Luke 12:17 Commentary and Bible Study

But we see something about this man's thoughts. ‘He thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?’ The first thing about his thoughts is they are very selfish thoughts. There was one fourth century preacher that made this observation on this rich fool of this parable. He says, ‘Oh yes he did have room. He had plenty of barns, he had the barns of the needy. There were plenty of barns where he could have put his excess. This tremendous excess of harvest which he had managed to get this year. He could have stored it in the kitchens of widows; he could have put it into the mouths of orphans.’ There were many barns, as it were, for a person who had a grain of unselfishness in him, but this man couldn't think what he was going to do, where he was going to put his increase, because all he had his mind on is keeping the substance for his own enrichment, for himself. Now those were days when there was no welfare state and there was tremendous need and there were widows and orphans and there were other areas which hadn't been anything like so fortunate. There were many dispossessed people or there were many barns but this man was preoccupied with himself.