"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." Exodus 20:17
What do we covet? God points out in the Ten Commandments a series of commands, codifying our relationship with Him officially (since "sin" existed from the Fall of Man forward) into ten commands that cement our relationship with Him as God's people. The first few deal with our relationship with Him, the next few deal with actions we take (murder, steal, adultery) and the last deals with a condition of the heart (covet).
In a healthy way, this desire can make us take action to obtain the "want" in an ethical and legal manner. We can work harder to achieve the goal. We can seek a job that pays enough to live the life style we desire for our families. In an unhealthy and sinful way, it can cause us to lie, cheat, steal or even murder (Cain killing Abel for having the more acceptable offering offended Cain's sense of desiring God's favor for example).
When is that line crossed? Interestingly enough, we see it almost daily. In large dramatic ways, we see sports franchises endorse cheating by their actions. My Astros as a most familiar way violating the directives from MLB to not use the electronic equipment for learning what pitch the pitcher is going to deliver. In other cases, we have two fishermen accused of adding weights to their fish to win the bass boat in a contest recently. We see Tom Brady in "deflate-gate" a few years ago, and even in marathons, people seeking to get a certain time to qualify for "the Boston" or some other event have been known to cut a course and shave a few miles off to better their time (marathon races have electronic mats used at the main points of a run, but all marathons add a mat or two in places unannounced to catch potential cheaters looking to shorten the course).
In a more sensitive vein, accounting firms don't make a ton of money on audits just because people want to see how well the books balance. We've even seen locally that Enron isn't the only game in town when it comes to attempting to present a false front and "cook the books." But corporations are made up of people, and as Promise Keepers once noted, the car doesn't break down over night. Our slide into they abyss of a heinous act is a slow boat to China as my dad used to say, usually starting small and then growing larger with each act.
What drives this behavior of willingness to live on the edge of danger to gain something illegally or unethically? It could be laziness. Worse, it could be a complete loss of perspective that blurs our vision between the right way to achieve and the wrong way to. That vision blurring condition is also known as sin, and as we confess from 1st John, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." So, it's likely that what becomes a big sin started in a small way.
The capacity is in all of us. The cure is available to confess that sin and to seek forgiveness. Our "repentance" is a turning away then.
We seek God's counsel when we sin, in this case covet, and we seek His forgiveness, given freely through His Son Jesus Christ's suffering, death and resurrection.
