Disordered Wantings
There is a peculiar kind of misery in disordered wantings, when the good thing you are wanting is sought for or hoped for in less than holy ways. The object itself may be perfectly innocent. But the appetite underneath it is where we see the cancer.
For instance, there is nothing evil in wanting a larger house, nor anything sinister in hoping for a happier marriage. Money, health, children, influence, meaningful work, even the respect of others are not inherently wicked things. God has made a world almost embarrassingly crowded with good things because He is a good Father who delights to give good gifts to His children. But no good father gives his child a present with the expectation that the child will thereafter prefer the present to the father. The gift is meant to express the love of the giver, not replace him. The first error, then, is obvious enough: we can love the gift so much that we forget the Giver.
But there is an opposite error, and Christians are sometimes tempted to mistake it for holiness. We can become so suspicious of loving created things too much that we begin pretending we should hardly love them at all. Christianity has never required us to pretend that bread tastes like sawdust, that laughter is no better than grief, or that a warm home is indistinguishable from sleeping in a cold field. That is actually not holiness. It is a pious form of ingratitude wearing your Sunday best.
And as such, God does not cure idolatry by teaching us to despise His gifts. He teaches us to love them in their proper place. The problem is neither that good things are good nor that we enjoy them as such. The problem begins when we ask a good thing to become a god, when we cease merely enjoying it and begin expecting it to fulfill us. And gods, as it turns out, are expected to do considerably more than they can manage.
This is one of the great confusions of the human heart. We rarely say, with the candor of Moabites, “This is my idol.” Instead, we couch our idolatry in the slogans of reasonableness. We do not say, “I am trusting something other than Jesus.” We say things like: “I just want to be secure.” “I only want to be happy.” “I would finally have peace if this one thing changed.”
And while the language may sound benign on the surface, it reveals something far more serious underneath. Namely, that we have taken a finite thing, something with a perfectly proper but limited load-bearing capacity, and loaded upon it an infinite weight. And we do this in nearly every nook and cranny of our lives. We ask money to make us safe, marriage to make us whole, success to assure us that we really matter, health to make death seem less real, and the applause of men to quiet the accusations rattling around inside our own heads. Then we are flabbergasted when the poor created thing buckles beneath a weight it was never designed to carry. The problem was never that the thing was bad. The problem was that we demanded it be God. And creaturely things make miserable Christs.
But Scripture does not leave this disorder unnamed. The Tenth Commandment places the whole arrangement beneath the X-ray and exposes the disease. The Great Physician names it plainly: covetousness. And then His Law renders the terminal report: “You shall not covet.”
And while this is certainly a command meant to be obeyed, it is more than an actionable edict. It is a standard we cannot meet, with a death sentence attached to it that we have surely earned. And its reach is nearly universal, because this is not some obscure prohibition against feeling envious when another man possesses something we would like. It is God’s judgment upon the heart that looks to created things for the life, peace, security, and satisfaction that are owed finally and fully to Him.
And this is what makes the Tenth Commandment so devastating: it leaves the sinner with nowhere to hide, because it governs not merely what we sinfully take, but also what we sinfully want. A man may never commit adultery with his body, steal money with his hands, or speak a lie with his lips, and still sit guilty in the front row of a church. His hands may be clean while his heart is crowded with forbidden desires. That is because the commandment reaches behind our conduct and descends all the way into our appetites. It does not merely ask whether we have taken what God has forbidden; it asks whether we have begun to crave what God has not given. Paul therefore says that covetousness “is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5), because beneath the wanting is worship. The covetous heart has begun to believe that life is somewhere else, that blessedness has somehow been misplaced, that God has put the better portion on another man’s plate.
And once we have decided that God has put the better portion on another man’s plate, the sin becomes more serious still. For our quarrel is no longer merely with the man across the table, but with the Host who served us both. Your neighbor did not choose his portion, and he certainly did not choose yours. He did not arrange your gifts, your limits, your opportunities, your family, your disappointments, or your station in life. God did. And so beneath the covetous thought, “I should have that,” lurks another thought that is far more blasphemous, and that is: “God is withholding from me.” What looked at first like envy of our neighbor turns out to be an accusation against our Father. This is because covetousness is not merely the desire for another man’s portion. It is a quiet and respectable form of finger wagging at the Almighty, indicting the one who owns all things with infinite power and might, and portions all things with infinite goodness and love, as the one who has sinned against us.
That is why contentment cannot be reduced to silly slogans about having “an attitude of gratitude.” If covetousness is really an accusation that God has not given us enough, then a gratitude journal cannot reach the bottom of it. The problem is not simply that we want too much. It is that we have wanted lesser things too much and God too little. Thomas Chalmers called the cure “the expulsive power of a new affection,” which is simply a grand way of saying that the heart lets go of a lesser treasure when it discovers a greater one.
C.S. Lewis made much the same point when he argued that our problem is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are far too weak. We are like children content to make mud pies in a filthy alley because we cannot imagine what it would be like to spend a holiday at the sea. Sin does not make us creatures who desire too much glory, too much joy, too much satisfaction. It makes us creatures willing to settle for embarrassingly little of them. We clutch money, approval, comfort, sex, success, and security as though these trinkets were the treasure itself, when all along God is offering us Himself.
And so you cannot merely scold the soul into wanting nothing. It was made to love. It was made to treasure. It was made to cling to something. The answer to covetousness is therefore not an emptier heart, but a fuller one; not fewer affections, but better ones. The grip of lesser things is finally broken when Christ becomes more lovely than the thing we once thought we could not live without.
And this is where Christianity begins to be truly good news. The gospel does not merely berate the covetous man and tell him to stop coveting. It gives him Jesus Christ as his treasure. It gives him the One who, though He possessed all things, grasped at nothing; who received poverty, obscurity, rejection, suffering, and even death without once accusing His Father of withholding good. Where Adam reached for what God had forbidden, and all his children have spent their lives reaching after lesser loves, Christ willingly received the cup His Father had given Him. Where Israel murmured in the wilderness, Christ trusted. Where we look at God’s providence and say, “I do not want Your will; I want mine,” Christ prayed, “Not My will, but Yours, be done.”
And then this obedient Christ went to the cross for men whose hearts have spent their lives inventing substitute saviors. He bore the judgment owed to idolaters like you and me, and He rose again to give His people more than mere forgiveness. He rose to give them Himself.
And this is the great rearrangement of the Christian life. The lesser things do not become worthless; they become smaller. Money can return to being money. Marriage can return to being marriage. Success can return to being a gift instead of a god. The good things of this world are not despised, but they are finally put back in their proper place. And as the Spirit works upon us through the years, Christ becomes more precious, more beautiful, more sufficient, while everything else is seen in its proper proportion.
That is Christian contentment. Not that we cease to love the gifts, but that we finally learn to love the Giver more.
“Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You” (Psalm 73:25).
