Bible Study series: Luke 12:13-21. “Fool! This very night, your life will be demanded of you!”
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In the next link to the original chapter, I comment more and offer the Greek text. At the bottom you will find a “Summary and Conclusion” section geared toward discipleship. Check it out!
In this post, links are provided for further study.
Let’s begin.
Scripture: Luke 12:13-21
13 Someone from the crowd said to him. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me!” 14 But he said, “Man, who appointed me to be a judge or arbiter over you?” 15 He said to them, “Watch out and guard yourselves from all greed because anyone who has abundance—his life is not sourced from his possessions!”
16 Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced bumper crops. 17 And he reasoned to himself, ‘What will I do? Because I don’t have any place to store my crops!’” 18 “He said, ‘I’ll do this! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones! Then I’ll store there all my grain and my goods. 19 I’ll tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take it easy, eat, drink, and celebrate!”’” 20 “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This very night, your life will be demanded of you! What you set up, to whom will it belong?’ 21 And so it is for anyone who stores up possessions for himself but is not rich towards God.” (Luke 12:13-21)
Comments:
13:
While Jesus was speaking, a man interrupted him. He respectfully called him teacher. Often experts in the law and teachers of the law—a class of proto-Rabbis, let’s say—sat in a synagogue or other local courts, to explain and adjudicate the law to them.
This man’s mind was stuck on his father’s possessions and the fact that his brother, probably the older one, would not share. Jesus saw that his mind needed to be elevated above material possessions. A believer is allowed to go to court (1 Cor. 6:1-8), though not a brother against a brother. It is wise to settle out of court, but if your opponent is stubborn and committing an injustice against you, then let a judge decide.
14:
“Man”: Jesus addressed him in a polite way for his time. The Message Bible says, “Mister.” Another translation says, “Friend.” Most other translations have “man.” I like the Message’s translation, but I decided to go conservative. But it may also be the case that the direct address creates distance between Jesus and the interrupter. Jesus wanted to be firm with his reply.
Jesus was not a judge in the law in the specific way that the man demanded. The Lord knew the law well, but he was not a judge or arbiter over such mundane matters. It would distract him from his calling, on his way to Jerusalem to die. The interrupter did not discern who Jesus really was, nor his mission.
“greed”: it is the noun that means “greediness, insatiableness, avarice, covetousness.” It means to “grasp for more.” The lexicon put together by Liddell and Scott says it means, “greediness, grasping, assumption [taking], arrogance.”
15:
“watch out” and “guard yourselves”: Jesus issues two commands in quick succession, so we must take these words seriously. He is about to tell us that money and resources like a land or a farm that produces bumper crops can deceive us. We can allow money to blind us to what matters.
We have all known people who are greedy. Yes, he may be a certain businessman who swallows and takes down other businesses by uneven and dubious means. But we ourselves can be greedy. We can covet out neighbor’s possessions. It violates the tenth of the Ten Commandments: “Don’t covet.”
“life”: Jesus is also raising the basic definition to life in God and his kingdom.
16:
“parable”:
“land”: it could be translated as “farm.” Land was the major source of money or wealth in the ancient world, because it was more stable than trading, sending out merchant ships that might sink. If the land was managed properly, like letting it rest on the seventh year, a kind of Sabbath (Lev. 25:1-7), then the soil could renourish itself and produce a bumper crop during the other six growing seasons.
17-18:
The man was reasonable in wanting to build bigger barns. It is reasonable to expand a business or move to a bigger place when it grows. No doubt a growing business helps the local economy, provides more jobs for people, and prospers the business owner. None of this is immoral in itself, but in the next verses Jesus is about to drive home what was really in the rich man’s heart.
19:
The rich landowner spoke to his own soul. King David and other psalmists did that (Pss. 42:5, 11; 43:5; 57:8; 62:5; 103:1-2, 22; 104:1, 45; 116:7; 146:1). But they did not speak low-grade ideas to their soul. They exhorted it to praise the Lord or to cheer up in him.
So what is the soul? It can mean, depending on the context: “soul, life” and it is hard to draw a firm line between the two. “Breath, life principle, soul”; “earthly life”; “the soul as seat and center of the inner life of man in its many and varied aspects, desires, feelings, emotions”; “self’; or “that which possesses life, a soul, creature, person.”
Word Study on Spirit, Soul, and Body
20:
“All of the ‘I’s’ and ‘my’s’ in his interior monologue are shortsighted. He is going to die, as all humans eventually do, rich and poor” (Garland, comment on 12:20)
The psalmist calls people fools who boast in their riches:
6 those who trust in their wealth
and boast of their great riches?
7 No one can redeem the life of another
or give to God a ransom for them—
8 the ransom for a life is costly,
no payment is ever enough—
9 so that they should live on forever
and not see decay. (Ps. 49:6-9, NIV)
In this parable, God breaks into the man’s life and calls him a fool.
“fool”: It could be translated as “unwise!” (See also Luke 11:40.) “The word ‘fool’ … is not used lightly but is used in the OT sense of one who rejects the knowledge and precepts of God as a basis for life” (Liefeld and Pao, comment on v. 20).
“will demanded of you”: it could be translated as “required of you.” The verb is in the passive form. Commentators teach us that in this context it is the divine passive, which is an indirect way of saying that God is the one who is about to demand the man’s soul.
“what you set up”: it could be translated as “what you have prepared.” God tells the rich man that everything he had built is about to be useless to him. It is about to belong to someone else. You are born naked into this world, and the hearse that transports your soulless body to the cemetery will not pull a U-Haul trailer behind it, so that your prized possessions will be thrown into the grave. Once in a while, however, the family of the deceased will put in the coffin a valued book or jewel or such like, but it does no good in the afterlife, biblically speaking. The deceased cannot take it with them. Back in the days of the Pharaohs, they commanded giant pyramids to house their priceless possessions to signal the gods in the afterlife that the Pharaoh was rich and therefore acceptable to them; he was another god. But the treasures were still in the burial cavity when thieves broke in and stole them.
Morris: “A man whose life hangs by a thread and who may be called upon at any time to give an account of himself is a fool if he relies on material things” (comment on v. 20).
21:
“possessions”: this was added from the context (v. 15) for clarity.
And now Jesus delivers the punchline or main point to the parable. The rich man lost his perspective on material possessions and ignored God. It is better to ignore the accumulation of material possessions and be rich towards God, and this wealth is not measured in dollars and cents.
“It is important to note that the issue in the parable is not wealth, but how wealth is directed. The sin is accumulating riches for oneself. … Paul also teaches that the love of money—not money per se—is the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10). It is how money can cause us to focus inwardly that is the danger. … The one who relies on God has the true wealth of life” (Bock, p. 1154).
So what does it mean to be rich in God? It means having salvation, which is eternal life starting the moment you surrender to Christ and are saved. It means entering, by God’s grace, the kingdom of God and keeping it first in your life. Matt. 6:33 says that we are to seek first his kingdom, and then all these things will be added to us. And Jesus is about to repeat this truth in v. 31, below. Being rich towards God means that you go from darkness to light. It is reaching out in Jesus’s name to the lost. It is sharing your possessions with the needy. Most of all, it is in loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and loving your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27). And how do we love our neighbor? The Golden rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you (Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31). If we were to do those basics, we would be rich towards God, and he would say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:21).
Jeremiah the prophet has this relevant insight:
This is what the LORD says:
… Let not the rich boast of their wealth, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight. (Jer. 9:23-24, NIV)
The rich man in Jesus’s parable should have had a higher perspective than money. Focus on the Lord and his kindness, justice, and righteousness—on earth, not just in the air or in the abstract.
GrowApp for Luke 12:13-21
1. Study Exod. 20:17, the tenth of the Ten Commandments. How have you overcome greed or excessively desiring what your neighbors have?
2. How do you become rich towards God?
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND MORE
To see the bibliography, please click on this link and scroll down to the bottom. You will also find a “Summary and Conclusion” for discipleship.
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