Jesus told this story to His disciples: “There was a certain rich man who had a manager handling his affairs. One day a report came that the manager was wasting his employer’s money. So the employer called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? Get your report in order, because you are going to be fired.’ “The manager thought to himself, ‘Now what? My boss has fired me. I don’t have the strength to dig ditches, and I’m too proud to beg. Ah, I know how to ensure that I’ll have plenty of friends who will give me a home when I am fired.’
So he invited each person who owed money to his employer to come and discuss the situation. He asked the first one, ‘How much do you owe him?’
The man replied, ‘I owe him 800 gallons of olive oil.’ So the manager told him,’Take the bill and quickly change it to 400 gallons. ‘
“And how much do you owe my employer?’ he asked the next man.
‘I owe him 1,000 bushels of wheat,’ was the reply. ‘Here,’ the manager said, ‘take the bill and change it to 800 bushels.’ The rich man had to admire the dishonest rascal for being so shrewd. And it is true that the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with the world around them than are the children of the light. Here’s the lesson: Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. Then, when your earthly possessions are gone, they will welcome you to an eternal home. If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities. And if you are untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the true riches of heaven? And if you are not faithful with other people’s things, why should you be trusted with things of your own? No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Luke 16:1-13
I have just been in Salatiga teaching some of the concepts of Deeper Bible, to a group of 100 students and their lecturers, at Pesat Bible College. I told them of the danger of limiting your Bible reading to chapter boundaries. Many times I have reminded you all through the Gems, that Robert Estienne’s chapter divisions (the standard Bible chapter breaks) are not necessarily reliable. Many times the sense or flow continues across the chapter boundaries. So make sure you keep the big picture and the flow of thought in mind. That is especially true of the first book of Luke (Luke’s Gospel) because he has told us he has deliberately set out to give us an ordered account, and I have made it clear that this ordered account is not necessarily chronological. So keep your wits about you. It has taken us a month of Gems to cover Chapter 15. Now, the temptation is to just simply move on without thought to how everything connects. Keep looking at the details gemmers, and at the same time, take a step back and take in the big picture.
The other thing I have been teaching the students in Salatiga, has been the relatively recent advancement in Biblical studies of looking for sense units in the text of the Bible. So as we approach chapter 16, look for how it all fits together. How do you make sense of Luke’s arrangement of the material? Is there an evident flow? Is there any section that doesn’t appear to fit? How does it fit with the three-part parable from chapter 15? Is there anything about the text that makes you confused or makes the meaning hard to understand? That is the place to focus your attention. As I have just told the students at Pesat, most of us read our Bible in wrong ways. One such erroneous way of reading the Bible is to skip the parts we don’t understand. If we keep skipping those parts year after year, then we will never come to understand the Bible. Take the time now to face the difficult pieces head on.
There is one major difficulty with this chapter of Luke, which has generated lots of debate over the years.
- Did you notice it?
- Does it leave you with questions?
Don’t run away from the difficulties. Face them head on. Good life advice.
Never confuse the will of the majority with the will of God.
Anon
To forgive is to set the prisoner free…and then discover the prisoner was you.
Anon
If you judge people you will have no time to love them.
Mother Theresa
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego. The self is more distant than any star.
G. K. Chesterton