Exodus 20:17 You shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant… We have here at the close a startling enough reminder that the calling of Israel to be a state or commonwealth did not exhaust its calling. It is very easy to see that the idea thus introduced at the close of the covenant was sure to exert a profound influence on the Israelite's whole conception of duty. 1. For one thing, it served to lay emphasis upon the stainless purity required in each individual soul. To be a good citizen, it told him, might be enough in an earthly kingdom, but not in the kingdom of Jehovah. Jehovah looks upon every heart. He is each man's God as well as King over all the citizens; Lord of the conscience and the interior life. The individual, therefore, must be holy as well as the state; and if innocence from statutory transgression be much, purity in the soul is more. 2. In the next place, this sudden revelation of a deeper righteousness, which is so unexpectedly flashed oat upon us at the close of the Commandments, flings its piercing light back upon all that had gone before. The truth is that illicit conduct always has its root in illicit desire. 3. In the next place, it was by thus appending, as it were, a rider to every other Commandment of the Ten that this last one awoke in earnest Hebrews the conviction not only of failure but of hopeless failure. A fatal commandment, truly, to one's self-righteous conceit! Not content with disclosing ghastly depths of evil beneath the surface of a decorous and well-ordered life, it insists on probing the motives of our best conduct; it puts us upon an effort to "cleanse the very thoughts of our hearts," not "by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost," but by our own exertions; till the poor soul, stung to death by evil thoughts which it cannot expel, evil desires which it cannot prevent, and evil passions which it cannot master, is reduced to an extremity of despair: "Who shall deliver me out of this body of death?" 4. It is in this way, finally, that the last of the Ten Words educated the Hebrew for the New Testament revelation of "grace and truth by Jesus Christ." (J. O. Dykes, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. |
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