The Father Knows

What would you actually do with the money if the number were right?

Luke 12 is spoken outdoors, to a crowd Luke says was so large they trod on one another, and it starts because a man in it shouts a question about an inheritance. Jesus refuses to arbitrate and tells the parable of a farmer whose land produced so well he had to build bigger barns, and who died the night he finished them. Then he turns to the disciples and says this. So the setting is not a seminar on contentment. It is a property dispute, a rich man dying, and a crowd pressing in, in a province where most people lived close enough to the edge that food and clothing were genuine questions rather than anxieties.

That matters, because Jesus is not scolding people for needing things. He says it plainly: your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. What he forbids is the seeking, the word in verse 29 being about pursuit, and he identifies it as the pattern of the nations of the world. That is a description of an organising principle, not of a worry that crossed your mind.

The order is the whole instruction. But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you. And immediately after, so nobody mistakes what kind of Father this is, he tells the little flock not to be afraid, because handing over the kingdom is something the Father takes pleasure in doing.

Here is the truth in it, and it is more freeing than the version that gets preached. You are not being told to stop caring about money, which you could not do and which would not be virtuous if you could. You are being told that the caring has been put in the wrong place in the queue, and that the one who knows what you need has already decided what he is pleased to give.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 116 is Let No Man Despise (1 Timothy 4:12).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna