Everything goes bad until the day it doesn’t. When the wicked flourish and things seem worst, precisely then God causes an Esther or Cyrus to arise, and they fall. The Lord especially acts when the people think he is irrelevant and does nothing (Zeph.
Rev. 13:8 and passages like it are a meditative and interpretive lens to Genesis and the entire OT. That the OT points forward to Christ and his atoning sacrifice is just a pious thought but Scripture’s teaching. So when God creates trees, he also creates the very genetic line of plants upon which will hang the salvation price of the world.
Kolb accurately and simply defines coveting as “wanting the wrong things,” and this is what St. Paul means by calling coveting idolatry (Col. 3:5). To covet is to want the idol instead of God.