10th Commandment: Do Not Desire Your Neighbor’s Possessions

We are at the 10th and final of the Ten Commandments. We made it. We're doing the 10th command, which is famously translated as covet. Do not covet. Do not covet. Now, that word is accurate, technically. But the word covet in English buries something that I think is really interesting, that I want us to see. Okay. So the Hebrew word here is hamad, and it's the word desire. You will not desire your neighbor's house. You will not desire your neighbor's wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Desire. Desire. Command 10 is different than all the others. So all the other commands refer to behavior that is observable, actions that you can see. Desire is completely internal. Yeah. So in a way, the 10th command comes back, and it addresses the thing upstream of murder and adultery and stealing and bearing false witness. Why would you do any of those things? Probably you have a desire that's driving your decisions. It's the undercurrent for everything. Now, not all desire is bad, just like in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh Elohim planted a garden in Eden. He placed there the human who he had formed, and Yahweh Elohim caused to sprout from the ground every tree desirable for sight and good for eating. Yeah.

So every tree in the garden is both desirable and it looks good. And that word desirable is the word hamad. So there's one tree then that will be desirable in the garden that will look good, and it's going to kill you, which is, of course, not good. So desire itself can lead to either life or to death. And I guess the question then raised by the tree is, how am I supposed to know the difference? Yeah, you need to learn to listen to the wisdom of God. Right. So it has to be significant that all of the wisdom of the 10 words ends right here with addressing human desire. And wisdom is all about training our desires to become more and more aligned with God's desires. And this is just like what Jesus taught us to pray, which is, may your kingdom come, Father, and may your desire be done.