Faithbase

Welcome to Thinking About God's Law. This is Casual Saturday. I don't have my tie on. I hope that doesn't disrupt your viewing process here. But we are at the last commandment, the 10th commandment. You shall not covet your neighbor's house, wife, servant, ox, donkey, etc. Anything that's your neighbor's you should not covet it. Now in the Hebrew here the word implies a desire to make it your own, not simply to say, boy that's so nice. It's more than just simply saying that's a nice house or a beautiful wife or whatever. It's I want that. I want to take that away from them and I want that to be mine and I don't want one just like it. I want that. So what this is is a disruption of the continuity of the covenant. It is an attempt really, or a desire to stop that person from experiencing God's blessings so that you can have what is theirs and you can have what you just think you deserve as in their stead I should say. So in that ancient world to take, to disrupt that process of covenant realization or blessings, the realization of the blessings of the covenant could place someone in great peril because again to lose the implements of work or to lose family or whatever would be quite a blow to the person's continuity. They would not have anything to pass on. They would not be able to carry on the family name or the family tradition in the farm or whatever. In our world it's not completely different by any means to covet someone's property or covet someone's relationships or whatever. It is still wrong because it's still the attempt to at least intellectually remove from them things that they have that we might have them and to instead hope that the things that they've been blessed with would become ours. And that's greed. That is envy. That is covetousness. And I think I had one too many T's in there when I said covetousness. So my admonition to you today is as you think about God's law in this case is to think about it. Let's go a little bit different direction than what we have been doing. Think about how you can be more grateful for what God has given you and grateful for God's blessing as you see it in your neighbors, see it in your friends and whatever. But to be content with what you have and to be happy for the other person for what they have. So that's what we're gonna do today as we think about God's law. And in the next session or two I'm going to kind of wrap up. I'm gonna kind of sum up what we talked about in this series because I do want to go back to the Sabbath commandment and talk a little bit about that and the difference between the commandment concerning the Sabbath in the Exodus account and the Deuteronomy account. So we'll come back to that and that'll be an additional episode and then a wrap-up. So there should be a probably two more here. But until then God bless you. Think about God's law. Think about how he has blessed you and how you can bless others. Give gracious or give a show gratitude I should say not only for your own blessings but for those of others that you know. God bless you.