Luke 12:21

Luke 12:21

I. Consider the sinfulness of the rich man, as gathered from his address to his soul. The rich man addressed his soul when forming his plan for a long course of selfishness. "I will say to my soul, Soul thou has much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry." And what had the soul to do with the indulgences and enjoyments which he thus thought that his riches would procure? Had he addressed his body, and thus seemed forgetful or ignorant of its being immortal, we must have wondered at him less, and have thought him less degraded; but to confess that he had a soul, and then to speak to that soul as though it were material, a mere animal thing, with fleshly appetites and passions, this marked him at the very outset as being at the lowest point of sensuality; as though he knew no higher use of faculties, which distinguished him from the brute, than to give a zest to gratifications which he had in common with the brute. But, nevertheless, there was truth in the address of the sensualist; he was not so mistaken as at first he might appear. True, indeed, the soul could not literally eat, the soul could not literally drink; but the soul might have no taste, no relish, for spiritual things, the whole man might be given up to carnal indulgences, and the soul might be in such subjection, such slavery to the flesh, as to think of nothing but how to multiply its gratifications or to increase their intenseness. The very essence of idolatry is discoverable in this address of the rich man to his soul. It may be justly said that the rich man substituted his stores for God, put them in the place of God, or looked to them to do for him what God alone could do. Do you wonder, then, that his conduct was especially offensive to God, as offensive as though, in spite of the very letter of the Second Commandment, he had fashioned an image and bowed down before it?

II. It ought to be received by us as a very impressive warning, that it was nothing but a practical forgetfulness of the uncertainty of life, which brought down a sudden judgment on the rich worldling whose history is before us. There is evidently a peculiar invasion as it were of the prerogatives of God whensoever a man calculates that death is yet distant. Every man who is not labouring earnestly to save the soul is reckoning on long life. And the fearful thing is, that this very reckoning upon life, which men would perhaps hardly think of counting amongst their sins, may be the most offensive part of their conduct in the eye of the Almighty, and draw upon them the abbreviation of that life, and thus the loss of the expected opportunities of repentance and amendment.

H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2,544.

References: Luke 12:21. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvi., p. 123.Luke 12:22. Ibid.,vol. xx., p. 372.Luke 12:22. R. S. Candlish, Sermons,p. 139.