Joshua 7:16-21: in context

Israel has just been defeated at Ai because someone violated God's command and took plunder that was devoted to destruction. Joshua narrows the search by lot, tribe by tribe, family by family, until it falls on one man, Achan. And Joshua says something gentle to him: my son, give glory to God and confess; tell me what you have done. Achan does confess, and his confession is worth reading closely, because in a single sentence he lays out the whole anatomy of how his sin happened. When I saw among the spoil a beautiful robe and the silver and the gold, he says, then I coveted them, and took them, and they are hidden in the ground inside my tent. Four verbs, in order: I saw, I coveted, I took, I hid.

That is the sequence almost every sin follows, and naming it is useful, because it shows where the chain could have been broken. It began with seeing, which is often innocent enough. But the seeing was allowed to become coveting, a lingering desire that fixed on the thing. The coveting became taking, the desire turned into action. And the taking immediately became hiding, the action buried out of sight. It is the same progression as Eve in the garden, who saw the fruit was desirable and took and ate; the same as David, who saw Bathsheba and sent and took. The steps are predictable, which means they are also interruptible, if I catch them early enough.

That gives me a way to examine my own temptations honestly, because I can usually locate myself somewhere on Achan's chain. Something has caught my eye; the looking has started to become wanting; the wanting is edging toward taking; and part of me is already planning how to hide it. The further down the chain I go, the harder it is to stop, which is why the place to break it is early, at the seeing and the coveting, before it becomes the taking and the burying. Where am I right now on Achan's sequence of saw, coveted, took, and hid, and will I break the chain before it reaches the end?