The One Thing You Are Counting On

Rich but Foolish. A reading of Luke 12.13-21.

“Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” 
But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” 
And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” 
And he told them a parable, saying, 
“The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” ’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 
So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.””
(Luke 12:13–21, ESV)

Answer this before you read another line, and answer it honestly, because the whole passage turns on it. What is the one thing you are quietly counting on? Not the thing you would say in a Bible class. The thing underneath. When the diagnosis comes back wrong, when the market drops, when the offer falls through, where does your mind run for solid ground? For a lot of us it is a number. The retirement number, the one that finally lets us exhale. For some of us it is the house that would prove, at last, that we made it. For some of us it is a college fund that wears the face of a child we love. Hold your answer. Luke 12 is going to press on it.

The scene opens with a man who is not really listening. Jesus is teaching a crowd so large that Luke says they are stepping on each other, and a man on the edge of it has been rehearsing a sentence. The moment Jesus pauses, he pushes it out. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me” (Luke 12.13). Notice he is not asking a question. He is asking for a verdict. He has already held the trial in his own head, and he wants Jesus to enforce the ruling. He does not want an arbiter. He wants an advocate.

And Jesus, who talks about money more than almost anything else, will not touch the case. “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” (Luke 12.14). Then he turns to the whole crowd and names the thing he sees underneath the request. “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12.15).

The word for covetousness is pleonexia. BDAG defines it as “the state of desiring to have more than one’s due.”¹ Not the desire to have. The desire to have more. It is an appetite that has never once in human history said the word enough. You can hand it the whole harvest and it will start eyeing the next field. That is why Jesus says to guard against it the way you would guard against a thief already in the neighborhood. And here is the part we would rather skip. Covetousness is not a them problem. It is a me problem. Post the watch over your own heart.

There is a shallow way to hear this, and it is tempting. Do not be greedy. Give a little more. Hold your things loosely. Feel bad for a minute, then close the app and get on with the day. I want to grant what is true in that, because it is true. This is a warning against greed. But if that is all you hear, you will have received a lecture, and a lecture has never once changed a heart. The problem in this text is not that the man owns too much. The problem is what he thinks his life consists in. Jesus is not adjusting behavior. He is going after the heart. So he tells a story.

“The land of a rich man produced plentifully” (Luke 12.16). Read that first line slowly, because the subject of the sentence is the land, not the man. The ground did this. The rain and the seed and the sun that he did not make and cannot command did this. His whole fortune walked in the door as a gift. And he cannot see the giver. Watch what he does. He talks to himself. He asks where he will store it all, decides to tear down his barns and build larger ones, and then says to his own soul that it has ample goods laid up for many years, so relax, eat, drink, be merry (Luke 12.17-19). Count the pronouns. I and my, over and over, stacked up like grain in a silo. There is not one other person in his plan. Not a neighbor. Not the poor at his gate. Not God. He lives in a village, surrounded by people, and he throws a party for himself, with himself, in his own head. His wealth has walled him in.

Be careful here, because it is easy to make him a villain, and he is not. He is no thief. He never cheated anyone. He is not lazy. He is prudent, hardworking, exactly the man a banker would line up to lend to. So in what, exactly, is he a fool? In one thing only. He forgot God. He looked at a gift and called it an achievement. He looked at a life that was on loan and called it his. There are many kinds of pride in this world, and the worst of them is not the pride that shakes its fist at God. It is the pride that never thinks of him at all. This man is a practical atheist. He would have told you he believed in God. He simply built his whole life as though there were not one.

So God gives him a name. “Fool” (Luke 12.20). The Greek is aphron, but the root runs back to Psalm 14.1, where the fool says in his heart there is no God. The Hebrew there is nabal, and it never meant a man who was bad at arithmetic. The biblical fool is not short on brains. He is short on God. And notice where the psalm locates the denial. In the heart. The man never says it out loud. He says it with his barn.

Then comes the sentence none of us can schedule. “This night your soul is required of you” (Luke 12.20). The word for required is the ordinary word for calling in a loan, demanding back what was only ever lent. Feel the floor move. The harvest walked in as a gift, and now the same God calls the loan back in. Your soul, the very self you have been talking to as though it were yours, was never yours to keep. And the things you prepared, whose will they be? Not yours. You cannot carry one grain of it through the door you are about to walk through. Man heaps up wealth, the psalmist says, and does not know who will gather it (Psalm 39.6). The ones who built the pyramids are gone. The ones who worked the land before you handed it on. In three or four generations no one will know your name, though they may live on the ground you once cared for.

So who could ever be rich toward God? If the hardworking, prudent, generous-on-a-good-day man is the fool, what hope is there for the rest of us? Here is the turn, and it is not a better strategy. It is a person.

The world has one principle for getting ahead, and we learned it before we could read. Store up. Hold on. Build bigger. Protect what is yours. The gospel comes in and turns that on its head. The way up is down. The way to be full is to be emptied. The one who would save his life must lose it. The world hears that and says it will get you killed. It got Jesus killed. “Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8.9). He was entitled to protection and was handed over. He was entitled to the glory of heaven and got a borrowed grave. He had riches beside which every barn on earth is lower than a child’s piggy bank, and he emptied them to the last coin. The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (1 Corinthians 1.18). God looked at the world’s favorite insult, fool, the word it nails to anyone who gives it all away, and he picked it up and wore it.

And there was a night when a soul was required of a man in a garden. He did not clutch it. He did not build a bigger barn to hide in. He knelt in the dark and said, “Father, not my will, but yours,” and then he handed it over, “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 22.42, 23.46). The rich fool had his life demanded and lost everything. Jesus had his life demanded and gave it, for you. He took the word Fool so that it would never be God’s last word over you.

This changes what money is. Being rich toward God is not a project you begin. It is a gift you receive. “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5.21). He took your poverty and gave you his riches. If you are in Christ, you are not trying to become rich toward God. You already are. And when you actually believe the treasure is already yours, the barn loses its grip. You do not have to guard it with your life, because your life was never in it. Now, maybe for the first time, you can open your hands.

Let me be plain about what that freedom is not, because we run to two ditches to avoid it. One ditch is legalism. Give ten percent and you are square, write the check, keep the rest, and do not ask me about my heart. The other ditch is cheap grace. Grace means God does not care about my money, so do not bring it up. Both of those are the rich fool talking. Both are ways to keep the barn and keep God at arm’s length from it. Jesus walks past both and says he does not want a cut of your barn. He wants you. Give him your very self, and the barn follows on its own.

So what does this look like on a Tuesday? Make it small and real. Decide your giving before you count your keeping, so generosity is a plan and not a leftover. Give to one need you can put a face and a name to, so it stays love and does not drift into an abstraction. And tell one trusted person the truth about your finances, because the fool did all his thinking alone, and the surest sign the barn owns you is that you will let people ask about anything except your money.

The rich man told his own soul to rest, and he pointed it at a barn. Augustine, sixteen centuries ago, found the only place that rest actually waits. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”(Confessions 1.1). That is the whole of it. He became poor so that you might become rich. So you can let the barn come down. You already have the treasure.

~PW 🌮🛶

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• Arndt, William, Frederick W. Danker, Walter Bauer, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Bock, Darrell L. Luke 9:51–24:53. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Baker Academic, 1996.
• Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Clarendon Press, 1906.
• Edwards, James R. The Gospel According to Luke. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Eerdmans, 2015.
• France, R. T. Luke. Teach the Text Commentary Series. Baker Books, 2013.
• Keller, Timothy J. “How Money Makes Us Fools.” Sermon on Luke 12.13–21. Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York, November 16, 1997.
• Marshall, I. Howard. The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Eerdmans, 1978.
• Morris, Leon. Luke. Tyndale New Testament Commentaries. Rev. ed. Eerdmans, 1988.
• Moulton, James Hope, and George Milligan. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources. Hodder and Stoughton, 1930.
• Stein, Robert H. Luke. New American Commentary. Broadman and Holman, 1992.
• Wright, N. T. Luke for Everyone. SPCK, 2004.

1. William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 824. ↩︎