moral vocabulary we use with our children these days probably does not include the word “covet.” Unless we are teaching a catechism (and I hope you are), and unless we are going through the Ten Commandments (and I hope you are), then in all likelihood, just in the common ordinary living of life and teaching of our children, in our going out and our coming in and our sitting down and our standing up, in the kitchen, in the car and on the playground, it is unlikely that this is the word we would choose to use. We might use “envy” (that is included in covetousness). We might use “jealousy” (that is included in covetousness).

The Ten Commandments as a Whole⤒🔗

This is a very important word, and its Hebrew root is very, very important. Even as it is a strange word to modern times and is not often mentioned by parents of children, or even by adults in common, ordinary conversation, it is an indispensable word, as we shall understand. Because once again, we are reminded that the Ten Commandments are not ten little rules for children; they are ten commandments for grownups. The Decalogue. It is more than the “big ten.” This is a symphonic whole. And the key to interpretation is to understanding that this law that is given unto us is not merely divisible into ten different principles, or commands, or moral instructions; it is one comprehensive whole that is for our good. It is addressed to us so that we would know what a covenant-keeping God requires of the people with whom he is in covenant. The covenantal love and expectation of God as the One who gives the covenant and makes the covenant and the suzerainty treaty, in which it is the Conqueror who is setting down terms to the conquered. It is the Rescuer to the rescued. It is the Lord to his people. Here we see what God, our Sovereign, believes is good for us.

As Christians, we read the Ten Commandments knowing that in these commands are instructions, but beyond instructions, there is information here for our souls that we desperately need to know. We desperately need to know what covetousness means. We desperately need to know what it means to covet, and why there is sickness and death in coveting, and why it is so seductive, that we should give ourselves to this. And the key to interpretation is understanding that the Decalogue is not merely a list of ten; it is a symphonic whole. It is a comprehensive claim: This is what Yahweh demands of his people.

And the first commandment and the tenth commandment are like bookends to make the symphonic comprehensiveness of the Decalogue clear. Because even as the first Commandment (“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me”), underlies all of the other commandments, so also when we reach the tenth commandment, we reach the one that helps to explain all of the other commandments. We begin with monotheism and the total claim of a God upon his people. We come at the end to understand that there is in the end not merely the external commandment that is addressed to our actions; here there is the command that reaches directly to the heart and deals with our desire.

Wrong Desire←⤒🔗

And that word “desire” infuses our understanding of this entire Decalogue. Because the whole problem with the attempt to worship an idol, the whole issue of the attempt to name God according to our names, to picture God according to our preferences, to make an idol of our own design, our own personal preference, our own personal private God, is a desire to have the God we would create rather than the God who created us. We desire what belongs to his name and his name alone. That is a wrong and evil and deadly desire. We desire to rob him even of his day; we would have that day for ourselves. We would have his authority for ourselves and his rights for ourselves. We desire these things. We desire to be autonomous rather than to obey our parents and respect our parents.

We desire our neighbour’s things. We desire our neighbour’s life. We desire our neighbour’s reputation. We desire our neighbour’s wife. We desire. We desire! We desire sometimes, this commandment warns us, our neighbour’s house.

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 belongs to your neighbor.Exodus 20:17, NASB

The apodictic negation here is repeated: “You shall not.” You shall not! And there is unusual specificity here, and the specificity fits the situation of God's covenant people Israel. Reading this with 21st-century eyes, it is very easy to say that we have never coveted our neighbour’s ox or his donkey. But we may have coveted his Lexus, or his lawn, his clothes, or his athletic ability, her wardrobe, or her children. Covetousness seems to get right to the marrow of our bones.

This double negation is very interesting because it is, obviously, without parallel in the Ten Commandments. This is the double one (“You shall not…you shall not”). And for this reason, by the way, there are others who count the commandments differently. But I believe the Reformation structure of counting the commandments is right. I believe this is one comprehensive commandment, and it addresses itself to us in a double negative. “You shall not…you shall not.” This gets right after the very root of what it means to covet, which is to desire that which is wrong to desire. To want that which it is wrong to want.

A Culture of Coveting←↰⤒🔗

Several scholars suggest that even as this word is difficult to match in terms of an English analogue, perhaps the best way to put it is that coveting means to “hanker after.” That certainly helps, because that is a phrase I am sure you use every day…not! But it does communicate. We are hankering people. We hanker after things, and we live in a society that tells us that we ought to be hankering even more. Just look at the advertising. Just look at the culture that surrounds us. Listen to the discourse of our times. Watch the images that come before our eyes. We are told that you are what you own. You are what you buy. You are what you wear. You are what you want. You are what you drive.

Just in the last few days I have been in some remarkable places, [including] a couple of university cultures—very elite universities. And you can almost taste in the air the promise that “You are your degree.” You are your alma mater. You are this this. This is who you are. You should desire to be here and you should make this the focus of your desire. And by the way, if you do come here, then when you graduate all these other things will come unto you as well. The Lexus and the Mercedes, the law firm and the medical practice, and the cultural accolades. We are a hankering people. Some for some things; other folks for other things. But if we are really honest, we are hankering people.

The Seduction of Coveting←↰⤒🔗

The problem is: we hanker after the wrong things. You shall not. You shall not! You shall not covet. It is more emphatic, lengthier and more detailed than the other commandments. And it must be because there is a particular seduction to this whole sin of coveting. It must be that we would blind ourselves to this quite naturally. We can hardly blind ourselves to the fact that we committed murder. We can hardly deny the fact that we would have committed adultery, or that we would have disobeyed parents, or that we would have made an idol to ourselves. But it must be that, given this commandment that reaches to the interior of the heart, we have the capacity as fallen human creatures to lie to ourselves about what we are doing. And that is [why] this last commandment comes with this double negation and with this specificity.

Luther said that this last commandment is addressed not to those whom the world considers wicked rogues, but precisely to the most upright, to people who want to be commended as honest and virtuous, because they have not offended against the previous commandments. We read the Ten Commandments, we hear the Ten Commandments, and we receive the Ten Commandments. “Commandment number one…never done that; I have always been a monotheist. Commandment number two…never done that! Commandment number three…no! Four….” Moving on to five, we are caught! But when we get to murder and adultery and stealing and bearing false witness and these things, it is very easy (and with all the commandments) to say, “You know, that is just not who I am. That is just not what I do. There was that time, yes, that I did disobey my parents, but that was taken care of.” But when you get to coveting, we realize that we are not only nailed, we are kind of nailed in progress. It is like the indictment comes down in the middle of the performance of the crime, and it is like we are men and women in motion—the motion of coveting.

Luther speaks to the seductive power of this particular sin by saying that it affects those who look morally upright. It affects those who go to church. It affects those who are preachers and teachers of the Word. It affects all of us, because it is so insidious. Luther went on to say that we know how to put up a fine front to conceal our rascality. We are hankering rascals—that is what we are! Luther is right! Andrew Fuller, that great Baptist, said:

It has long appeared to me that this species of covetousness will in all probability prove the eternal overthrow of more characters among professing people than almost any other sin. And this because it is almost the only sin which may be indulged in a professor of religion and at the same time supported.The Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Volume IV, 1824

If we are not careful, we will even support each other in our covetousness. “You want that? Go for it! If you want it, it must be that you should have it. Want a bigger church? Want sweeter people? Want this? Want that? What could be wrong with that?”

The Deceitfulness of Riches←⤒🔗

The deceitfulness of riches. This is very interesting. Clearly there is a materialistic aspect to this tenth commandment. After all, the warning is about coveting a neighbour’s house, his wife, his male or female servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

In Matthew 13 Jesus spoke of the parable of the sower and the soils. He spoke of that thorn, that weed-infested soil, in which the good seed of the gospel appears to take root, but it never actually takes root, because it is strangled out by the thorns, and it never bears fruit. And you know Jesus’ words of condemnation against those who never bear fruit! What does Jesus describe as the problem? What is the weed that infests this garden? It is the deceitfulness of riches.

This is a constant biblical theme. This is just basic biblical theology. The big lie is that we are what we own, or we can be what we want to own. That we are what we wear, or we are what we drive. What we do when get a new car? You have to show it to someone! What fun is it to have it if someone else isn't going to covet it? That is a drive by invitation to covet! Very few of us have ever done that with an ox. I wouldn't know a good ox from a bad ox! But the point is: this is just so close to us.

Materialism and Consumerism←↰⤒🔗

Some of you will remember the television program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. What was odd about that program is that you never actually saw anyone rich or famous; you just saw their stuff. And that was evidently enough. People will be shown this celebrities home, and you never actually even saw the celebrity in it! You just had to take Robin Leach's word that that was his house. “Here is all his stuff—magnificent stuff, lots of stuff, stuff you are never going to own but can watch on the TV. You can aspire to have this stuff, but you are never really going to have this stuff. This is his stuff. You are not going to see him using his stuff either; you just let Robin Leach show you his stuff. And people watched it!

We are living in a new gilded age. We are living in, it seems, a new age in which the prosperity theme comes back, the materialism becomes the warp and woof of the culture. And if we are really honest, we have to admit some things together. And that is that consumerism is as much a danger to our souls as anything we can possibly know. Consumerism is as much of a threat to our families as anything we could possibly detect. Consumerism and materialism are as a much a threat to our churches as any other heresy we might envision or any other sin we might understand. Because it does come into us and its false promises are so easily accepted by all of us.

Why are so many families in such desperate shape? Why are so many parents so distracted? Why are there so many latchkey children who come home? It is because we live in a society that praises covetousness. I am not saying there are no situations in which that must be necessary for a family to thrive. I am simply saying most of what we define as necessary now has to do with expectations that meet our new gilded age, which is a completely artificial thing!

This past weekend, speaking at a conference, we were discussing the whole issue of children. This morning we are even going to have the opportunity to pray for children and to meet some new members of the Southern Seminary family. And the net reality is that most people seem to be having fewer children. Why? “Because we cannot afford more” is what so many times is the answer. It is as if people in the past times who were having more were wealthier than we are now! We do not even hear the illogic of what we have to say.

It is interesting to listen to the young. It is interesting to listen to the young person who comes up and says. “I am really, really turned off by the materialism of the established church and its consumerist mentality and all that. And that is why I am doing this over here. We are merging out. We do not want that.” Well, find me one without an iPod! It is just a different covetousness. It is just different there. Is it right to rail against consumerism and materialism? You bet! But it is really hard to do that with credibility unless we admit we are already in this web, we are already in this goo, we are already in this covetousness culture. And it infuses our minds and thinking as well.

Do you know that there are interior designers now that parents can hire to design designer bedrooms for their adolescent children? Do you see all the babies in designer clothes? We may see some this morning, and I do not mean that as an insult. We all live there. And not only that, every grandchild usually has grandparents. We do know how this works! But there is something really odd about putting this little creature in a horribly expensive little thing that in a flash he or she is going to grow out of. The designer is living off on some Caribbean island because we are falling for this!

Recognizing our Own Covetousness←↰⤒🔗

It is so easy to point at the covetousness of others. It is so easy to point at the consumerist failures of others. But this is my story; this is our story. I am deeply imbedded in this. It is so easy to see this! I am struck by this command. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 7, this command kills us. We look here and we find ourselves so easily.

It is amazing how so many of the most famous streets and avenues we know are nothing more than the parades of capitalism, consumerism and of covetousness. How many of us don't know Rodeo Drive, Worth Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Michigan Avenue? It is all there! All the avenues. And even if we cannot afford these things, we love to walk and look at them. It is kind of like watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. We can at least walk along Rodeo Drive and take pictures of the Rolls Royces!

I was in California and I walked out of a restaurant, and there was a very excited valet. His excitement was tangible. The host who had taken me to dinner was driving me in a pickup truck. [And] this driver was getting ready to show us a $1,250,000 Lamborghini parked right there in front of the restaurant. I did not know that a car could cost that much! (Transcription of audio file from 26:40 to 27:35 omitted.) I looked at that, and I immediately got over any coveting, replacing that with hypocrisy. Because I immediately jumped to: “If I had that kind of money, I wouldn't spend it on a Lamborghini! If I had that kind of money, I think it would be sinful to spend it on a car like that.” If I had that kind of money, well, it would just be my own covetousness. We can so easily look at this and deceive ourselves.

Jesus in Matthew 6 said:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth….but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal.Matthew 6:19-20, NASB

Coveting kills! We read:

Then [Jesus] said to them, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.”Luke 12:15, NASB

Even when one has an abundance, we always tend to think, “If we can just get from here to there, we will be happy there!” At least Nelson Rockefeller was honest. When he was asked by a reporter one time, “How much money does it take to be satisfied?” he, one of America's richest men, said, “A little more.” And that is the way it is. Jesus warns us about covetousness. He picks up on the command and he speaks of the deceitfulness of riches. And he speaks of the way that it steals the soul.

Not All Desire is Wrong←⤒🔗

And yet, it is really a danger for us that we would misread this and that we would decide that the problem is desire. It would be very easy for us to see that desiring our neighbour’s house or ox or wife or servant or anything is what is wrong, and so we need to replace desire with no desire. But brothers and sisters, that is Buddhism, not Christianity. Buddhism is about the renunciation of desire. The tenth commandment is not about the renunciation of desire; it is about replacing the wrong desire with the right desire.

The problem of the tenth commandment is that it directly violates the first. We are placing another god before us: the god of this object or the god of that consumer product or this lifestyle or this or that aspiration. Christianity is not Buddhism; it is not the renunciation of desire. Rather, it is, by God's grace and by the sanctifying power of Word and Spirit, an exchange of a lesser desire for a greater desire. Of a temporal desire for an eternal desire. Of a corrupting desire for a sanctifying desire.

Desiring the Things of God←↰⤒🔗

We are to desire Christ. We are to desire the glory of God. We are to desire the fellowship with the one true and living God. We are to desire those things that are above. We are to desire heaven.

And a part of what it means to desire heaven is to understand that there and there alone will our satisfaction be found. Here there can be no satisfaction. Our stuff will burn, our stuff can be stolen, our stuff will corrupt, our bank accounts will dissipate, and the interest rates will fall. The moment you drive it off the lot it is a used car. Everything tends towards its own dissolution. Moths eat it, rust destroys it, or thieves steal it.

We are not to renounce desire; we are instead to find the right desire. We are to forfeit the wrong desire. We are to let go of the desire for material goods and earthly pleasures—these things that so can so easily eclipse our desire for the things of God. In Psalm 73 we find a wonderful testimony to this, where the psalmist writes in the beginning of this Psalm of how this became a snare for him:

But as for me, my feet came close to stumbling, my steps had almost slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant as I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no pains in their death, and their body is fat. They are not in trouble as other men, nor are they plagued like mankind.Psalm 73:2-5, NASB

Oh, it is so easy to do this. This is why people watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous when it was on. This is why people like to look at these people and look at the elite and see the celebrities or drive in the rich neighbourhoods and say, “These people must be happy. These people must be fulfilled. Their desires must be sated.” But it isn't so. There are actually problems that the rich have that the poor cannot even afford. There are pathologies of those who have too much that those who have too little will never understand.

But it is very interesting that this tenth commandment is a leveller of humankind, because rich and poor alike can covet. For that matter, rich and poor alike do covet. In Psalm 73 we read that honest assessment, and then we see the turn that takes place. We look at the end of the Psalm, and by the time we come to the end, the Psalmist has been confronted with his covetousness. He has not renounced desire; instead, he now desires the things above. He now desires God.

Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth.Psalm 73:25, NASB

So one desire forfeited; the other desire embraced. In Luke 18:18 and following Jesus encounters the rich young ruler. We know he is rich and we know he is young and we know he is a ruler when you put all the passages together. But what we find here is that there is this man, and it is the exact same game that we know we can play with ourselves. When he says, “What must I do to be saved?” Jesus recites the commandments to him. And he very easily says, “Well, I have kept all those.” Done! I went to Sunday school and was raised by good Jewish parents! And then Jesus shows him how far short he falls of the commands. It is fascinating, because we are told in Luke 18 that he went away sad (verse 23).

[Jesus] said to him, “One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But when he had heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.Luke 18:22-23, NASB

The tenth commandment can bring some sadness, because it does nail us. And it can also bring some sadness because it forces some options. The rich young ruler went away. This is a picture of how the deceitfulness of riches can entrap the soul, even unto death. A “hankering after”: that is what this covetousness is. It is so easy to hanker after something else. When Jesus told him to sell all that he had and give it to the poor, Jesus was not giving him a new gospel—a new gospel of liberation theology, a new gospel of wealth redistribution, a new gospel of the renunciation of all these things. Instead, it was a diagnostic test. It was like a CAT scan or an MRI of the soul, to reveal to this man the fact that even as he claimed to be a law-keeper, he was a law-breaker. He was not willing to do what Christ commanded. And covetousness was at the heart of it.

The Law Reveals Our Sin←↰⤒🔗

In Romans 7, where Paul is addressing himself to the law, making very clear that the law kills and the law cannot save, he then is very clear also to say that the law is nonetheless a gift.

What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.”Romans 7:7, NASB

“I would not have come to know sin except through the Law,” Paul says. And the example he gives is coveting. Because except for this command, and for the specificity of it and the moral force of it and the revelation of it, we would not see this for what it is. We would explain it as something else. We would dress it up as an appropriate desire. We would repackage it is a desire to do well, as a way of career enhancement, as a way of helping more people, of being a better steward with more rather than an inferior steward with less. We could dress all of this up. As Luther says, we can dress up our rascality. But the law gets to our heart. It gives this inner diagnosis. We would otherwise be deluded. We would be blind to our own sin. And the apostle Paul says, “For this reason, the law is grace to us.” It cannot save, but it kills us where we need to be killed. It diagnosis the problem. It gets to the heart of the issues. It makes us realize what sinners we are, in order that we can understand what a Saviour Christ is.

The Danger of Covetousness←⤒🔗

So how bad is coveting really? How insidious is it? Let's just be honest: What kind of deadly danger are we facing here? Calvin said this, “For if by law, covetousness is not dragged from its lair, it destroys wretched men so secretly that they do not even feel its fatal stab” (The Institutes, 2.7.6). It is that deadly. It is like a virus within us, and it is killing us when we don't even see it. It is there when we think it is dormant. John Chrysostom, the great preacher, said, “Even more dangerous than sins of the flesh is the sin of covetousness.” Chrysostom says something very interesting here. He says that even lust can be temporarily satisfied, but covetousness never is. It never sleeps; it never rests. Chrysostom said, “Look, it is the only sin that trumps lust.” It is true, isn't it?

Augustine, in his confessions, tells a story that gets right to the heart of this problem. It is probably the most famous account out of this great book, the first great Christian autobiography, where Augustine deals with his own confessions. It is an account of his soul. And he tells this story (he was a boy at this time):

There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit. One stormy night, we rascally youth set out to rob it and carry our spoils away. We took off a huge load of pears, not to feast upon ourselves, but to throw them to the pigs, though we ate just enough to have pleasure of forbidden fruit. They were nice pears, but it was not the pears that my wretched soul coveted, for I had plenty better at home. I picked them simply in order to become a thief. The only feast I got was a feast of iniquity. And that I enjoyed to the full. What was it that I loved in that theft? Was it the pleasure of acting against the law in order that I, a prisoner under rules, might have a maimed counterfeit of freedom by doing what was forbidden? The desire to steal was awakened simply by the prohibition of stealing. The pears were desirable simply because they were forbidden.Confessions of Saint Augustine, 1944

How bad is it? It is so evil, so wretched and so corrupting that it reaches the very centre of the human heart at its deepest level. And brothers and sisters, this is where it all started. The same Hebrew word used in Exodus in the Decalogue in the tenth command is used in Genesis 3:6. Here in the Fall, in this passage that is so familiar to us, the primal sin, is the same word. It is the wrong desire.

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.Genesis 3:6, NASB, emphasis added

She hankered after that which was forbidden. She wanted that one thing, and he wanted that one thing, they were forbidden to have. That is just how basic and fundamental this sin is. That is how insidious and seductive this sin is. It is why we so desperately need this tenth commandment. “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house…you shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour.”

We rightly shortened the commandment to this: Thou shalt not covet. It is a lifelong battle fought by the poor and the rich alike, but for the Christian it is of particular importance, and for the Christian minister, dare we say, it is of even greater importance. John Newton said this, speaking about covetousness among ministers:

Nothing is a greater bar to a minister's usefulness, or renders his person and labours more contemptible, than a known attachment to money, a gripping fist, and a hard heart…A day will come when mercenary preachers will wish they had begged their bread from door to door, or been chained to the oar of a galley for life, rather than to have presumed to intrude into the church upon such base and unworthy views.The Works of the Rev. John Newton, 1808, p. 501

There is more than this. We have evidence in the New Testament. Are we not chilled by the name Demas? In the closing verses of 2 Timothy, Paul speaks of Demas, and he says, “For Demas, having loved this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica” (2 Timothy 4:10). In Philippians 1:24 and in Colossians 4:14 Demas was with him. He, along with Luke and Paul, greeted the saints where the letters were written there to Colossae and to Philemon. Paul recognizes that Demas was with him during an awful period of persecution, even in Rome when he was in prison, and yet now as Paul's life is nearing its end, Demas has deserted him. And he deserted him because of the love of the things of the world.

There is a higher expectation of us. Once again, it is not the renunciation of desire; it is the exchange of a lesser desire for a greater, of a lower for a higher, of a temporal for an eternal. It gets to the heart of the great commandment that we are “to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind, and we are to love our neighbour as ourselves.” This brings together the first commandment with the rest of the commandments. The first and second tables of the law all comes down to this. The Lordship of Christ, the reign and the rule of Yahweh.

We need to know this. There is grace that we would know this. Even as the law kills, there is grace in it, as it tells us of our need. As Christians we are not called to less than Israel was commanded in the Ten Commandments; we are called to more as in the Sermon on the Mount. If it gets to the interior, we understand that for those who follow Christ it gets even closer to the interior.

This is why we so desperately need the Word and this is why we are so dependent upon the indwelling Spirit, because the only means of rescue is from above. We cannot free ourselves in the society in which we live. We cannot blind ourselves to the advertisements, to the commercials and to the billboards. We cannot ignore our neighbours. We understand these things are going on. And the bend of our hearts is towards covetousness. The lie that deludes and deceives so many will deceive us as well, but for the Spirit of God within us and the ministry of the Word of God to us. And thus, we reach the end these Ten Words.