Luke 12:16-21 (NIV) And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”‘
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”
This parable was told to illustrate Jesus’ commandment to guard against greed of all kinds (verse 15). The main character in the story is a man whom God had blessed with an abundance of crops, so abundant, in fact, that his barns were not large enough to hold it all.
The man’s focus should have been on God, the one who had poured out the blessing on him, and on asking God what HE wanted him to do with this abundance. God might have been able to point him to hundreds of poor families that could have really used a gift of this food. And, when he obeyed, God could have poured out still more blessings on him.
But his mind was not even bent in that direction. Instead, the sheer abundance of the harvest moved him to think about how he could preserve it for himself. That way, he could take life easy for a few years, instead of having to work. It was such an attractive scenario that it pushed every other though from his head.
But God’s final pronouncement in the parable shows how futile that kind of thinking really is. The man had big plans, but God knew that he wouldn’t live to see them. He would die that very night.
The point of the parable is not that God was condemning the man to death for his self-centered thinking or his lack of generosity. Nor was it that the man might have saved his life if he had been more generous. Parables are usually much simpler than that. It simply shows that, in this world where death could come at any moment, a focus on worldly riches, which cannot pass into the next life, is supremely foolish. Instead, one’s focus should always be on eternal things.
Father, we really can get trapped in a world-centered mindset that not only blinds us to our own mortality (none of us is guaranteed tomorrow, no matter how young or healthy), but that takes our focus off of You and Your will for us. Help me, Lord, to always keep eternity in view, and to keep a soft, movable heart before You all the day of my life, no matter how many or how few they may be. Amen.