Luke 16

Today’s Passage: Luke 16

This chapter is about money, and it is the most uncomfortable chapter on money in the Gospels. It opens with a parable that has puzzled faithful readers for two thousand years, the story of a manager caught wasting his master’s property who, facing dismissal, quickly discounts the debts of his master’s debtors so that somebody will take him in when he is out on the street. The startling thing is that the master commends him. Jesus then draws four short sayings out of that story, about faithfulness in small things, about who really owns what you are holding, and finally about the impossibility of serving two masters at once. The Pharisees, whom Luke tells us plainly were lovers of money, hear all of this and scoff, and Jesus turns and answers them: what men prize, God finds detestable. Three tight verses follow about the Law and the Prophets and the kingdom now being preached, about the permanence of the smallest stroke of that Law, and then one terse and difficult word about divorce. And then the chapter ends with the most vivid picture of the world to come that the Lord ever gave us: a rich man in purple and fine linen, a beggar named Lazarus dying at his gate, and the reversal after death that neither of them could undo. Two parables, then, standing at either end like bookends, both of them about a man with money and a coming reckoning. Between them Jesus asks the one question the whole chapter turns on. Not how much do you have, but whom are you actually serving.

As you read, hold this: What you do with money is what you are doing with your soul, for the wealth in your hands belongs to Another and will not last, and the Word you already have is enough to save anyone willing to hear it.

Luke 16:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Jesus also said to His disciples, “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. ² So he called him in to ask, ‘What is this I hear about you? Turn in an account of your management, for you cannot be manager any longer.’ ³ The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking away my position? I am too weak to dig and too ashamed to beg. ⁴ I know what I will do so that after my removal from management, people will welcome me into their homes.’

Watch how quickly the ground gives way under this man. One day he is the most important servant on the estate, and the next a report reaches the master and the whole arrangement is over. Notice that he never denies the charge. He is given the chance, and what he says to himself is not “this is a lie” but “what shall I do.” He is guilty, and he knows the master knows. And so the manager (οἰκονόμος) oikonomos, pronounced oy-ko-NO-moss. Strong's G3623, steward, the manager of a household he does not own. The word is oikonomos, built from oikos, a house, and a verb meaning to arrange or manage, so it means quite literally the one who orders the household. It is the origin of our word economy. The Greek world used it for the man who ran an estate or a city’s finances, and the New Testament picks it up and puts it to work everywhere: Paul calls himself and his fellow workers stewards of the mysteries of God, Peter tells ordinary believers to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace, and an elder is to be above reproach as God’s steward. What every use has in common is the thing that makes this parable go. A steward handles real wealth and real authority, and none of it is his. He does not own a bushel of that wheat. He signs a name that is not his own, spends money he did not earn, and one day he turns in an account. That is the frame Jesus is putting around your life. The house you keep, the wages you draw, the hours in your day, the strength in your arms, none of it originated with you and none of it stays with you. You are the manager, not the master. Live like a man who expects to be asked, one day, how he handled what belonged to Another, and you will find that half the anxiety about money quietly falls away. does the arithmetic of a man whose world has just ended. Digging is what a landless man does, breaking ground for someone else in the sun, and he says frankly that he has not the back for it. Begging is what a broken man does at a gate, and he says frankly that he has not the stomach for it. Remember that phrase, because before this chapter is over the Lord is going to put a beggar at a rich man’s gate and ask you what you did about him. But here the manager is only measuring his own future, and he sees it clearly, which is more than most of us manage. He is going to lose everything, and he has a very short window in which the master’s seal is still in his hand and nobody outside the house yet knows he has been fired. So he makes a plan. Not a plan to repent, mind you, and not a plan to make restitution. A plan to be welcomed. He wants a door that will open to him when this door shuts, and every move he is about to make is aimed at that single hour.

Luke 16:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ And he called in each one of his master’s debtors. ‘How much do you owe my master?’ he asked the first. ⁶ ‘A hundred measures of olive oil,’ he answered. ‘Take your bill,’ said the manager, ‘sit down quickly, and write fifty.’ ⁷ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ ‘A hundred measures of wheat,’ he replied. ‘Take your bill and write eighty,’ he told him. ⁸ The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the sons of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the sons of light.

Here is one of the hardest passages in all four Gospels, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Faithful readers who love this Book and believe every word of it have differed over it for centuries, and you should know that before anyone hands you a tidy answer. Three readings are commonly offered. Some hold that the manager was cutting out his own commission, the surcharge a steward customarily added to a tenant’s bill for himself, so that the master lost nothing and the manager bought goodwill entirely at his own expense, which would explain the commendation neatly. Others hold that he was defrauding the master outright, but that the master, catching him at it, cannot help admiring the sheer nerve and speed of it, the way a man may laugh at a thief’s cleverness while still calling him a thief. Still others say we should not press the details at all, that the single point of comparison is the man’s foresight and urgency in the face of a deadline, and that nothing else in the story is meant to be copied. Weigh those honestly. But notice what the text itself will not let anyone soften. The master commends him for one thing only, that he had acted shrewdly (φρονίμως) phronimōs, pronounced froh-NEE-moce. Strong's G5430, shrewdly, prudently, with practical foresight. Phronimōs is an adverb that appears exactly once in the whole New Testament, right here, and it is worth pausing on because it is not the word for wisdom in the great sense. Its family is phroneō, to have a mind about something, and phronimos, prudent or sensible, the word the Lord uses for the man who built his house on rock, for the wise servant set over the household, and in the command to be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. It is practical intelligence: seeing what is actually coming and acting on it in time. That is a morally neutral skill, which is precisely why Jesus can hold up a crook as an example of it without endorsing a thing the man did. A dishonest man used his head; the point is that he used it. And here is the searching question the word leaves behind. We will read the fine print on a mortgage, compare insurance policies line by line, and set aside money for a retirement we may not live to see, and we do all of that because we genuinely believe those days are coming. Do we bring one tenth of that seriousness to the day when the account is turned in? Praise God that the deadline in His story is not a dismissal notice but a Savior who has already paid what we could not, and yet the summons stands: think, and act, like a man who knows what is coming. , and in the very same breath Luke calls him “the dishonest manager.” The commendation is for the shrewdness, never for the dishonesty. And then Jesus draws the sting Himself with a line that ought to make every believer wince: “the sons of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the sons of light.” Men will plan, calculate, sacrifice sleep, and move fast when their earthly future is at stake. The children of light, who have an eternal future at stake, too often drift. That is the rebuke, and it lands.

Luke 16:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings. ¹⁰ Whoever is faithful with very little will also be faithful with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. ¹¹ So if you have not been faithful with worldly wealth, who will entrust you with true riches? ¹² And if you have not been faithful with the belongings of another, who will give you belongings of your own? ¹³ No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Now the Lord tells you what to do with the story, and it is not what the manager did. It is what the manager understood. “Use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.” Read the little clause in the middle again: when it is gone. Not if. Every currency you have ever held is on its way out of your hands, and the only question is whether it leaves you empty or goes ahead of you into something that lasts. This is not the purchase of heaven, for nothing in Scripture is more certain than that heaven is not for sale and never was. It is the plain instruction to take a temporary thing and spend it on people, so that when the ledger closes there are those glad to see you arrive. Then come three short tests, and they are quietly devastating. First, that faithfulness is not a matter of scale: the man who cannot be trusted with a small sum will not become trustworthy when the sum grows, because character does not change with the size of the number. Second, that worldly wealth (μαμωνᾶς) mamōnas, pronounced mah-mo-NAHS. Strong's G3126, money, wealth, material riches personified as a rival master. Mamōnas is not originally Greek at all. It is an Aramaic word that Jesus, speaking to Aramaic-speaking people, used without translating, and the Gospel writers simply carried it across in Greek letters, which is why older English Bibles keep it as mammon. It seems to have meant something a man puts his trust in, property, resources, the thing you rely on, and that root is the whole point. Notice what Jesus does with it. He does not treat money as a neutral tool, a hammer that may be used well or badly. He personifies it. He makes it a rival lord with a throne and a claim, standing across from God Himself and demanding the same undivided devotion. That is a far more serious diagnosis than we usually allow, and it explains why the Lord speaks about money more than almost any other single subject. He is not worried about our budgets. He is warning us about our worship. And notice, too, that Jesus never says wealth is sin, never tells the reader how much to keep, and never suggests that a poor man is automatically closer to God or a comfortable one automatically lost. He asks a different question altogether, and it is a question that finds a man with very little exactly as surely as it finds a man with a great deal: which one of these two do you actually serve? is the practice ground and not the prize, so that the handling of money is God’s training school for “true riches.” And third, the one that goes deepest, that everything you now hold is “the belongings of another.” You are still the steward. And then the door closes on the whole discussion: “No servant can serve two masters.” He does not say it is difficult. He says it cannot be done, because these two masters both want everything, and a heart divided between them has in fact already chosen. Matthew records the same word from the mountain:

"No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." Matthew 6:24 (BSB)

Luke 16:14–18 (BSB)

¹⁴ The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all of this and were scoffing at Jesus. ¹⁵ So He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is prized among men is detestable before God. ¹⁶ The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John. Since that time, the gospel of the kingdom of God is being preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. ¹⁷ But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for a single stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law. ¹⁸ Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Luke lets us see the audience, and it changes the room. The Pharisees are listening, and Luke tells us the one fact that explains their reaction: they were lovers of money. So they sneer. It is what a man does when a word has gone straight through him and he will not let it stop. And Jesus answers with the sentence that exposes the whole machinery: “You are the ones who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts.” There is the difference between a reputation and a soul. A man can build a case for himself that convinces every neighbor he has, and God is not reading the case. He is reading the heart. And then the line that should be nailed over every ambition any of us has ever had: “what is prized among men is detestable before God.” Not merely less valuable. Detestable. The applause, the standing, the portfolio that proves a life well managed, all of it can be an abomination in the sight of heaven while the crowd is still clapping.

Then three verses that at first seem to wander, and do not. Jesus is answering the charge these men would certainly have thrown back at Him, that His preaching cuts loose from Moses. Not at all. The Law and the Prophets ran their course and pointed forward until John, and now the kingdom is being preached and people are pressing into it with everything they have. But that new preaching does not repeal a syllable of the old: sooner would heaven and earth pass away than one small stroke of a letter drop out of the Law. And having said that, He drops a single sentence on the subject where these very men had learned to bend the Law to their own convenience. Divorce, in their debate, had become a matter of finding sufficient grounds, and the looser school had made the grounds very loose indeed. Jesus states the permanence of marriage in the barest possible terms, with no qualification at all: the man who divorces and remarries commits adultery, and the man who marries the divorced woman does too. Take that word plainly. God made marriage one flesh and He means it to hold. And take it honestly as well: Luke gives no exception here, while Matthew twice records the Lord adding one, and faithful readers differ on how to hold the two accounts together. Some understand Luke to be compressing a saying whose exception Matthew preserves; others understand Luke to give the absolute principle and Matthew a narrow concession; others read this verse as aimed squarely at the casual divorce culture of the men standing in front of Him. What is not in doubt is the weight He gives marriage, or that the same Lord who guards it so fiercely is the Lord who forgives sinners completely. This verse is a wall around a covenant. It was never meant as a stone to throw.

Luke 16:19–22 (BSB)

¹⁹ Now there was a rich man dressed in purple and fine linen, who lived each day in joyous splendor. ²⁰ And a beggar named Lazarus lay at his gate, covered with sores ²¹ and longing to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. ²² One day the beggar died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. And the rich man also died and was buried.

Now the Lord tells a second story about a man with money, and this one has no puzzles in it at all. He sets the two figures side by side and lets you look. One is dressed in purple and fine linen, which is to say he is wearing a small fortune, and he lives each day in joyous splendor, so this is not a feast but a habit. The other has a name, which is remarkable, since no other person in any of the Lord’s parables is given one. Lazarus, which is a shortened form of Eleazar and means God has helped, and the irony of that name in that condition is the whole story in miniature. He is laid at the gate, which means someone carried him there and left him, unable to walk. He is covered with sores. He longs for the scraps. The dogs come, and there is nothing tender about it. And note carefully where he is put: at the gate. Not down the road, not in another town. At the one place the rich man walked past every single day of his life.

Then both men die, because both men always do. And the shape of the sentence is worth watching. The beggar is “carried by the angels to Abraham’s side,” which is the language of honor, a welcomed guest brought to the place next to the host. The rich man “also died and was buried,” and no doubt he was buried very well, with a fine procession and warm words about a life of joyous splendor. That is the last thing the world can do for a man, and the world does it whether or not it makes any difference. Understand what the text does not say. It does not say the rich man went where he went because he was rich, and it does not say Lazarus went where he went because he was poor. Scripture never teaches that a bank balance decides a soul. But the Lord has shown you a starving man lying at a gate every day for years, and a man in purple who stepped over him, and He expects you to draw the conclusion He is drawing. Moses had already said it, long before, and the rich man had it in his own Scriptures:

"For there will never cease to be poor in the land; that is why I am commanding you to open wide your hand to your brother and to the poor and needy in your land." Deuteronomy 15:11 (BSB)

Luke 16:23–26 (BSB)

²³ In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham from afar, with Lazarus by his side. ²⁴ So he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue. For I am in agony in this fire.’ ²⁵ But Abraham answered, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things. But now he is comforted here, while you are in agony. ²⁶ And besides all this, a great chasm has been fixed between us and you, so that even those who wish cannot cross from here to you, nor can anyone cross from there to us.’

This is the most sobering passage the Lord ever spoke about what lies on the other side of death, and it must be taken exactly as He gives it, without softening and without the smallest trace of relish. Say plainly what the words say. The man is conscious. He remembers his own life. He can see, and speak, and reason, and he is in torment, and there is no hint anywhere in the account that this ends. Anyone who tells you the Bible teaches that the lost simply cease to exist, or that everyone arrives safely in the end, has to get past this passage first, and it will not be moved. The Lord Jesus is the one telling it. He of all people would soften it if it could be softened.

And then notice something that ought to stop you cold. Even here, the rich man does not repent. He asks for water, and he asks for it by name: “send Lazarus.” After everything, he still speaks of the man at his gate as an errand boy, someone to be dispatched on his behalf. That is what a lifetime of stepping over a person does to a soul. Abraham’s reply is gentle in its address, “Child,” and unbearable in its content. He points back to a life in which one man received his good things and the other received bad, and says that now the accounts are reversed. And then he names the thing that makes it final: “a great chasm (χάσμα) chasma, pronounced KHAHS-mah. Strong's G5490, a chasm, a gaping gulf fixed between two places. Chasma comes from a verb meaning to gape or yawn open, and it gives us the English word chasm almost unchanged. It appears in the New Testament only here. It is a picture word, the mouth of a canyon, ground split apart, and it says nothing about width but everything about impassability. The detail that carries the weight, though, is not the noun but the verb attached to it: the chasm has been fixed, set in place and standing so. It is not a natural feature of the landscape that someone might one day bridge. It was established, and it stays established. And observe that it is fixed in both directions, so that the comfort of the redeemed cannot be reached by those in torment, and the mercy of the redeemed cannot reach across to relieve them. There is no hint here of a waiting room, no second chance, no arrangement whereby the living may improve the standing of the dead. That is a hard word and Jesus did not flinch from it, and neither should we, but hear where it drives you rather than where it might frighten you. It drives you to today. While a man breathes, no chasm is fixed for him. The door is open, Christ is offered, and the invitation stands. There is not one hour to waste, either for your own soul or for the people God has laid at your gate. has been fixed between us and you.” Not a distance. A gulf, and one that has been set in place, and it holds in both directions, so that even those who wish to cross cannot. Do not hurry past that. Everything that can be done about a soul’s eternity is done on this side of the grave. This is the reason the gospel is preached with urgency, and the reason a believer’s heart should ache for the people he passes every day, and it is also the reason the cross is such unspeakably good news. Christ went into death for us so that the chasm no man can cross would be crossed from the other side, by Him, on our behalf.

Luke 16:27–31 (BSB)

²⁷ ‘Then I beg you, father,’ he said, ‘send Lazarus to my father’s house, ²⁸ for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also end up in this place of torment.’ ²⁹ But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let your brothers listen to them.’ ³⁰ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone is sent to them from the dead, they will repent.’ ³¹ Then Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”

The last request is the one that turns the whole chapter around, and it is not what you expect. The rich man asks for his brothers. Five of them, in his father’s house, living exactly as he had lived, and he wants somebody sent to warn them. It sounds almost noble until you notice that he is still, even now, asking for Lazarus to be sent on an errand. And Abraham’s answer is the sentence the Lord has been walking toward from the beginning of the chapter: “They have Moses and the Prophets; let your brothers listen to them.” They already have everything they need. It is in the house. It is read aloud in the synagogue every Sabbath. Moses had told them to open wide their hand to the poor at the gate, and the Prophets had thundered at a nation that lay on ivory beds and did not grieve over the ruin around them. Nothing more was required. Nothing more was going to be given.

The man will not accept it, and his objection is one we have all felt: “if someone is sent to them from the dead, they will repent.” Surely a miracle would do it. Surely if God would just show Himself unmistakably, people would believe. And Abraham’s reply is the closing word of the chapter and one of the most piercing sentences in the Gospels: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.” Unbelief is not an evidence problem. It is a listening problem, and a heart that has already refused the Word it has will find a way around any wonder you put in front of it. Luke’s readers knew exactly how true that was. Another man named Lazarus did come out of a tomb, and the response of some was to plot his death. And then the Son of God Himself rose on the third day, in the same city, and the report was managed and explained away. The Word of God in your hands is not a lesser thing than a sign from heaven. It is the greater thing, because through it God actually saves.