While we've come to the end of a couple of weeks when we've been reflecting very simply

and briefly on the 10 Commandments, a number 10 is this, you shall not covet. We covet

when we're not content with what we have and want to have what belongs to someone else.

I'll come to what I think is one of the most interesting things about this commandment in a moment,

but since we're at the end of these two weeks when we've been focusing on the decalogue,

I want to make this observation. It's not blindingly original.

We all recognise that as life becomes more complex, the principles or laws we use to regulate it

are important and they're bound to increase in number. If nobody had put anything up in space

or ever went there, then we wouldn't need any space law. If there were no computers, no

worldwide web, no social media, we wouldn't need laws to regulate them, but they do exist

and we all understand that we need to agree how to handle them.

But here's an important observation. God gave us 10 basic laws to govern our lives.

Yes, we need to learn how to apply them and as we've hinted that wonderful

cataclysms of the church do a masterful job in helping us do that.

But when these 10 big laws are ignored, demeaned or rejected as is often happening in our society

today, when a society overthrows what I sometimes call the big 10, something else inevitably happens.

Our governments have to start introducing more and more and more laws to try to

cope with the moral chaos and the social chaos that results. They simply don't know what they're

doing because they have no moral rudder calibrated to God's word and wisdom. Ignore, demean,

or destroy the big 10 and you inevitably have to reproduce more and more and more laws.

And the truth of the matter is, as Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in one of his

opinions, that we're doing things simply because we want to. And the more we do things because we

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