Covetousness and Conditioning

¹ Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? ² You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.

James 4:1-3

¹⁷ "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's."

Exodus 20:17

From these verses, it is easy to assume that to covet means to desire something which someone else has. However, that description is more fitting with envy than it is with covetousness.

Covetousness can cause a person to desire what he does not have. But it has more to do with desiring after a created thing with desires of the flesh nature, rather than desiring something with love - which is God’s desire working in us.

Covetousness is the classic wrong belief that the acquisition of more money, a promotion at work, a more expensive car, a younger wife, and so on, will make you happy. Let us get one thing straight - you could get all of those things into your life and yet still be just as dissatisfied with your lot in life.

Fullness of Joy

The Bible says that in the presence of God is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). Joy actually comes from God - it does not come from material goods. Joy is a spiritual power that resonates in our spirits and makes us feel alive. Therefore, the idea that an inanimate object has some sort of mystical power - is absurd.

It is a different matter entirely when you desire a created thing with the love of God. Love brings the very presence of God flooding into your spirit, which in turn, compels you to desire those things that God wants you to desire and to do the will of God.

¹³ For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

Philippians 2:13

¹³ For it is God Himself whose power creates within you the desire to do His gracious will and also brings about the accomplishment of the desire.

Philippians 2:13 WNT

The Apostle Paul said that it was the love of God which compelled him to do what he did.

¹⁴ For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died;

2 Corinthians 5:14 NKJV

Other versions of the Bible express this verse slightly differently:

The love of Christ constraineth us (KJV); it is the love of Christ which is moving us (BBE); Christ's love has moved me to such extremes. His love has the first and last word in everything we do (MSG); Whatever we do, it is certainly not for our own profit but because Christ's love controls us now (TLB); We are ruled by Christ's love for us (CEV); For the love of Christ controls and urges and impels us (AMP); Christ's love guides us (GW).

The Presence of the Invisible God

When the love of God compels a person to desire something and do a certain thing, they often do not attribute that desire and action to the presence of God’s indwelling love. We experience the emotions of love and joy, and yet, God still remains invisible and somewhat unknown to most people. The net effect of this is that people, without the knowledge of God, see the power of God as indwelling created things, people, places, activities and material objects. In this way, people make a god out of something. This is the situation which was addressed by the Apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans.

¹⁷ For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith." ¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. ²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. ²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator--who is forever praised. Amen. ²⁶ Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷ In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Romans 1:17-27 NIV

God wants His children to have good gifts, it is therefore His intention that we desire after those things that He wants us to enjoy. If you think about it for a moment: something would not be a good gift for us if we did not enjoy it and if it did not bring us a sense of satisfaction and delight. It is for this reason that we delight in spending time with those people that we love and doing the things that we enjoy. However, the moment that we take our mind off the invisible God for a length of time, we are in danger of misappropriating the power of God and making idols out of created things.

The people of Israel had to be told to remember God in relation to the accumulation of wealth, so that they would be reminded that it was God’s power, not their own, which entitled them to have what they had (See Deuteronomy 8:18).

Classical Conditioning

We are creatures of habit that respond to conditioning. According to psychology, there are two different types of conditioning. There is classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

Classical conditioning is when an observable stimulus exists, which produces a particular response in an organism. This is reflexive behaviour. In other words, a person or animal is trained to naturally respond to something in the environment, which it has associated with some other thing.

The best example of classical conditioning is the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychologist.

Pavlov noticed that when the dogs in his laboratory were given meat, they would salivate. The dog's salivation to meat is an unconditioned reflex: it is something which is within their nature.

Just before the dogs were fed, a bell would be rung. The ringing of the bell in itself did not have the ability to cause the dogs to salivate. After time, the dogs had learned to associate the ringing of the bell with the dispensation of food. Therefore, the dogs would begin to salivate in response to the ringing of the bell alone. When this happened, classical conditioning had occurred and a new, conditioned reflex had occurred.

Classical Conditioning in Everyday Life

People become classically conditioned when they are given the love of God for the purpose of desiring something. A good example of this would be when a man becomes attracted to a particular woman. This is for the purpose of the man becoming conditioned by the love of God in order to desire a close relationship with that woman.

In the absence of a proper apprehension of the role that God plays in a person’s life, a person can become conditioned to believe that it is the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex which brings him or her the experience that we know as love.

Without the revelation of the existence of God and a reverence for Him – a person is likely to dismiss the belief that it is God’s presence that makes him or her happy when he or she falls in love with a member of the opposite sex. This misappropriation of God’s love will inevitably cause a person to make a god or goddess out of a person. The same concept is true with anything else that a person has learned to associate with feelings of well-being.

In the absence of something which a person has been conditioned to identify as giving him pleasure, he will naturally long for the acquisition of that thing by the quickest and most accessible means. In the absence of the love of God, a person will continue to long for what they identify as bringing them love.

In the absence of God’s love, a person will often desire after something through lust rather than love. Lust in the Biblical sense is not always sexually related: lust can come in the form of the desire for an abundance of material goods.

We all have become conditioned to make idols out of things. I am not laying the blame upon the love of God – not at all. I am simply highlighting the effect that love can have on the mind of the person who does not truly appreciate God. We can therefore see the vital importance of praise in the life of a person. Praise is not simply flattery – it is the acknowledgement of the truth: God is all in all. Christians cry out to God for Him to pour out His power, and yet, it is the very power of God that could lead to the creation of wrong beliefs and the like – if we are not ready to receive that power.

Idolatry can be likened to the creation of icons in the mind which represent something that is vital to human existence. Money is one of the most notorious of these icons which man has made into a god. It is little wonder that the Bible warns us against seeking after the acquisition of money. (See 1 Timothy 6:9-10).

Greed will always cause a person to want more and more of something, with the belief that the more they have of it - the more satisfied they will be. When a person delights in the acquisition of money, they will desire more of it, even when they have acquired more than enough for their own needs.

Selfish Ambition

Once a belief has been established in a person’s mind through conditioning – the mind, in the absence of God’s love, will seek to established ideas and plans which may seem convincing – but are actually nothing more than baseless fantasies. The Bible calls these fantasies, selfish ambition (Philippians 2:3). We see selfish ambition at work in the parable of the man who broke down his barns in Luke 12:15-21.

The first line of this parable is interesting:

¹⁵ And He said to them, "Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses."

Luke 12:15 nkjv

The Greek word translated “life” in this verse, is zoe (G2222) which means the very life-giving essence of God indwelling man’s spirit. When a person is covetous, he has become deluded into believing that the very source of his joy actually comes from an inanimate object, place, activity or person.  This leads to a fruitless pursuit of happiness through people, power and possessions.

What Is Happiness?

Happiness could be described as the fulfilment of a person’s need for a sense of security, significance and self-worth. Joy could be described as the manifestation of the life-giving presence of God. There seems to be a correlation between the two in that when a person is truly content, feels secure and accepts himself as he is – then he experiences a free-flow of the joy of the Lord.

The Bible says in Romans 14:17 that the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. This righteousness, peace and joy is found in the Holy Spirit, not in our achievements, the way we look, what other people think about us, our good works or our ability to keep rules.

No wonder Jesus Himself said in Matthew 6:33 that we are to not worry about material provision – but that we were to seek after the kingdom of God and His righteousness. When we do this – all those things, the material provision that we seek – will be added to us.

Contentment is the Key

I believe that contentment and self-acceptance is the key to happiness. 1 Timothy 6:6 says that godliness with contentment is great gain.

God does want His children to have all of their needs met and to live life in abundance. But God also calls us to live simply and to appreciate what we have. When a person succumbs to greed, he loses the ability to be satisfied with what he has; in fact, he cannot be satisfied with anything.