A few months ago, a Facebook friend of mine posted a video of a new invention that caught my eye. It was a promotional piece about a new water-powered jet pack. Take a look.
Isn’t that cool? If you’re at all like me, after seeing it the first thought that occurs to you is, “I’ve got to get one of those!’ Think for a moment how strange that idea is. When you got up this morning, you weren’t thinking about a jet pack. Chance are, you have never even thought about getting one. So why do you all of a sudden want one?
I think it’s because you now know it exists. Sure, it costs $128,000, but it’s out
there and it’s available for the taking.
Now most likely, you’ll leave here today and not give the jet pack a
second thought. You won’t start
saving your money for one or go to your bank tomorrow morning to apply for a
jet pack loan.
Unless…
Unless other people you know start buying jet
packs. What if the people next
door get one? What if the price
comes down, and a family you know that makes less money than yours, or is less
educated buys one? Wouldn’t that
mean that you deserve a jet pack too?
Previously, the jet pack was just theoretical and you probably didn’t give
it much thought. But now, not only do you want a jet pack, you NEED one - and
as soon as possible!
Our desires are often not incarnated until we see
our neighbors possessions. When
our neighbors have things that we don’t, it awakens something in us, a sense
that we want that too. We may even
feel we deserve it or are entitled to it.
That awakened desire to have what others have is
called coveting. In this, the last
of the Ten Commandments, God prohibits it. A person who seeks to live life God’s way, does not
covet. We should not take things
that are not rightfully ours. Not
only that, we are not even to want them.
How can we possibly live up to such a high
standard? What’s so bad about
coveting? As long as you don’t
actually act on those bad desires, what’s the big deal?
All the other commandments dealt with our actions,
but this one deals with our thoughts and motivations. Over the centuries, some religious scholars have suggested
that this command only refers to coveting that leads to the wrongful action of
actually taking the property of another.
I disagree. I believe this
commandment prefigures the ethics of Jesus and his approach to the Law. Remember Jesus did not come to replace
Judaism with a better religion called Christianity. He himself said that he didn’t come to abolish the Jewish
Law, but to fulfill it. For
instance, as we saw a few weeks ago, the Ten Commandments prohibit the act of
adultery. Jesus took things even
further and said if you even look at someone else with lust, you have already
committed adultery in your heart.
Likewise, it seems to me that this commandment warns us that when we
lust after what others have, we have already committed sin in our heart.
When we talk about coveting, we aren’t only talking
about things, we are talking about people too. We can dehumanize people to the point of making them merely
objects to be coveted. We see an
example of this right here in this commandment. Notice we are instructed not to covet our neighbor’s wife. The husband isn’t mentioned. Why? As we saw a few weeks ago when we
explored the commandment on adultery, this is because women in the ancient
world were regarded as their husband’s property. Does this mean the Bible endorses that view of women? Even
worse, we are told not to covet our neighbor’s slaves. Does this mean the Bible endorses
slavery?
Sadly, some people in the past and even today would
say, “Yes.” However, I think it is important that we remember that, unlike some
other religions, we don’t claim our Scripture was dictated word for word by
God. The Bible is the Word of God,
not the words of God. As such, it
contains the shortcomings, not of God, but of the culture into which the Word
of God was spoken. This is a case
in point.
When we encounter such repulsive ideas in the pages
of Scripture, that doesn’t mean we should either pretend they aren’t there or
decide a commandment doesn’t apply to us.
In fact, such passages may provide us an opportunity to go even
deeper. Ironically, the fact that
we today are repulsed by the idea of treating people as property, should alert
us to the dangers of coveting.
Here’s why. At the heart of coveting is a
consumerist mindset. It is a
mindset where one looks at the world and continually asks the question, “What’s
in it for me?” What can I acquire
to make me better or happy.
We may even define ourselves by our acquisitions. When it comes to Facebook and other
social media, we’ll brag about what we consume, whether coffee or music, just
to create a desired impression. We
do it through our public wish lists on online shopping sites.
This consumerist mindset also covets and consumes
other people. In many ways, we
have not really come much further than our ancestors who treated women as
objects or owned slaves. We still
dehumanize other people and reduce them to mere commodities. Sometimes in overt ways such as
portraying persons as sexual objects in pornography and advertising. Sometimes in subtler way when we reduce
them to customers, voters, or even potential church members. We can collect friends, whether in the
real world or on Facebook, purely to satisfy our own desires, or for the
connections they have or the favors they can do for us. We often approach relationships, not
with a Christ-like attitude of sacrifice for the other, but seeking what the
other can do for me.
Consumerism is all about me and it’s driven by coveting. It puts us, not God, at the center of
the universe, in control, and deciding what we want and from whom we want
it. Consumerism is delusional and
coveting is the force that opens us up to that delusion.
Think of that jet pack again. I know, you haven’t forgotten it. This whole time, you’ve probably been
thinking, “So, when can I get one?”
Coveting the jet pack could open you up to all sorts of stupid
decisions. For instance, although
it now costs, $128,000, what if the price came down to just say $50,000? Now suddenly it’s much more
reasonable. If you bought one, you
wouldn’t be spending $50,000. You
would be saving your family $78,000.
What a responsible thing to do!
As a matter of fact, in an ideal world, shouldn’t you have a jet pack,
and instead of your your neighbor?
Isn’t that much more appealing than everyone having their own jet
pack? Do you see the ugliness to
which coveting can lead us.
This commandment gets at the root attitude that
causes us to violate all the others.
Sure, coveting can often lead to murder, to adultery, to stealing and to
lying. But our coveting also leads
us to use God’s name to justify those things; or create false gods of money, causes and power; or to fall
prey to generational narsicism and our own desires; or to keep so busy in
cycles of consumption and production that we never have a Sabbath balance in
our lives to hear the cry of the poor.
Our coveting even leads us to forget the first commandment, the one that
proclaims who God is and what God has done, since it puts we the consumer at
the center of the universe.
It’s funny how some Christians will get all bent
out of shape by a holiday like Halloween, but remain silent about the upcoming
secular holiday season. Sure they
will get upset about which megastore doesn’t say “Merry Christmas”, but ignore
the far bigger perversion of our faith which twists the birth of the one who
was the ultimate sacrifice into a festival of consumption. Beginning this Black Friday we enter
what often amounts to a cultural celebration of materialism and consumerism -
essentially a celebration of covetetness.
In the coming weeks of Advent, we’ll explore that more deeply.
As we finish this series on the Ten Commandments, I
would encourage all of us to do some deep self examination. I would bet we all break at least one
of these commandments each day.
Although we know we can seek forgiveness for that through Jesus, that
doesn’t mean we can just forget about these commandments and move on. Knowing
that, we need to ask ourselves what it is that trips us up. Quite possibly, it is this dark sin of
coveting that leads us to get in trouble with all the others. It is the delusion of thinking we are
the center of our consumerist universe or that fulfilling our desires will make
us happy.
This country has a founding document called the
Declaration of Independence. It
set forth the ideals of who we wanted to be as a people. Sometimes I like to think of the Ten
Commandments as our founding document.
They are the founding document of the Kingdom of God. They reflect who God wants us to be as
a people. When Jesus preached
about God’s Kingdom, he described a reign of justice, of righteousness and of
peace. In short, all the things to
which these Ten Commandments point.
If you want a description of what the Kingdom is like, it’s a world in
which people live out these commandments.
As the early Christian writers said, we are not
saved by these commandments. The
Christian life is not a matter of following these laws perfectly so that you
get into heaven. Following these
Ten Commandments is not about pleasing an angry God. Neither is it about getting saved and living your life
feeling you can these commandments because you went up to an altar call and
said a special prayer, while you wait to die and go to heaven. Although none of us can live up these
Ten Commandments, they are still our rule for life. More importantly, they are both a preview and the method for
transforming the world into what Jesus preached about, and what God dreams of
for Creation. We can only pray
that through the love of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, we will
be able to look back at our lives and say that these Ten Commandments were a
description of who we were.
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