From Covetous to Christlike

The law against coveting is often ignored, yet it was this command that pierced the heart of Saul and revealed his need for Christ. Today, Sinclair Ferguson considers the effects of neglecting God’s law and its relationship to our Lord Jesus.

Well, we’ve come to the end of a couple of weeks when we’ve been reflecting, very simply and briefly, on the Ten Commandments. And number ten is this: “You shall not covet.”

We covet when we are not content with what we have and want to have what belongs to someone else. I’ll come to what I think is one of the most interesting things about this commandment in a moment. But since we’re at the end of these two weeks when we’ve been focusing on the Decalogue, I want to make this observation: it’s not blindingly original. We all recognize that as life becomes more complex, the principles or laws we use to regulate it are important, and they’re bound to increase in number. If nobody had put anything up in space or ever went there, then we wouldn’t need any space law. If there were no computers, no worldwide web, no social media, we wouldn’t need laws to regulate them. But they do exist, and we all understand that we need to agree how to handle them.

But here’s an important observation: God gave us ten basic laws to govern our lives. Yes, we need to learn how to apply them, and as we’ve hinted, the wonderful catechisms of the church do a masterful job in helping us do that. But when these ten big laws are ignored, demeaned, or rejected—as is often happening in our society today—when a society overthrows what I sometimes call the “Big Ten,” something else inevitably happens: our governments have to start introducing more and more and more laws to try to cope with the moral chaos and the social chaos that results. They simply don’t know what they’re doing because they have no moral rudder calibrated to God’s Word and wisdom. Ignore, demean, or destroy the Big Ten, and you inevitably have to reproduce more and more and more laws.

And the truth of the matter is, as Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in one of his opinions, that we are doing things simply because we want to. And the more we do things because we want to when they’re against what God wants to, the more and more we will create more and more laws and find ourselves in moral chaos. I’m sometimes reminded of Hans Christian Anderson’s story about the emperor’s new clothes—the tailor that had made clothes for the emperor that didn’t really exist, that left everyone sycophantically telling the king how marvelous he looked. That’s our world today. And it took a clear-sighted little boy to pull the wool from off their eyes by pointing out that the king had nothing on. So, we need to look out for the inevitable end tale of rejecting the Big Ten. It’s always going to be more laws, unworkable laws, and further laws to deal with unworkable laws, and the gradual undermining of the stability and safety of society. And yes, only the gospel can save, but the gospel that saves teaches us to please God by obedience to His commandments.

And I have one last reflection here, because the tenth commandment is the one that seemed to break through the hardness of the heart of Saul of Tarsus. He says as much in Romans 7:7–12, that when the law came, sin revived and he died. And the particular law that came was, “You shall not covet.” And he suggests it was this that laid the foundations for his Damascus Road experience. But what was Saul of Tarsus coveting? I can’t go into the exegetical details here, but I believe the answer is, without fully realizing it, he was coveting what he had seen Stephen had that he didn’t have. No one had ever made that impression on him. A young contemporary who was full of grace, full of the Holy Spirit, full of God’s Word—so like the Lord Jesus Christ and full of faith—everything that Saul of Tarsus actually wasn’t. In Stephen, Saul of Tarsus saw illustrated firsthand what he would write in the eighth chapter of Romans: a lifestyle that expressed beautiful obedience to the law, but a lifestyle that was effected only through faith in Jesus Christ. That was what he lacked. That was what he saw. And probably even before he knew it, that was what he coveted. And that word from God, “You shall not covet,” brought him to realize his need.

And there’s an important lesson here for us as Christians. It’s that what best shows people both the beauty of the law and reveals to them that they’ve broken it is seeing that law fulfilled by the Spirit of Christ in our lives and our becoming more like Jesus. Because, ultimately, that’s what the law is about: Jesus Christ is the end of the law.