What Shalt Thou Covet?

A Lucky Strike

In late August at a church youth camp, I began to wander aimlessly through the Word during the dedicated morning devotional time. A random walk through scripture is not usually the most rewarding method, but sometimes you roll the dice and win. As an adult counselor at a youth camp, it pays to be on the lookout for Bible “nuggets” that you might use in conversation or when leading group devotions. On this particular morning it was Proverbs 29:3 that jumped off the page.

It was the second part of the verse that immediately connected my mind to the prodigal son. If you needed to condense the entire parable into one sentence, Solomon would win first place for brevity while sacrificing the minimum meaning with this verse. The prodigal did indeed ignore wisdom and keep company with harlots and as a result he spent his substance and caused his father sorrow. When the prodigal finally returned to loving wisdom, his father rejoiced.

However, we can’t give Solomon credit for publishing history’s first cliff notes because he wasn’t alive when Jesus gave the parable of the prodigal. If anything, we could give him points for prophecy instead. The striking parallelism between Proverbs and Luke 15 is evidence that both books, written thousands of years apart by different men, really did have the same author – God.

And what a great nugget to share with a young person! The prodigal would certainly have had access to this pearl of wisdom. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish man who went to synagogue and heard the scripture read every week. It was possible that they even owned their own copies of certain portions of scripture. How on earth could the prodigal have made such poor life decisions when he had clear, scriptural guidance like this readily available to him?

The rest of the lesson writes itself and I gave it the title: “Prodigal Prevention”. This young man either did not read his Bible, or if he did read it, he wasn’t heeding what he read. With all the major life decisions looming in front of teenagers (marriage, career, where to live, zeal for God), if their only resolution was to find just one Bible principle to guide each choice they could avoid innumerable mistakes. I doubt this young man was praying for God to approve his plan to leave the home and live it up. Can you imagine that prayer? “God, would it be ok with you if I took all my money and spent it on prostitutes, substance abuse, and just left you out of it?”

He certainly had a humility problem. James tells us that it’s only the person who lacks wisdom that needs to ask of God for some. Who doesn’t lack wisdom? James uses clever rhetoric to show us that when we don’t ask God for wisdom every day, it’s because our pride tells us that we don’t need it. You never once see the prodigal ask God or anyone else for wisdom. And that’s another problem. He refuses to seek counsel for his decisions. In short he just does whatever was right in his own eyes and we know how that worked out.

So I put this in my back pocket and waited for the right moment to unleash this torrent of wisdom. But there was just one small problem. Months later, after I bothered to actually read Luke 15, I discovered the prodigal son was actually a rebuke to the Pharisees, not to the young and rebellious. And their big problem was not a lack of wisdom but a covetous heart. What!?

Welp

To properly understand what Jesus is teaching, the context is crucial. A key principle of public speaking is know your audience. You need to tailor your message and delivery to those listening to maximize your impact. We are introduced to the audience at the beginning of the chapter.

The publicans and sinners were there to listen, but the Pharisees and scribes arrived to murmur with displeasure that Jesus would bother with sinners. Our Lord chose not to respond with a lecture, but with four parables to upbraid the Pharisees and instruct those who came to learn. In short, Jesus was rebuking the Pharisees for valuing “stuff” over people and illustrates their hypocrisy with a series of parables.

“Hey Pharisees, if you had 99 sheep and you lost one, would you spend hours in the wilderness looking for it until you found it?”

Of course they would. Sheep were valuable and everyone knew that. Isn’t an eternal soul of greater worth than a lamb?

“Ok, but what about a lost piece of silver? Would you light a candle and clean the house from top to bottom until you found it?”

Now he was speaking their language – money. If you lose a $100 bill which of us wouldn’t spend at least a couple of hours looking for it? A silver coin was worth 1-2 days of full time labor in the time of Christ and that was worth more to the Pharisee than a repentant sinner.

And finally, the story of the prodigal son drives this home. If a lamb and a coin are worth pursuing until they are found, then how can we fault the father who ran to meet his returning son while he was yet a great way off?

Having this broader backdrop in mind, we begin to understand that the prodigal son was not a wayward teenager but rather he models you and me and every other sinner on earth. If we don’t see ourselves as the lost man in that story, then we are like the proud older brother who believes he has done nothing requiring repentance just like the Pharisees. Truthfully everyone could place themselves in one of two categories: prodigal or repented prodigal. I became a repentant prodigal when I knelt in my bedroom as a 16-year-old and asked God to cleanse the filth I’d accumulated serving in the pig pens of the world. But before I had even started up the stairs, my father in heaven had already seen me a great way off and was running to meet me.

You can’t prevent anyone from being a prodigal. All any of us can do is recognize that we are one and come back to the father and our senses.

Now What?

After throwing out my preconceived conclusions and finally getting to the heart of the story, I now had to scramble. What is the message to a young person (or any person) that Jesus wanted us to hear? Let’s take a look at the next chapter.

Remember, all of these parables starting in chapter 15 were for the Pharisees and Jesus points out that their big problem was covetousness. What does it mean to covet and why is it so bad?

When God gave Moses the ten commandments, the reason behind each one is usually pretty obvious. Don’t have other gods or make idols because there is only one true God. He made everything and as his creation we owe him our worship and we should fear him enough not to take his name in vain. Remember the sabbath day and learn to trust God and have faith that he will provide. Honor your father and mother and God will reward you. Don’t kill, commit adultery, steal or lie. I wouldn’t want to live in a society where any of those were acceptable.

But what about coveting? Why is it wrong to want what your neighbor has? Can’t we admire and desire a good-looking wife like Bob’s from next door? He’s got a personal chef, a Tahoe, a Hummer EV, a basketball court, and a pool. Is it a sin to want any of those things just because someone we know also owns it?

The answer is that the word “covet” means much more than to simply want something. It means inordinate desire. Inordinate literally meaning not ordinary. If you see that your neighbor owns an ATV and you decide you want one too, you’ve not yet begun to covet. But when you wake up every morning and rush down to your computer to look at prices and customize and build your order and then fantasize about it and talk about it whenever you can fit it into a conversation… that’s coveting. Your desire for an ATV in that moment has gone outside the ordinary. Someone else could look at your life and say, “Wow he really wants an ATV a lot more than most people, I wonder if he’s OK.”

Because we live in a house of flesh, the things for which we have extreme desire are overwhelmingly of this world. This is why scripture can condemn covetousness in almost every place it appears. Jesus himself would warn two men quarreling over their inheritance to “Take heed, and beware of covetousness”. The danger is that the human heart can only hold a strong desire for one thing at a time and everything else is not just second place – it is despised.

Consider Esau despising his birthright because his desire for food overshadowed everything else. When Amnon wanted his sister Tamar, nothing would stop him from achieving his goal, but when his strong desire moved on to something else, he despised her. Even the prodigal son wanted his independence and freedom above anything else and he despised wisdom, patience, and his family that raised him. This is why coveting your neighbor’s stuff is so dangerous. It causes you to despise God, his kingdom will rarely enter your thoughts, and you will despise others who believe otherwise.

The covetous hearts of the Pharisees didn’t just produce apathy in their hearts for the lost. Much worse, they were actively campaigning against Jesus and anyone who would show care for sinners! If this world’s goods were a woman, the Pharisees brought her daily flowers and their incessant wooing of her affections caused any onlookers to blush. Their desire for her was far in excess of the ordinary. They had chosen their master and in their service to her they let eternal life pass by.

Covet the Best Gifts

For nearly all of my life, I viewed coveting as a sin. It’s in the ten commandments after all! So you can imagine my surprise when I finally paid enough attention to 1 Corinthians to notice Paul’s unusual instruction to those believers to covet the best spiritual gifts.

Lest you think a typographical error had been made, Paul repeats the directive with additional explanation a short time later.

What we learn is that having an extraordinary or excessive desire can be hurtful or healthy depending on what that something is. While our sinful flesh longs after the world and directs us to despise the kingdom of God, we can completely flip the tables if we build an otherworldly desire for God’s service. We can obsess over our skills and how they might help us dominate in sports or succeed in business, but what if our extraordinary desire was that we might teach the Bible, prophesy, heal others, or have spirit empowerment to govern the church of God?

As a teenager, I decided that I wanted to be a pastor. I told my pastor this at the time and he advised me to do something else instead. I think he was right in that I could see no evidence of God’s call on my life for the ministry and I’m glad God led me on the path I eventually took. However, that desire has never gone away and God used that to do far more with my life than I could have ever planned. It helped me despise the world and urged me to faithfully serve the best master.

We ought to cautiously and carefully inspect what we want so badly that our obsession becomes obvious to others. Jesus concluded his parables to the Pharisees by warning them that whatever desires come naturally to us are an abomination in the sight of God. And if we choose to pursue those desires with extraordinary effort we aren’t fooling anyone but ourselves. God knows our heart and he allows us to choose our own master.

A Challenge

What is it that you want more than anything else? Do you know yourself well enough to answer that question? Could other people answer that question for you based on your reputation? It’s also entirely possible that you don’t have any desires that anyone would consider excessive. But I don’t think that is a great place to camp out and you won’t be able to stay there long with your flesh tugging you towards the world. Jesus wrote a letter to the Laodicean church chiding them for hanging out in the lukewarm zone. He’d rather have you all the way in or all the way out.

Be wary of covetousness. Our natural instincts will lead us down a path of servitude to the master of the world. But the benefits of zealous coveting of God’s kingdom and his service can produce abundant fruit. What shalt thou covet?