Luke 12:16 Commentary and Bible Study

These parables are so rich, so helpful to us. On the surface they seem so simple and yet they are so deep. How easily this man in the crowd could relate to it! They have so many lessons in them and warnings and so much encouragement and direction for seeking the Lord. You start here with a rich man and let's make a little character study of him. You are learning something about this man. ‘The ground of a rich man brought forth plentifully’, and immediately he begins to think within himself, ‘What am I going to do with this substance? This is mine.’ There's no sign of any gratitude to God. There's no acknowledgement of where his increase came from, where his substance comes from. ‘It’s all mine’ – that is all he can think of. Now in those days, presumably he as a rich man he didn't go out and work the ground himself. We imagine he had a pretty large estate and probably it was inherited land; probably he hadn't worked up this possession himself. In those days wealthy men and great landowners usually didn't appear overnight. It was something which had continued over generations, and a lot of his success would have been due to the weather, due to his labour force, due to the fact that he had an astute husbandman and steward and person directing and managing his land, and due to previous generations. But there's no sign of any gratitude, not to God, not to anybody else. The whole episode, brief as it is, focuses on an intensely self-centred person. It never occurs to him that he has received this from somewhere or that someone else is involved in this. Sadly, we all have this tendency to place confidence in whatever we have. We are generally self-confident and self-sufficient. If you have good health, generally speaking it doesn't occur to you to thank God for it. If you have brains, it doesn't occur to you that you were born with them. Instead, you take credit for them; you preen yourself. We are full of pride: this is our trouble. We trust in it. We think we are going to get on in life because we have got this attribute or that attribute. Whatever our strengths are, we put all our self-confidence into those things. If you’ve got business shrewdness, or if you've got wealth, these are the things you will be trusting in. That's the basis of covetousness. How am I going to make out in life? What's going to make me happy? What's going to get me where I want to go? The fact that I've got more of this than somebody else, or that I am better at that than somebody else goes to my head. Perhaps I’ve got more charm. Whatever it is you have, you trust in it, not in the Lord, not in your Creator.