Year 1, Day 225: Luke 16

The Dishonest Manager – Personal Reflection

Let’s look at this dishonest manager passage pretty deeply today.  Luke tells us that this man is a steward (or manager) of another person’s wealth.  The steward’s job is to take things that don’t belong to them and use them in such a way as to increase the wealth, prestige, and glory of the master.  At no time does the master’s stuff actually become the steward’s property.  And the master always has a right to ask for an accounting.

For the record, so it is with us, isn’t it?  The world and everything in it is God’s.  Nothing I “own” is mine, but rather God’s possession in my management.  It does me good to remember that.  Nothing is mine.  It is all on loan from God.  How effective am I at taking everything God has given to me and using it to increase His glory, honor, and reputation?  If there is a story about a dishonest manager, it might as well be a story about me.

The Dishonest Manager: The Story

Now let’s turn to Jesus’ commendation of the dishonest manager’s action.  Actually, what Jesus says is that the master commended the dishonest manager since he had acted with insight (ὅτι φρονίμως ἐποίησεν).  Jesus is using this as a story to show the importance of acting with insight/shrewdness.  This is not a story about the ends justifying the means as it seems at first glance.  This is not a story about using whatever tactics you can use to get ahead.  It is certainly not a story speaking about forgiveness or even eternal life.  After all, the dishonest manager still gets fired.

It is a story about the importance of acting with insight.  The people of this world are wise in the ways of the world.  We must likewise be wise in how we act.  As such we can see three admonitions Christ gives after this story:

• We are not to be foolish with the time God has given us.  We have a certain amount of time on this life before God will ask us to account for our use of His wealth.  Don’t be foolish, but be wise in what time God has given you.  Use this time to make friends and share the Gospel.  Use the capital given to you to increase God’s work done through you.
• We are not to be foolish how we use our material resources.  God has richly blessed us.  If we are dishonest with our wealth in this world, why would God entrust any eternal wealth to us?  If we are swayed by materialism into acting like the world, why would we ever think we can proclaim the Gospel effectively? 
• The third admonition is to be single-mindedly devoted to God.  We cannot serve two masters.  If we love the stuff of this world, we inherently cannot love God.  There is no compromise in the words of Jesus on this matter.  Either we love God and His ways or we love the stuff of this world.  There is not “both/and.”  It is only “either/or.”

Seeking Justification

The rest of the passages talk about things that keep us from seeing the glory of God: wealth, sex, and prestige/power.  From Jesus’ perspective the Pharisees fall on the issue of money and prestige.  They love money, scripture says.  In order to get money, you have to have the people with you in order to contribute their money to your cause.  So to inherently love money implies a certain love of people (or at least love of the having the people behind what you are saying).  Thus, in order to get money we often compromise what we teach.  Rather than teach the difficult message of God’s truth we teach what the people can palate.  This is the error of the Pharisees.  They seek to be justified before mankind and not before God.  After all, having the justification of mankind is much more profitable in this life!  But it is oh, so wrong.

Divorce

The next small passage is on divorce.  Oh, what a hot-button issue this one is.  Elsewhere in scripture we hear conversations of divorce.  Moses permitted divorce (see Deuteronomy 24:1ff)  Jesus says this permission was on account of the hardness of the hearts of people (in other words, they were sinful.  See Matthew 19:1-12).  Jesus teaches us that there is only one reasonable case for divorce: sexual immorality on the case of a spouse (See Matthew5:31-32 and Matthew 19:1-12).  And in this passage Jesus says that someone who divorces and remarries commits adultery.

Here’s the sadness about this topic.  Our sex drive is so much stronger than our inherent love for God.  To take the topic off of sex, our desire to be loved by another human being is greater than our desire to be loved by God.  Think about it.  Both of those things are true.  If we were truly satisfied with God’s love, why would we seek the inferior love of a human being over God’s love unless it comes through means approved and supported by God’s love?  We can all have God’s love and it is perfect.  Yet so often while having God’s love we find that what we really crave is the love of another person.

I know the stats.  Divorce is big in our country.  Over 50% of all marriages end in divorce.  That tells me that divorce is actually more common than life-long marriage.  I’d be a fool at this point if I didn’t remind everyone that divorce is sin and just like all other sin there is forgiveness for the truly repentant.  I absolutely stand behind both expressions of sin and forgiveness. 

I think we should allow this passage to force us to think elsewhere than on how “sinful divorce is.”  Rather we should think on how much the issue of divorce and remarriage exposes the reality that our human hearts are much happier with the love of another human than the perfect love of God.  And divorced or not, I think we are all guilty of this from time to time.  At least I know that I am.

Rich Man and Lazarus

Jesus gives us a parable to also speak to all the issues of this chapter.  We have the rich man and Lazarus.  The rich man had wealth, time, knowledge, access to scholars, and every reason to be productive in God’s kingdom.  But he spent it enjoying the lavishness of life.  He died and found himself separated from God and could do nothing about it.  When he calls out and finds that there is no hope for him, he begs for his living relatives to be warned.  He is told that they have the same opportunity as he had. 

We understand that we have the same opportunity that he had, too.  We have wealth – do we pursue it more than God?  We have time – do we use our time to pursue our own desires or godliness?  We have relationships – do we use them to proclaim Christ or proclaim the ways of the world?  Is our life really in the pursuit of God’s ways?

Or like I’ve seen plastered all over Facebook this summer … is our life really “In the Pursuit of Happiness” with God being an afterthought?

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