IDEA: There are problems in trying to interpret the thrust of the tenth commandment.
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 explore some of the difficulties that arise from reading the text.
Would you agree or disagree with the observation that this is a fairly simple, straightforward command, like "You shall not steal" or "You shall not murder"?
I. We immediately face a difficulty by raising the question, "Is the command a single commandment?"
Everyone agrees that there are ten commandments. But not everyone agrees about what makes up the Ten Commandments.
The Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Reformed theologians see this as a single commandment.
Roman Catholics and Lutherans consider this to be two commands, and they split the verse into the ninth and tenth commandments.
How do Roman Catholics and Lutherans come up with two commandments in this verse?
It comes from the fact that the words "You shall not covet" are given twice.
That would seem to make eleven commandments. How do they come out with ten?
To make things come out with only ten commandments, they combine the first two commandments.
II. A second difficulty is that Deuteronomy 5 gives a different version of the commandment from the version in Exodus 20.
In Exodus the commandment starts with not coveting your neighbor's house. In Deuteronomy the commandment starts with not coveting your neighbor's wife.
The Lutherans follow the Exodus order and take not coveting your neighbor's house as the ninth commandment and everything else as the tenth commandment having to do with living creatures.
The Catholics follow the Deuteronomy order and take not coveting your neighbor's wife as the ninth commandment, distinguishing between sexual desire and covetous desire.
III. While the words "You shall not covet" appear twice in the verse, this doesn’t warrant splitting the verse into two separate commandments.
Whether you take this commandment as one or two, it is clear that God is saying "Do not covet."
For our purposes we will take it as a single idea.
Paul treated it that way in Romans 7:7. "What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.' "
In our study of the first two commandments, we treated them as separate commands. Therefore, as we conclude our study we will treat this verse as a single command telling us that we're not to covet things or animals or anything that belongs to our neighbor