The Lord is awe-inspiring, fearsome, fascinating, intriguing, majestic, and full of splendor: breathtaking! Here is what I saw of him and what came to my mind and heart in Luke 12:21,
"This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."
"This" refers to the fate of the rich man in the story Jesus gave "a crowd of many thousands." In the story a certain rich man had a bumper crop, built bigger barns and decided to "take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." Luke 12:19. As the story goes, God told the rich man, "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" Verse 20.
The point of the story is the message of Ecclesiastes. The riches we pursue in this life "under the sun" is an emptiness, a "vanity". It's meaninglessness lies in the reality that whatever we accumulate in this life does us little good for eternity. This life and what it offers is pretty short compared to eternity and all we acquire gets left behind. Jesus reminds us of this in the story of the beggar, Lazarus, and the rich man. In that story Abraham tells the rich man, after he is dead, "Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony." Luke 16:25.
The danger imposed by riches is that they are deceiving. The pursuit of wealth becomes a great distraction, keeping us from wisely considering the import issues in this life. The wonderful offer of salvation from God's judgment gets choked out by the desire to acquire wealth in this life. In the parable of the soils, the Lord said that one condition of the heart the gospel may encounter is one filled with thorns, "The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature." This is a heart the gospel will eventually fail to resonate with and the person will find himself shut out from the kingdom of God and cast into a fiery lake of burning sulfur, Revelation 21:8.
Jesus never taught a rich man cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he did warn of the dangers riches and the worry of them present to us. In Luke 16:13, Jesus said, "No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money." Regardless of what we have in the way of wealth in this life, the wise man will be "rich toward God."
Here is a message that has been lost by many in our time, as they have misunderstood God's love to be expressed by his blessing of wealth upon us in this life. Of these, Paul told Timothy to beware as they are, "men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain." 1 Timothy 6:5.
Anything of the Lord capture your heart from Scripture today? Share your thoughts of worship with us from your Bible reading today. We'd love to hear from you!
Trevor Fisk
No comments:
Post a Comment