The Cost of EnvySample

Coveting

Unlike jealousy, the sin of coveting always indicates there is something wrong in us, not in someone else. It is sometimes provoked when I consider someone else, but only because that someone possesses the person, place, or thing my heart has decided it cannot be happy without. And that is a decision that is always wrong. It is the antithesis of contentment—the godly virtue every Christian must seek to take hold of. A genuine and growing relationship with Christ is the open secret to this interior satisfaction that Paul says is possible in “whatever situation” and “in any and every circumstance,” whether “facing plenty” or “hunger,” having “abundance” or “need” (Phil. 4:11–12).

Coveting is such a fundamental sin it was embedded by the Lord as the tenth commandment—one that comes with more examples than any of the other nine. Consider again the all-encompassing words of Exodus 20:17, “ You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

It is easy to identify this feeling, especially if your neighbor is doing better than you. And certainly, if it's someone in your neighborhood is. His car is hard to ignore. Noticing hurts. Why? Because he’s driving what you want. Coveting is the word for really wanting something badly. Whether it’s a house or a spouse, cars or cash. It’s something you crave. As Albert Mohler unpretentiously put it, coveting is all about hankering, people hankering after things they want. Maybe not the synonym you would expect from the learned Dr. Mohler, but it certainly captures the nuance of the problem.

Coveting is more than merely wanting something, pursuing someone, or aspiring to some position; it is deeper than that. It crosses into an obsessive craving and unquenchable thirst to just “having to have” the object of our desire. It leads some to pine away in self-pity and others to fanatically chase after their preoccupation.

Either way, coveting is a fixation to capture what we do not have. It is based on the addictive illusion that if we have the object of our desire, we will be satisfied. But as poets have written and rock stars have sung, the satisfaction doesn’t dawn. The fulfillment doesn’t last. The mirage of arriving is never realized.

Solomon reflects upon his life of hankering and asks:

“What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity” (Eccl. 2:22–23).