IDEA: Commandments one through nine deal with outward behavior, but the tenth commandment takes us to the human heart.
TEXT: "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s" (Exodus 20:17).
"You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife; and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, his male servant, his female servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s" (Deuteronomy 5:21).
PURPOSE: To help listeners understand how the tenth commandment differs from the first nine.
Do the Ten Commandments start with a roar and end with a whimper?
Doesn’t it seem that the final commandment is softer and less demanding than the earlier ones?
What is this tenth commandment getting at as the conclusion of the Decalogue?
What is its specific emphasis?
What does it add to the other nine that is truly new?
I. G. Campbell Morgan states that all the former commands forbade overt acts.
If we disobey any of the other commandments, sooner or later people can detect our disobedience.
We can catch someone worshiping a graven image or breaking Sabbath or lying or committing adultery or murdering.
II. This commandment forbids a state of mind.
We can break this commandment without the knowledge of any other human being.
It is the first implied awareness that wrong ideas precede wrong actions.
No matter how pious or decorous our outward behavior, if we encourage our minds to seethe with covetousness, that’s an abomination to God.
III. This tenth commandment comes last as a transition from a God who is concerned only with our acts to a God who is Spirit and looks beyond all actions to our heart.
It anticipates what Jesus says about the whole Law in the Sermon on the Mount. So behind killing there is hate, behind adultery there is lust, and so on.
The peculiar nature of this commandment is that it passes below the externals of our conduct to the hidden activities of the mind, heart, and will.
Conclusion: The tenth commandment takes us to the human heart. There is a modern legend in which the devil is asked what he thinks of the atomic bomb: "A mere trifle, a child’s toy! I much prefer the explosive power of the human heart!