Tenth Commandment: You shall not covet.

“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 is your neighbor's.” (Exodus 20:17)

What is the Tenth Commandment?

The tenth commandment is, “You shall not covet anything that is your neighbor's.”

In the tenth commandment, God reveals another way that you are to love others as you love yourself—by not coveting anything that is your neighbor's. The biblical words for coveting imply an improper desire for something or someone, or an insatiable attraction for something more.[1]

There's nothing wrong with having desires, even strong desires, for something or someone. The problem is when your desires become improper and inordinate—when your desire for something or someone goes beyond what God has revealed is best for you and loving toward others.[2] Coveting occurs when you allow the object of your desire to become so attractive to you that you begin desiring it more than you should.

For example, in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus instructs you not to look on someone with “lustful intent” (Matt. 5:27–28), he is not forbidding you to feel normal sexual attraction and desire for someone who is not your spouse. Instead, Jesus is forbidding you to have an improper and inordinate sexual attraction and desire for someone who is not your spouse. That would be coveting.

The tenth commandment is unlike the earlier commandments that each focus on a particular external behavior such as murder, adultery, theft, and the bearing of false witness. Instead, the tenth commandment, like the first commandment (“You shall have no other gods before me”), focuses on the desires of your heart that underlie why you break all the other commandments.[3]

Jesus taught that the inordinate desire for something or someone (coveting) is the root from which every sin springs (Mark 7:20–23). The internal covetous desires of your heart always precede and produce your external, sinful behaviors that break God's commands.[4]

Before someone commits murder, commits adultery, steals, or lies, they first have an inordinate desire for something or someone. For example, an inordinate desire for control and power can lead you to anger and murder, and an inordinate desire for sexual pleasure can lead you to adultery. An inordinate desire for possessions and wealth can lead you to steal, and an inordinate desire for approval and reputation can lead you to lie.

The first and tenth commandments are like bookends. You show your love for God and your trust in him above everyone and everything else (first commandment) by not inordinately loving or trusting in anyone or anything else above him (tenth commandment).[5] The way you have no other gods (idols) before him is by not having inordinate desires (coveting) for anyone or anything above him.

This is why Paul teaches that everyone “who is covetous is an idolator” (Eph. 5:5; Col. 3:5). Coveting is idolatry because it turns the desires of your heart away from God and toward someone or something else as your ultimate source of satisfaction and joy.[6] Your desires are good, but because of sin you are always inclined to focus your desires on things other than God (idols) that cannot fully satisfy you.[7]

Heart idolatry is looking for your source of greatest happiness in something or someone other than God. It’s trying to make good people and things ultimate, when only God is ultimate. Good things that can become idols which we covet include our relationships, approval, success, comfort, control, pleasure, power, or possessions.

Coveting involves a deep-seated craving for something or someone that you believe you must have to be satisfied and fulfilled. Whatever it is, without it you believe that your life would be meaningless. The problem is that whatever you really desire the most in life, and whatever you truly live for, has tremendous power over you and can enslave you and destroy you.[8]

If someone blocks you from your idols, anger can consume you. If your idols are threatened, you can become paralyzed by fear. If you lose them, you can be driven into despair. This is because your idols give you your deepest significance and security, but they can never fill the void in your heart that God created to be filled only by him.

The core problem is not that you desire things. Desire is healthy. The problem is that you desire the wrong things or desire the right things in the wrong way. The reason God forbids you to covet anything that is your neighbor's is because he designed you to flourish in life by finding your ultimate contentment and joy in life in something far better—in him.[9]

Like all the commandments, the positive command implicit in this negative is that you are required to be content with everything he provides for you and be thankful for everything he provides for others.

What is forbidden by God in the Tenth Commandment?

In this commandment, God forbids you to have improper desires for anything that is your neighbor's. This commandment lists several examples: “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 is your neighbor's.”

This list of examples, drawn from the ancient Middle Eastern culture, represents a range of broader, universal categories such as property, relationships, possessions, and status. Male and female servants, oxen, and donkeys were critical for economic prosperity in ancient times. Today, this could apply to coveting someone's business and career, including their employees and business resources.

The addition of “or anything that is your neighbor’s” suggests a comprehensive prohibition against coveting anything else that you could be tempted to desire as your source of greatest happiness and fulfillment above God. This could include coveting someone's reputation, approval, and success, their authority, power, influence, and control, or their comforts and pleasures.

The core reason you covet is because God created you in his image to be a worshipper. God designed you to be always worshipping him as your ultimate source of joy and fulfillment in life. But when you allow the desires of your heart to be captured by other gods, they steal your heart's desires (your worship) away from God who alone can satisfy them.

So, you must be actively pulling your heart's desires off your idols through repentance, so that you can be placing your heart's desires back on God through faith. True repentance is not merely changing your external behaviors, but pulling your heart's desire, love, and trust away from your idols.

This is why you must learn to confess not only your external sins but also what the English Puritans called the “sin beneath the sin”—the internal, inordinate desires of your idolatrous, covetous heart that underlie all your external sins.

For example, you must not only confess your sin of anger but also the deeper sin that leads to your anger—your inordinate desire for control that was blocked. And you must not only confess the sin of adultery but also your underlying sin of longing for ultimate satisfaction in sexual pleasure.

Similarly, you must confess not only your sin of stealing but also the deeper sin of placing your trust in your wealth above God. You must confess not only the sin of lying but also the underlying sin of longing for the approval of man more than God that leads you to lie.

Once you have identified your heart idols, the “sin beneath your sin,” true repentance involves not only confessing them but also taking radical action against them, sapping the life-dominating power they have over you. In Romans 13:14, Paul writes, “Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”[10] You must do whatever it takes so that what is idolatrous to you will have its vivid appeal drained away.[11] 

What is required by God in the Tenth Commandment?

In the tenth commandment, God also requires you to be content with everything he provides for you and thankful for everything he provides for others. Put positively, this is a command for you to be content with everything God provides for you and others.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism Question 80 says, “The tenth commandment requires full contentment with our own condition, with a right and charitable frame of spirit toward our neighbor, and all that is his.”[12] This contentment is your ultimate safeguard against the many temptations to covet that can lead you to disobey God.

Paul teaches that the validity of your contentment can be tested in good circumstances and bad [by having “both plenty and want”], and it is a “secret” that can be learned. He writes, “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Phil. 4:11–12).

In the next verse, Paul reveals that the only source of true contentment, the “secret,” is found in Jesus Christ. “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). When Paul shares this with Timothy, he writes, “Godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content” (1 Tim. 6:6–8).[13]

Paul reveals throughout the New Testament that the “secret” to finding contentment in your relationship with God is learning how to turn away from your sin in repentance and turn to Jesus Christ in faith. Paul presents repentance as “putting off” your old self and faith as “putting on” your new self (Romans 6; Colossians 3). In repentance, you pull your desires away from your idols that can never satisfy you, so that you can place your desires on to the resurrected, ascended Jesus Christ who alone can satisfy you.

Paul also reveals how his own repentance and faith in Christ transformed him when writing: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). The Greek word translated “boast” (καυχᾶσθαι kauchaomai) means to glory in, trust in, rejoice in, revel in, and obsess about something.

Through Paul's ongoing repentance from his idols and faith in Christ, he learned “the secret” of how to glory in, trust in, rejoice in, revel in, and obsess in Jesus Christ. In Paul’s obsession with the display of God’s radical love for him on the cross, he experienced the transforming power of the gospel to crucify the dominating power of his sinful nature and the idolatrous lure of the world on his desires.

The primary reason you are not experiencing more contentment and fulfillment in life is because you are coveting idols instead of God. You're allowing the desires of your heart to be captured by the idols of the world instead of by God's astonishing love for you displayed in the cross of Jesus Christ. 

Whatever your cravings, you keep believing the lie that you can never be truly satisfied without them. And they keep enslaving you and robbing you of the contentment and joy that God designed for you to find in him alone.

This enslaving power of sin will never dissipate until a greater desire of your heart replaces it. It is only when God's love for you in Jesus Christ becomes more attractive to you than all the pleasures of sin that your heart will be set free. Only then can you experience what's been called, “the expulsive power of a new affection,” setting you free from the enslaving power of an old affection.[14]

You must not allow the God-given desires of your heart to be satisfied with the fast foods of this world when God freely offers you the gourmet banquet of heaven in his Son, Jesus Christ. Only God can ultimately satisfy the deep desires and passions of your soul. Only he can fulfill all the promises your idols keep making you in vain. Eighteenth-century hymnwriter, William Cowper, describes this well:

The dearest idol I have known,

Whate’er that idol be,

Help me to tear it from Thy throne,

And worship only Thee.

And worship only Thee.

Tenth Commandment: You shall not covet.

“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 is your neighbor's.” (Exodus 20:17)

Catechism Questions

What is the Tenth Commandment?

The tenth commandment is, "You shall not covet anything that is your neighbors."

What is forbidden by God in the Tenth Commandment?

God forbids you to have improper desires for anything that he provides for others.

What is required by God in the Tenth Commandment?

God requires you to be content with everything he provides for you and thankful for everything he provides for others.

Footnotes:

[1] The Old Testament Hebrew word for covet (חָמַד chamad) implies an improper desire for something or someone. In the New Testament, there are two Greek words used for coveting that convey having an inordinate desire (ἐπιθυμέω epithumeō) and an insatiable attraction for something more (πλεονεξία pleonexia). The etymology of ἐπιθυμέω (epithumeō) is made up of two parts: 1) ἐπι (epi) meaning over, and 2) θυμέω (thumeo) meaning desire. The word does not refer to mere “desire,” but to an “over-desire” for something or someone. The other related Greek word for covet is πλεονεξία (pleonexia), sometimes also translated greed, which conveys the idea of having an insatiable desire for more. The etymology of πλεονεξία (pleonexia) is also made up of two parts: 1) πλεον (pleon) meaning more, and 2) εξία (exia) meaning have.

[2] The New Anglican Catechism 350 says, “Coveting is the disordered desire for what belongs to another or what I am unable to have by law, by gift, or by right” in To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism, ed. by J.I. Packer and Joel Scandrett ,(Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2020), 104.

[3] The tenth commandment is a good conclusion especially to commandments six through nine, but it should also be seen as encompassing all ten commandments. The tenth commandment has been called the most scrupulous of the commandments because it aims to prevent the evil acts addressed in all the previous commandments by first addressing your sinful desires before they motivate you to commit them.

[4] At its core, sin is more than disobeying God’s laws. It's a deep-seated, invisible, terminal disease. Paul describes the actions of our sinful hearts as the works of the flesh (Gal 5:19–21).

[5] The New Testament views covetousness as a great sin, on the same level as idolatry (Eph 5:5; Col 3:5). This is why coveting is named in the comprehensive list of heinous sins displaying humanity's depravity in Romans 1:29, and why Paul equates it with immorality and impurity in Ephesians 5:3. The Apostle John writes, “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).

[6] Paul refers to the tenth commandment as the one command that uniquely revealed to him the depth of his own sinfulness. “For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Rom. 7:7–8).

[7] Sin changes more than your status with God. It also changes your heart, your human nature. Because of the fall of humanity in sin, all people are born not only under sin’s condemning penalty, but also under its domineering power and the control of Satan. Our pure hearts (before the Fall) became corrupt hearts with disordered loves, dead to God, enslaved to idols, producing ungodly lives in disobedience to God.

[8] Paul writes, “Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money [not “money” but the “love of money”] 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. 6:9–10).

[9] C. S. Lewis exposes the reality that your misplaced desires settle for something far less than God offers you in himself. “…like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” Therefore, your core problem is not that you desire too much, but that you desire too little.

[10] Paul also writes, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5).

[11] You must not only refrain from coveting, but also resist your very first internal heart desires and inclinations that can lead you to coveting. The sin of coveting always begins with your normal desires for someone or something. But, as your normal desire for someone or something begins to grow in your heart, it can easily lead you to experiencing abnormal, inordinate desires (coveting)—that can then lead you to commit worse sins of anger, murder, adultery, stealing, lying, etc. James writes, “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death” (James 1:14–15). 

[12] The Westminster Larger Catechism Question 147 says: “The duties required in the tenth commandment are, such a full contentment with our own condition, and such 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.”

[13] This secret is also revealed in Hebrews 13:5: “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.'”

[14] “There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from the human heart its love of the world, 1) either by a demonstration of the world’s vanity, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an object that is not worthy of it; or, 2) by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old affection, which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old affection for a new one. My purpose is to show, that from the constitution of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent and ineffectual—and that the latter method will alone suffice for the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection that domineers over it.” Thomas Chalmers, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” in The Expulsive Power of a New Affection, foreword by John Piper (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 1.