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f you don't get caught in a lie, did you really sin? If you don't get caught stealing, is it really breaking the Seventh Commandment? Sometimes we don't think those private cruises we book on the Lust Boat really matter. No harm, no foul. We might be able to live this way if God had just stopped at eight commandments.
In the Large Catechism, Luther says God gave the last two commandments especially to people like you: people who go to church, who are involved in youth group, and who haven’t been zapped by the first eight commandments. The last two commandments tell us that sinful desires alone qualify as sin. Even if you never acted on that lustful thought you had, even if you got away with it, it’s still sin before God and subject to punishment both now and in eternity. You’ve probably wondered why God has two commandments saying,“You shall not covet.” Maybe your Baptist friends, who combine the Ninth and Tenth Commandments into one, are right about this. The Reformed way is intriguing. What real difference is there between coveting your neighbor’s house, wife, workers, or animals? The difference is in the Hebrew word for covet. The word covet in the Ninth Commandment means “You shall not cause yourself to covet.” In other words, don’t play with a single sinful desire in your mind. Don’t act as if it really doesn’t matter because it seems that no one else knows about it. That lust, that covetous desire to want one thing more, is sin in all its ugliness and damnableness. Even if you were a quadriplegic and unable to lift a hand or speak a word, having one single lewd thought in your life is enough to damn you to hell for all eternity. But it never stops at one, does it? Once that one little thought of lust pops into your mind, there’s a cascading effect. It’s like someone launched a computer virus in your mind. Thought after thought rushes in, and you become tainted, ruined, defiled by lust after lust. This is what our Lord points out in the two commandments that expose the sin of coveting. The Ninth Commandment tells us not to covet a single thing. The Tenth Commandment says that we’re not to go along with those lustful thoughts, since they get out of hand so quickly.
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