5 Warnings Against Covetousness and How to Put It to Death

We Must Believe the Warnings Too

Paul clearly saw that the main fuel for faith is the word of God—promises such as, “My God will supply every need of yours.” So when covetousness begins to raise its greedy head, what we must do is begin to preach the word of God to ourselves. We need to hear what God says. We need to hear his warnings about what becomes of the covetous and how serious it is to covet. And we need to hear his promises of future grace that give great contentment to the soul and free us to love.

Consider some warnings against covetousness. Let them send you running to the covetousness-destroying promises of God.

1. Covetousness Never Brings Satisfaction

“He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity” (Eccl. 5:10). God’s word on money is that it does not satisfy those who love it. If we believe him, we will turn away from the love of money. It is a dead-end street.

Jesus puts it like this in Luke 12:15: “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” If the word of the Lord needed confirming, there are enough miserable rich people in the world to prove that a satisfied life does not come from having things. Watch the news and see if it is not true that just as many people commit suicide by jumping off the Coronado Bridge in San Diego (in spite of wealth) as the Brooklyn Bridge in New York (because of poverty).

2. Covetousness Chokes Off Spiritual Life

When Jesus told the parable of the soils (Mark 4:1–20), he said that some seed “fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it” (Mark 4:7). Then he interpreted the parable and said that the seed is the word of God. The thorns choking the seed are “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things” (Mark 4:19).

Covetousness is the “desire for other things” in competition with the word of God. A real battle rages when the word of God is preached. “The desire for other things” can be so strong that the beginnings of spiritual life can be choked out altogether. This is such a frightful warning that we should all be on our guard every time we hear the word to receive it with faith and not to choke it with covetousness. This is the conclusion of Jesus after telling a different parable: “Take care then how you hear” (Luke 8:18).

3. Covetousness Spawns Many Other Sins

When Paul says, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Tim. 6:10), he means that the kind of heart that finds contentment in money and not in God is the kind of heart that produces all other kinds of evils. James gives an example: “You covet and cannot obtain so you fight and wage war” (James 4:2 author’s translation). In other words, if we were content, like Paul, in hard times and easy times, we would not be driven to fight and wage war like this.
Covetousness is a breeding ground for a thousand other sins. And that heightens the warning to flee from it and to fight for contentment in God with all our might.

4. Covetousness Lets You Down When You Need Help Most

It lets you down in the hour of death. In 1 Timothy 6:7, Paul says, “We brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.” At the greatest crisis of your life, when you need contentment and hope and security more than any other time, your money and all your possessions take wings and fly away. They let you down. They are fair-weather friends at best. And you enter eternity with nothing but the measure of contentment that you had in God.

If you dropped dead right now, would you take with you a payload of pleasure in God or would you stand before him with a spiritual cavity where covetousness used to be? Covetousness lets you down just when you need help most.

5. Covetousness Destroys the Soul

In 1 Timothy 6:9, Paul says again, “Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” In the end, covetousness can destroy the soul in hell. The reason I am sure that this destruction is not some temporary financial fiasco but a final destruction in hell is what Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:12. He says that covetousness is to be resisted with the fight of faith, then adds, “Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession.” What’s at stake in fleeing covetousness and fighting for contentment in future grace is eternal life.

So when Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:9 that the desire to be rich plunges people into ruin, he isn’t saying that greed can mess up your marriage or your business (which it certainly can!). He is saying that covetousness can mess up your eternity. Or, as 1 Timothy 6:10 says at the end, “It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs [lit., “impaled themselves with many pains”].”

God has gone the extra mile in the Bible to warn us mercifully that the idolatry of covetousness is a no-win situation. It’s a dead-end street in the worst sense of the word. It’s a trick and a trap. So my word to you is the word of 1 Timothy 6:11: Flee from it. When you see it coming (in a television ad or a Christmas catalog or an internet pop-up or a neighbor’s purchase), run from it the way you would run from a roaring, starving lion that just escaped from the zoo. But where do you run to?

We must pray that he will incline our hearts to his word, where the triumph over covetousness is promised.

The Sword That Puts Covetousness to Death

You run to the arsenal of faith and quickly take the mantle of prayer from Psalm 119:36 and throw it around yourself:

[O Lord], incline my heart to your testimonies,
     and not to selfish gain!

In other words, “Grant me the future grace of strong influences on my heart to give me an appetite for your truth that breaks the power of my appetite for things.” Without the future grace of God, our hearts will pursue money. We must pray that he will incline our hearts to his word, where the triumph over covetousness is promised.

After putting on this mantle of prayer, we must then quickly take down two cutlasses from the armory of God’s word: a short one and a long one, specially made by the Holy Spirit to slay covetousness. And we must stand our ground at the door. When the lion of covetousness shows its deadly face, we show him the shorter cutlass—namely, 1 Timothy 6:6—“Godliness with contentment is great gain.”

We preach it to our souls and thrust it at the attacking greed. “Great gain! Great gain in godliness with contentment! Stay where you are, lion of covetousness. I have great gain when I rest content in God. He is my treasure now, and he will be to the end. This is my faith in future grace. Be gone!” Then, if the lion persists, you take out the longer cutlass:

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

So we can confidently say,

“The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear;
what can man do to me?” (Heb. 13:5–6)

Trusting this all-satisfying promise of future grace, you drive it into the chest of the lion of greed. You do exactly what Paul says in Colossians 3:5: “Put to death . . . covetousness.”

Brothers and sisters, all covetousness is unbelief in future grace. Learn with me, oh, learn with me how to use the sword of the Spirit to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold of the future grace of eternal life!

This article is adapted from Battling Unbelief: Defeating Sin with Superior Pleasure by John Piper.

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