Are the First and Last Commandments the Same?
00:00:00.000 | Is the first commandment and the last commandment essentially the same
00:00:09.220 | commandment? It's a question worth thinking about as John Piper recently
00:00:13.260 | explained in a sermon. Here's how he posed the question and explained the
00:00:17.400 | implications. Have you ever asked the question whether the first of the Ten
00:00:24.380 | Commandments and the last of the Ten Commandments are the same commandment?
00:00:31.780 | I wonder if you can remember what they are. So the first commandment is, "You shall
00:00:36.740 | have no other gods before me." Exodus 20 verse 3. And the last one is, "You shall
00:00:44.860 | not covet." Paul says, Colossians 3:5, "Put away all covetousness which is
00:00:58.980 | idolatry." Oh, so the first and last commandments are the same commandment.
00:01:09.660 | Only the last one bends it out horizontally so you know what's really
00:01:16.460 | going on. Let's try to define these commandments. So the first commandment is,
00:01:20.740 | "You shall not have any other gods before me." What does that mean?
00:01:27.900 | The words surrounding it, verse 5, "I am the Lord your God. I am a jealous God."
00:01:37.700 | So, okay, put jealousy together with, "You shall not have any gods before me." God is
00:01:42.580 | like a husband. Israel is like a wife, and he's jealous if she consorts
00:01:49.180 | with another man, God, another God. And so what does not have any other gods before
00:01:57.740 | you mean? It means your love, your affection, your delight belong to me, God
00:02:04.420 | says. It's belonging to me, only me. You can't mix it up. All throughout the Old
00:02:11.660 | Testament, idolatry was called adultery. So you're giving your affections away.
00:02:18.940 | You're desiring things more than you're desiring me. I'm jealous. A husband ought
00:02:24.940 | to feel that. Jealousy is only a sin when it's all out of proportion and in the
00:02:30.500 | wrong places. A husband who sees his wife fall in love with another man and
00:02:36.220 | doesn't feel jealous is sick. He should feel rage of jealous, and he should win
00:02:43.540 | her back, and she should repent. God feels rage at his idolatrous people, and wrath
00:02:53.420 | comes from God. The last commandment is "you shall not covet," and Paul quotes it
00:03:02.780 | that way. He doesn't just say, "Covet your neighbor's wife, covet your whatever."
00:03:06.060 | He just, in Romans 7, he says, "The commandment, you shall not covet." What
00:03:11.540 | does "covet" mean? I remember as a kid trying to define "covet," and I never
00:03:16.020 | could. I always thought, "Well, it means want what you have. I want what you have."
00:03:20.980 | That's not what "covet" means. "Covet" is much more widely used than just
00:03:27.900 | wanting what somebody else has. And what's interesting is that in the Old
00:03:33.220 | Testament and the New, the Hebrew and the Greek, the word simply means "desire." And
00:03:37.940 | so the question then is, "Well, when does desire become covet?" Because desires
00:03:44.060 | aren't bad. You can desire what's good, and you can desire what's bad. So
00:03:47.940 | when does a desire along the way, either in intensity or for
00:03:52.740 | something, when does it become bad? When does it become the coveting kind of
00:03:58.820 | desire? And my way of answering that is to take the tenth commandment and put it
00:04:05.620 | together with what we just said about the first commandment. Paul says "covet"
00:04:10.140 | is idolatry, and we've just seen God as jealous for his wife's affection
00:04:17.380 | and attention and glorification and love and devotion and treasuring. And here we
00:04:26.500 | have covetous called idolatry, and it's just desire for anything. So
00:04:34.340 | here's my attempt at a definition based on that connection. I would say don't
00:04:43.380 | desire anything in a way that would express lack of contentment in God.
00:04:53.500 | Covetousness is a desire that is going up because the desire for
00:05:01.140 | God is going down. For anything, for Bible reading, preaching, writing books,
00:05:10.500 | anything that you desire and the desire is coming stronger because the desire
00:05:17.940 | for God is getting weaker, that's covetousness. It's evil. Doesn't matter
00:05:22.700 | what you're desiring. And so I think what we've seen from Romans 1 and now from
00:05:28.660 | the Ten Commandments is where our exchange for the glory of God, the value
00:05:37.340 | of God, the beauty of God, the all-satisfying worth of God, where that
00:05:41.860 | exchange is happening and our desire for Him and our satisfaction in Him is
00:05:46.620 | getting weaker, other desires are going to come in to fill the void and
00:05:51.820 | they get stronger, all that's called covetousness. Wow, that is quite a clip
00:05:57.700 | and it's a little window into everything we do at Desiring God as well. This
00:06:01.740 | message excerpt was taken from a message given last summer in a series titled
00:06:06.220 | "Living in the Light with Money, Sex, and Power." A four-part series, three messages
00:06:10.940 | and one Q&A, all available at DesiringGod.org right now. And those
00:06:15.400 | messages of course became the new book, "Living in the Light, Money, Sex, and Power."
00:06:19.380 | A nice little hardcover available now at Amazon and downloadable free of charge at
00:06:24.340 | DesiringGod.org/books. Well, we show caution with our words,
00:06:30.420 | especially when those words are about other people. So how should we talk with
00:06:34.620 | our spouses about relational conflicts we may be having without gossiping about
00:06:38.700 | the people we struggle with? This is a really important question and it's asked
00:06:43.060 | of John Piper tomorrow. I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening to the
00:06:46.460 | Ask Pastor John podcast with author and longtime pastor John Piper. We'll see you
00:06:50.740 | tomorrow.
00:06:52.860 | [BLANK_AUDIO]