Sunday, February 11, 2024 PM

The Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy

Alright, let's open our Bibles and turn to Exodus chapter 20 and you have a bookmark to use and you can put it there in Exodus 20 and then also we need to be over in Deuteronomy chapter 5, Exodus 20 verse 17 and Deuteronomy 5 verse 21.

Exodus 20, 17, Deuteronomy 5 verse 21. Alright, let's pray together. Father, we thank you again for this night and pray that you would help us as we study your word. Please give us zeal and desire to understand your word and please provide the warm amen in our hearts that we need to give affirmation to your truth and be transformed by it.

We pray these things in Jesus name, amen. Now on some of the Ten Commandments that we've been studying, when we read them in Exodus 20, they are exactly the same in Deuteronomy 5, in the Deutero second namos law, the second giving of the law to the second generation out of Egypt.

Many of the things that Moses said in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers are repeated and consolidated in Deuteronomy. Some of those things are just direct quotes, the very same information and sometimes they are altered a bit, updated, expanded or clarified.

Do Not Covet Your Neighbor's Household

Now in Exodus 20, as we look at the tenth word about Christ, this tenth commandment given to Israel at Mount Sinai, we read the following, verse 17, Exodus 20, 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.

Okay, so we have it repeated twice, you shall not covet. Twice in the same commandment, it says, you shall not covet. The first instance speaks about a house and of course we think of, you know, some three bedroom, 1200 square foot, shingled roof, maybe with a chimney, but that's not what the Hebrews would have thought when they heard this declared to them.

After all, you have to remember that they're wandering around the wilderness in tents. It's kind of a different experience and some of the ways that the Ten Commandments are written are even envisioning, not their time in the wilderness, but what is it like to live in the land when you are going to try to build a house, which would look very different than the houses we live in.

But when we have the word house, we're looking at a word that speaks not simply of the structure in which the individuals would live, or even the different parts of structures on the property upon which they would live, but indeed the entire household.

Envisioning the family as more than a network of relationships, but the household being the folks that are of the house, but also everything they own, the entire interaction of this family group and all that they own.

A household in the Greek language, what we call a namos, where we get a word economy. So it's a lot of different relationships, everything about it. Do not covet your neighbor's household. Do not covet your neighbor's, what should we say, family business that they run out of their home.

That'd be more likely to the scenario because every family would be running their own economy out of their own tents or their own houses. It would not be typical at all for you to get up in the morning, pack a lunch, and go across town to somebody else's structure and work for them on an hourly wage and then come back home.

That'd be very strange. People who got up in the morning and went somewhere else to work were called slaves. If you were a free person, you would be working out of your own home, working whatever fields you had or animals you had or whatever your trade was, your vocation was, and you'd be doing it together as a family.

So when you think of a household here, do not covet your neighbor's household. It would include the business, right? It would include the animals. It would include the fields. It would include the harvest that year.

I mean, there's a lot of different factors involved in somebody's household. And we're told, the Israelites were told at Sinai, do not covet your neighbor's house. And let's get specific. There's the general.

Now let's be specific. In detail, that means not just in general, but in specifically, do not covet your neighbor's wife. Do not covet your neighbor's male servant, nor his female servant. Remember that Abraham, his wife's name was Sarah, and he had his head chief servant, Elimelech, and he had many other servants.

One of his female servants was named Hagar, but he had many different servants, didn't he? And he was a very heavy man, the Bible says, a glorious man, a man that was full of kibbutz in the Hebrew, full of weight and glory.

He had so many oxen, donkeys, and sheep and everything else that he and Lot couldn't occupy the same area of the promised land. There was too much of it. Well, the word is don't covet your neighbor's house or any of the specific instances of his household.

Why not? Why not? Well, the word covet has the idea of desire, has the connotation of crave, even to lust after, or in other words, to take pleasure in. To sit there and to consider these things and crave it and envision it as if I were to have that, if I were in that position.

You see, that's the idea of covetousness. And we're being told specifically, do not desire, do not covet, do not take pleasure in, notice, that which does not rightly belong to you. The fact that your neighbor has all these things, isn't a warrant for you to desire it as if it should be yours.

That doesn't rightly belong to you. Now, notice what this is not forbidding. This is not saying, notice this, the 10th commandment does not say, you shall not desire your own house. You shall not crave your own wife, nor enjoy that which belongs to you.

Do you notice that? It doesn't say that. It says you're not supposed to covet your neighbor's household. What God has given to us to enjoy, we ought to enjoy. If somebody works real, real hard at preparing a big meal, some of you can relate to this, and you put servings of the big meal in front of the folks, you're watching, are they going to eat it?

Are they going to eat it? Are they going to like it? Are they going to want seconds? Right? And if they enjoy that, that is a delight to the one who gave it. God has given us good things to enjoy. We ought to enjoy them.

It's not a sin to enjoy the things that God has given to us. That's just fine and dandy. What's not fine and dandy is when you look at what God has given to somebody else that they are stewards of, that they're owners of, and say, I could do a lot better with that than they do.

You know, if I only had those, if I had that many tools in my garage, I'll tell you, I would have been doing a lot more with them, you know, so on and so forth. You know how that goes. Well, it's an interesting comparison.

Coveting, Contentment, and Stewardship

We go over to Deuteronomy chapter 5. Of course, it sounds very much the same, but there's an interesting couple of differences in Deuteronomy 5 and verse 21. It reads, 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.

Now, what's different between that passage, that rendering of the 10th commandment, and the version in Exodus? The order? Yeah. So, again, we have the two-part commandment. It's the same commandment, do not covet, but there's a two-part to it, just like in the other one, but this time, instead of starting off with the general, do not covet your neighbor's household, and then the particulars, here in Deuteronomy, it starts off, don't covet your neighbor's wife, and then goes to the second portion, which house and everything with it.

But notice also, back in Exodus, that the very first prohibition in the do not covet, in the second section, is do not covet your neighbor's wife. It's just now first on the first side. So, either way you cut it, God says, this is a very, very special relationship.

Do not covet your neighbor's wife. This is of prime concern to God. Then we have the household and the particulars, and interestingly enough, there is a different word used here that is not the same as covet, but it's a synonym, which speaks of craving and lusting, but it's also a word that means to be greedy after, be greedy after, to prefer.

Now, as we think about this commandment, obviously, it's given to the children of Israel in the wilderness as part of the covenant that God is making with them at Sinai. Since it's a covenant, it's shaped in the shape of the image of God.

It concerns the relationship with God, the relationship with one another, and the relationship with what God has entrusted to them. And clearly, it's of vital importance that what God entrusts to those made in his image, that we take proper ownership of that, and enjoy that, and care for it, and steward it, and we ought not to be looking at what God has entrusted to others made in his image, and crave that, and be passionate about that, and prefer that, and focus on that.

Because what are we saying about God, first of all? You know, you have not evenly or effectively distributed the resources. Bad job, God. You know, this person has an acre and a half, and I only have an acre.

That just chafes me. I can't stand that. This person over here has more hair than I do. Oh, that frosts me. You know? Look at this situation. You know, this person over here, you know, his wife never, ever says a negative thing to him.

I just know it. Oh, I just, man, I just can't stand that. What are we doing? We're not being content. We're somehow blaming God, saying, you haven't given me what I really want, and obviously, you've given what I want to somebody else, and now I'm focused upon that.

Now, I'm not relating to God correctly, I'm not related to my neighbor correctly, nor am I relating to what God has entrusted to me correctly. And so, the command, do not covet, gets at the heart of what it means to be made in the image of God, and calls us to be settled in his provision.

Remember the story of Achan, who was part of the Israelites coming into the promised land, and there was Jericho. And God declared that everything in Jericho, all the spoils of war, would be placed under the ban.

It was all dedicated to him for destruction, to be burned with fire, brought from the altar with holy fire, and to be destroyed. It all belonged to God. The spoil belonged to God in Jericho. All the gold belonged to him, all the garments belonged to him, all the animals belonged to him, it was all dedicated to God for destruction.

And Achan and his family saw some stuff that belonged to God. There's some gold, there was precious metal, there was a garment and so forth, and like, oh, that looks good. They desired it, they put their desire on that which did not belong to them.

Achan grabs it, they bury it under the family tent, and of course we know the rest is history. No good. This is an example of covetousness, of desiring that which does not belong to us. But this word for covet is not always used in a negative way.

The word, after all, simply means to desire and to crave, and desires and craving aren't bad in and of themselves. So let's give an example. Let's go over to 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles chapter 20 and verse 25.

God has won the day in a battle, and he has delivered his people from their enemies. He has turned the enemies against each other, and the enemies have fallen. Verse 25. When Jehoshaphat and his people came to take away their spoil, they found among them an abundance of valuables on the dead bodies, and precious jewelry which they stripped off for themselves more than they could carry away.

And so they were three days gathering the spoil because there was so much. The word for precious there, what kind of jewelry? The desirable kind, the kind of jewelry you really want. But that was fine and dandy.

Why? God gave it to them. God arranged it, God gave it to them, so it was fine to desire that jewelry, pick it up, and walk off with it. All right. What makes the difference? It makes a difference about who owns what, and who gets to decide who owns what.

Ultimately, God gets to decide who owns what, and he has principles involved in the owning of property, and the owning of property in and of itself is not wrong. Coveting other people's property is wrong.

That's not how God made us in his image. And as Paul says in Romans chapter 7, there is sin even if you're not instructed in the law, but the law reveals what that sin is. He said, I would not have known what covetousness was if the law had not said, do not covet.

He said that in Romans chapter 7. In other words, coveting is still a sin even if somebody doesn't know a word for it. Just because you don't have a word for it doesn't mean it's not a sin, but the law reveals that and shows just how sinful it is.

The sinfulness of sin, as Paul says in Romans chapter 7. And so that's what's happening here in the Ten Commandments. God is saying, you know when you all passionately desire the things that don't belong to you, that's called coveting, and don't do that.

Do not covet. That is not in agreement with what it means to be made in the image of God. So just to be clear, when we are told that it is wrong to own something, that's not true. That's not in agreement with the Word of God.

It's okay to own things. God gives things to us to own, but if we're told that it is wrong to own, then there is no right desire left. If it's wrong to own things, that means that all desires are forever wrong.

But if we are able to own things, then it's right to have desires for the things that we own, and that's a good thing. This goes all the way back to creation. Seven times in Genesis chapter 1, in the story of how God made all things in six days, God would speak something into existence.

He would arrange its position in the created order, and then he would step back and say, and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good, and God saw that it was good. Seven times, and the culmination is that God saw that it was very good.

You know, God makes something. He looks on it and says, wow, that's good. I enjoy that. I take pleasure in what I have made. And is that right for God to do? He owns it. He owns it. So, of course, taking delight in that which he owns makes perfect sense, and that's why we, made in God's image, it makes perfect sense for us to take delight in that which God has given to us to steward.

It's perfectly fine to delight in those things, not as an idol or in idolatry, but in the right relationship with God. So God made it. God owns it. God finds what he makes and owns satisfying in some fashion, and we find that he organizes things.

He puts the birds in the air, puts the fish in the sea, puts the animals on the land, right? He puts everybody into everything and everybody into their proper place, into their proper order. All of this is good and beautiful and pleasant and satisfying because it's apportioned by the will of God.

So we have to rest on the will of God in this matter. So let's go to Genesis chapter 2 in verses 16 and 17. And there's these declarations made in quick succession which gives us an understanding of when our desires are right and when our desires are wrong, when our enjoyments are right and when our enjoyments are wrong, and they have everything to do with who God is and what he says.

Let's come down to that. Now verse 16, God says to Adam, the Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden you may freely eat. Now that's good news, especially because of the kinds of trees that God made.

Verse 9 says, out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. So here is the true and the beautiful and the good, all in what God is speaking it, it happens, there's your true, it is pleasant to the eyes, there's your beautiful, and it was good for food, there's your good, right?

So God is doing these wonderful things making all these trees and he says to the man, go enjoy it, freely eat. Verse 17, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat because it's really ugly.

No, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat because the fruit's really nasty. No, I mean when Eve ate of that tree she saw that it was good for food, it was pleasant to the eyes.

I mean that tree was just as beautiful and just as nutritious as all the rest of the trees, but God says don't eat of that tree for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. See that tree over there?

That's not your tree. See all those other trees? Those are your trees. See that tree over there? That's not yours. When Eve puts her desire on what is not hers, this is covetousness. Even though, even though the tenth commandment hadn't been given, even though nobody told Eve, hey look sister, that's covetousness, it was still sin.

She looked on that and desired that and craved that which was not given to her, didn't belong to her. So that is the basis for the commandment as we think about God making these things good and giving and apportioning them.

Desire, Temptation, and Next Steps

We're going to look a little bit more next time at some positive and negative examples of the term, but then get into Genesis chapter 3 and Romans 1 and James 1 and talk about the nature of desire and how it interacts with our temptations.

So that's what we'll look at next time. Okay, well let's close by singing the doxology together.