“Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’

“Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?’ Then he said to them. ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.’

“And he told them this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops’.

“Then he said, ‘this is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and all my goods, and I’ll say to myself . ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years.  Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’

‘But God said to him, ‘you fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself.’

‘This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:13-21 (NIV)

One day while Jesus was teaching, someone in the crowd shouted to him—not a question, but a request. “Make my brother divide the family inheritance with me!”  This is a sadly typically scenario. A parent has died and the family is bickering over the estate. Jesus refused to get into this situation, but left the person, and all assembled, with a lesson. He told a story about a rich man—a first-century Donald Trump.

This rich man has a problem. He owns land that is so productive, that he no longer has space to store its produce. It keeps him up at night. It starts to stress him out. After much thought, he decides to tear down his storehouses and build bigger ones. A good idea and one that would gain the approval of anyone with an MBA.

What happens next, however, is a problem. The man looks at his achievements and breathes a huge sigh of relief and says, “Now I can relax! I’ve covered all of my bases and ensured a prosperous future for myself.”

Immediately, God confronts him and calls him a fool.  Why?  He’s done the prudent thing.  Should he have kept his old barns and let the excess grain rot in the field?

Why all of a sudden is he a “fool”?

In the Bible, “fool” can mean several things. A fool can be someone who is, as we say, a “dim bulb,” “a few bricks short of a load,” or the “village idiot.” But most often, a fool is someone who lives without regard to God.

Psalm 53:1 says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

The passage goes on to say of fools, “They are corrupt, and their ways are vile; there is no one who does good.”

To leave God out of the mix leaves a person open to corruption because it leaves him or her with no basis for ethics apart from our own whims. This is the great danger of atheism, or secularism, or just plain indifference. The Bible’s approach is to remind us that, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psa. 111:10).

In the story Jesus told the quarrelling family member, the point is that it is folly to do anything and leave God out of the mix. And this is exactly what the rich man does. It’s not so much that he’s hostile to God, it’s just that he’s not paying attention to God. As a follower of Jesus, no decision in life is solely yours to make. Whether the choice before you concerns your job, your relationships, or building a barn, God wants—and needs—to be in the mix.

B. Irwin