A Good Lesson from a Bad Example A

This is just the way the world works. Everybody's relatively corrupt. They're all part of how the system works.

You secure your future any way you can. And the people who are part of the system even are prone to commend the shrewdness and conniving of a clever person. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The parables of the good Samaritan, the rich fool, the great banquet. Jesus frequently used stories like those to expose self-righteousness and to shatter the false hopes of religious leaders.

And mainly what you can learn from those stories are the bad examples, the kind you should not follow. But in today's lesson on Grace to You, John MacArthur looks at a parable where Christ actually seems to praise a greedy, dishonest, unrighteous man. What lesson would Jesus want you to learn from that example?

Find out now. Turn to Luke chapter 16 and follow along as John considers the parable of the unrighteous steward, part of his series titled Stories with Purpose. Let me encourage you to come to Luke 16. There are about 40 parables that our Lord gave, and nobody else in the New Testament gave any parable, so all the parables were given by our Lord. And as we know, they were designed to hide the truth from unbelievers, but to reveal it to believers, those who have ears to hear. Parables were, in a sense, a judgment, a confirmation of rejection. At the same time, they were light to those who had the ears to hear. We find that this particular parable is designed to help believers as they all are. At the end of the day, they are only going to help believers because only believers really understand them. But this in particular is designed to speak to the sons of light.

That would be all of those who are part of the kingdom of God. It is a parable that has to do with money, and that's not odd because about one out of three parables will have something to do with money, and that's just the way life is. Somebody said if you live 80 years, you'll spend 50 of those 80 years thinking about money, one way or another. Our Lord gets it.

He understands that life in the world is dependent upon a form of exchange, and we live and breathe and move with those exchanges. So here is a story about money. It's a really shocking story because the characters in this story are, to one degree or another, relatively bad.

One of them is very bad. The rest are complicit with his evil, and even the guy who is supposed to be the hero in the story is really flawed because he commends this bad man and the people who were complicit in the badness. All of this, strangely, becomes an illustration of how we should live. We, as believers, God's people. So let's get the story in mind, starting in verse 1, Luke 16. He was also saying to the disciples, hey, now I want you to know this is for us. This is for us as it was for his disciples.

That is not to say that there weren't others listening. Down in verse 14, the Pharisees who were lovers of money were listening to all these things, and of course, they were scoffing at them. This is what we would expect from the people who didn't understand this parable and who in many ways were defined by this parable because they were lovers of money.

So they're in the crowd listening, but the direction of this parable, as always, is to hide the truth from them because of their resolute unbelief and to give the lesson to his disciples and to us. There was a rich man who had a manager, a steward, and this manager was reported to him as squandering his possessions. And he called him and said to him, what is this I hear about you? Give an accounting of your management, for you can no longer be manager. The manager said to himself, what shall I do? Since my master is taking the management away from me, I'm not strong enough to dig.

I'm ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that when I am removed from the management, people will welcome me into their homes. And he summoned each one of his master's debtors. And he began saying to the first, this is a process he goes through, how much do you owe my master? And he said, 100 measures of oil. And he said to him, take your bill and sit down quickly and write 50. Then he said to another, how much do you owe? And he said, 100 measures of wheat.

He said to him, take your bill and write 80. And his master praised the unrighteous manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light.

That's the story. A really strange thing in one sense to tell a story where everybody is sort of relatively corrupted, but that is exactly the point that our Lord is making. Jesus taught from a sort of a normal routine aspects of life. And once in a while, he turned life upside down and said things that might've seemed strange.

This is one of those. He also talked about an unjust judge as well as an unscrupulous steward. So there were times when he used evil people to make his point. Keep in mind, there's nothing in this parable that's secret or hidden or allegorical or mystical. It's a simple story. But what bothers some people is Jesus commends the bad guy.

Listen to his closing. His master praised the unrighteous manager because he acted shrewdly. And then in verse 9, Jesus says, and I say, make friends for yourselves by the means of the wealth of unrighteousness.

Wow. Do what he did? It is a problem for some people to have Jesus saying, follow the behavior of a wasteful, profligate, prodigal, deceitful, thieving, selfish, conniving, unprincipled person. And by the way, this is placed here right after the story of the prodigal son, because this is a prodigal manager. Prodigal means wasteful. The son wasted everything and didn't provide for his future. Here's a man who wasted the assets that he had control of, but did provide for his futures.

Maybe that's the link. The ending is a shock, a surprise ending, and becomes the point of the story. And we'll get to that in a minute, but let's go back and kind of track a little bit with the story so you understand how they would have heard it when our Lord gave it. There was a certain rich man. Let me just say, he was very rich because he is distant from this whole operation.

He's distant. We know he's a significant man because people owe him massive amounts of money. They are in debt to him on a very large scale, and there are many debtors.

You only have two illustrations here, but the verb in verse 5 means there was a process going on, and essentially you have a couple of illustrations of what was probably to be imagined as a much more extensive list of debtors. So this is a very rich man, a very rich man. What he has done is he's had to hire a manager and put him in charge of all of the assets of this entire operation because he's not there. We know that because he had to be called, a report had to be given to him, and he had to reconnect with the circumstances. This was pretty common in ancient times where people who were very wealthy had a lot of operations going on, a lot of agricultural operations going on, businesses going on, and they hired managers. The term manager, oikonomos from the Greek, which means law and house. He had the law of the house. He was the one delegated the authority to act for the owner. He managed the land. He managed the crops. He managed the assets. He managed the debts.

He managed internally the dispersing of the resources and the food and whatever was necessary for the servants and all the people who made up the core who operated this particular enterprise. Well, this manager has been wasting his owner's substance, his possessions. The end of verse 1, it was reported to the owner that the manager was squandering his possessions. Squandering is the same word used to describe the prodigal back in chapter 15, verse 13. He was dispersing.

He was scattering, wasteful like the prodigal. Well, this is not necessarily embezzlement. This is not necessarily some kind of shrewd scheme to embezzle. This is just an irresponsible incompetent person at this point in the story.

The rich man acts immediately. Verse 2, he called him and said to him, what is this I hear about you? What is this I hear about you? Well, what had he actually heard? Well, he'd heard some pretty severe things because the verb reported in the last verse, verse 1, the previous verse, is the verb diabolo from which we get the word diabolical. So the report was not a benign report. It was a report that involved a serious and legitimate slander against the man. By the way, diabolos is a biblical name for Satan, who is the slanderer. Slander was legitimate because the man had done what he had done. So he gets a very extreme report of the diabolical nature of this man's function in the position of manager. So he calls him, says, what is this I hear about you?

And then he does a foolish thing, this character that Jesus invents because it suits him, suits the story. Give an accounting of your management, for you can no longer be manager. Unlike any smart businessman, he says, essentially, go back and get an accounting of what you've done. I want you to go back and I want you to account for what you've done. The steward doesn't defend himself, clean out your desk in a sense, but you've got two weeks notice.

We'll put it that way. You go back. You're not going to save your job. That's not possible. He knows that's not possible, but the rich man wants an accurate record of his irresponsibility.

He wants to know exactly what he's done. That is a bad policy. That is a bad policy. If you have to fire someone, get rid of them that day.

Let somebody else figure out the mess because if you put them back in, they're going to go back in with vengeance and they're going to go back in with a target goal objective of personal gain. It's exactly what he did. He's losing his job. He's losing his home because they lived in those ancient times on the estate where they served. He's losing his income and he's losing his reputation because now everybody's going to know that he was incompetent. He is a mismanaging, irresponsible, incompetent, wasteful, prodigal manager. So in verse 3, he says to himself, a little soliloquy here, what shall I do? By the way, Luke loves that question.

He uses it three times, twice further in the book and once in the book of Acts. What shall I do? What shall I do so that when I am removed from the management, when it actually happens and I'm terminated, people will welcome me into their homes. I've got to find a way to go somewhere else. I've got to have a place to live. I've got to have an income. I've got to have a future.

What am I going to do to secure my future when my master takes away my stewardship, my management? Then he says, I'm not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. This is a proud white-collar worker. He's not interested in picking up a shovel. He doesn't want any manual labor. Hard work is not his thing.

He doesn't want even to step into the low status of a hard worker, let alone the low status of a beggar. Not going to do that. So what am I going to do? I'm sort of trapped. Then he has a eureka moment as Jesus invents the story.

I know what I shall do so that when I am removed from the management, people will welcome me into their homes. That's exactly what he has to have. He has to have a future. He has to have a future that is beneficial. He has to have a future that is comfortable.

He has to have a future that supplies all that he needs. I know what I will do. This is his eureka moment.

This is his bright idea. I need to be welcomed by some people into their homes. Who are those people going to be when the whole community knows that I've been thrown out for my mismanagement?

Ah, I know who it'll be. It'll be the people that I've been working with who owe my master debts. I need a place to live. I need food. I need a future career. I need status. I need to be where I am now.

I need to be in important places and in the homes of important people. So I have a plan. I'm going to contact all the people who owe my master debts, and I'm going to go through them all one by one by one by one by one, and I'm going to discount all their debts.

Pretty shrewd. I'm going to discount all their debts so that they will be obligated to me, right? Now, if he only did this for one guy, there wouldn't be any peer pressure on the one guy to reciprocate.

But if he does it for everybody in an honor society where everybody's concerned about his honor, they're all going to put peer pressure on everybody else, and he's not only going to have one home to go to, he's going to have a whole lot of homes to go to because they will want to maintain their honor. So, verse 5, he summoned each one of his master's debtors, each one, and he began a process, and there's a couple of illustrations of it, what it would have been. The first one, he says, how much do you owe my master? And he said, 100 measures of oil. And he said to him, take your bill, sit down quickly, and write 50. Wow, 50% discount.

That's pretty good. He owes 100 measures of oil. This could be 900 to 1,000 gallons of oil. This would be worth three years' wages in money, and this would be the product of at least 150 olive trees.

This is big debt, significant amount of debt. And I just whack it in half. And oh, by the way, could you please sit down quickly? Thieves always in a hurry, you notice. Con men always in a hurry, sign here, sign here, sign here, sign here. The discount is huge.

The deal is struck. No questions are asked about whether this is the wish of the owner. The guy who's getting the 50% discount doesn't want to ask that question.

Why? Because he doesn't want the answer to that question. He wants to sign and get out quickly because this is a deal he never could have hoped for. Another illustration in verse 7, how much do you owe? And he said, 100 measures of wheat. And he said to him, take your bill and write 80.

That would be some estimate about 1,000 bushels of wheat, taking 100 acres to produce, and maybe 8 to 10 years of labor. Huge amount. He discounts it 20%.

The man can't sign quickly enough either. Look, debts were discounted in the ancient world like they're discounted today. If there's a famine, if there's an economic downturn, that's part of life. But none of those are elements of this. There are no external circumstances. This has nothing to do with a depressed economy.

This has nothing to do with the limits of food. This has nothing to do with somehow disasters happening in the debtor's lives where they're unable to pay and some compassionate person is lessening the debt in order to serve them. This is purely a shrewd way to embezzle his master in such a way that secures the obligation of all these people to this manager so that he can go back to them and say, you remember what I did for you? You need to give me a room.

You need to give me a job and a place. And if you don't, I'm going to tell the rest of the people for whom I did the same that you're a dishonorable man. Now, everybody in this thing is twisted just a little bit. You say, well, it's not a lot.

No, because this is how people in the world are. This is how it works. This is exactly how it works. He literally secures his future in this way. And so in verse 8, his master, and here I told you, Jesus sticks a shock element in his parables very frequently.

Here's the shock. His master praised the unrighteous manager. Whoa, what is he praising him about? He's not praising him about his incompetence, his prodigality. He's not praising him about his embezzlement and deception of the owner. He's praising him because he acted shrewdly.

His owner praised him because he acted shrewdly. Now here again, I say, this is just the way the world works. Everybody's relatively corrupt. They're all part of how the system works. This is how life is.

You secure your future any way you can. And the people who are part of the system even are prone to commend the shrewdness and conniving of a clever person. Well, Jesus' comment on this is pretty amazing. Verse 8, the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light. What? Jesus is commending the guy? This is what has troubled some people.

Why? We would understand the manager, I mean, the owner commending the manager. He's applauding his shrewdness. We get that. But why is Jesus commending this? He acted shrewdly.

Let's just make sure we get that. Phronomos is the word that means providently, considerably. It was a well-devised scheme. He took careful advantage of an opportunity. He worked the situation to secure his future benefit, his future comfort. By reducing the debts, he indebted everybody to him.

He had done them immense good, I mean immense good. They are now obligated for his great generosity. There are many of them who are obligated. They're all concerned about their own honor. They're all concerned about reciprocation for somebody who does good to them because it's part of the social requirement in the culture. The point is direct.

Here it is. Sinful people act to secure their own future benefit in very clever and ingenious ways. They use the resources they have with shrewdness, whether honest or dishonest, to secure the best future they can secure. This is how the sons of this age operate. That's what Jesus says. He made the most of his opportunities.

Pretty impressive plan, pretty well-designed. The sons of this age. Who are they? Sinners. This age. They're not in God's kingdom.

These are unbelievers. Then that's how the passing world works, doesn't it? Every imaginable, clever scheme to make money, to secure your future and the future of the people that you care about is concocted, devised, and entertained. Whether it's honest or dishonest, it's rarely a question of whether it's honest or dishonest.

It's mostly a question of kind of getting away with it. Every scheme to secure the future. Investments of all kinds, strategies of all kinds to secure the future. Schemes of all kinds.

Every kind of ingenuity is used and applied. Every imaginable and unimaginable kind of device to guarantee future wealth is going on all the time. This is how the world operates.

This is how it operates. There are people at the top of the legitimate banks and the legitimate enterprises of the world who are corrupt and using every device that they can use to get what they want to get. There are crooks who create their Ponzi schemes and use every device. There are people who don't ask very many questions, but when they're told something is going to be lucrative, they can't sign fast enough and they get sucked into the schemes because everybody in this world is trying to take what they've got and multiply it to secure their future.

It's just how it works. They're good at it. They're shrewd at it.

The governments of the world have to have all kinds of agencies and all kinds of people going through books and all kinds of auditors and all kinds of operators and all kinds of agencies, both public and secret, to sneak around and find out all the schemes that are going on as people work to secure their future. And Jesus says they're more shrewd than the sons of light. What can that possibly mean? Sons of light. Believers. They're called sons of light in John 12, 36, Ephesians 5, 8, 1 Thessalonians 5, 5. We're sons of light. We're not in the darkness.

We're in the light. This generation, the people of the sons of this generation, the sons of this age, non-believers. In fact, in Luke 9, 41, it's called this perverted generation. In Luke 11, it's called this wicked generation. So this perverted wicked generation, the unbelieving world, operates with these kinds of machinations, honest or dishonest, whatever it takes to secure the future.

They're more shrewd than we are, sons of light. What could Jesus possibly mean by that? Verse 9, I say to you, and here He interprets this for the disciples and us, an interpretation by the way that the Pharisees completely missed, of course.

Make friends for yourselves by means of the wealth of unrighteousness, so that when it fails, they will receive you into the eternal dwellings. That's John MacArthur with some vital truth from the parable of the unrighteous steward. Today's message is part of John's series titled Stories with Purpose.

Along with teaching on this daily radio broadcast, John also serves as chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Well, clearly, John, Jesus spoke many parables, using them to communicate divine truth effectively and memorably. But does that mean he saw more value in using parables rather than using other teaching methods?

You know, it's common to think that. There are people who write books saying Jesus had gotten into his ministry, been months and months into his ministry, and people weren't getting it, and they weren't understanding it, and they were rejecting him. So he threw a switch and said, okay, I'm going to tell stories, because everybody loves stories, and stories make things clear. And there are people who offer that as the reason Jesus told parables.

But that is not the reason. The disciples said to him, when on one day, recorded in Matthew 13, he started talking in parables, and he never ever talked to the crowds again without talking in parables, they said, why are you talking in parables? And he said this, to hide this truth, to hide it. Jesus spoke in parables to the crowds as a judgment. Look, a parable unexplained, a parable not understood, is a complete riddle.

So they were judgments. But then privately, our Lord explained them to the disciples, and they made salvation truth clear. The parables of our Lord are familiar to us, but so misunderstood. I've written a book titled, Parables, subtitled, The Mysteries of God's Kingdom Revealed Through the Stories Jesus Told. It's an incredible look at the parables.

You're familiar with the stories, but maybe not the meaning. It's a 200-plus page book, available from our ministry at a reasonable price. Why don't you order a copy, or maybe more, of parables today? Yes, friend, if you are confused by the parables, if you feel that you're solving a riddle when you read them, John's book will help. And with its focus on the realities of salvation, parables also makes an ideal gift for someone with whom you've been sharing the gospel. To order your copy, contact us today.

The parables book costs $13.75, and shipping is free. To get John's book, again, the title is simply, Parables, call us at 800-55-GRACE, or visit our website, GTY.org. The number again, 1-800-55-GRACE, or the web address, GTY.org. And just a reminder that Grace To You is supported by friends like you, who are listening and learning and benefiting from our verse-by-verse Bible ministry. You help keep this broadcast on the air in your area and in communities like yours across the globe. To partner with us, mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace To You, P.O.

Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. You can also donate online at GTY.org or when you call us at 800-55-GRACE. There are also ways you can support this ministry for generations to come through your estate plan. To learn more about Legacy Giving, call us at 800-55-GRACE, or click the donate tab at the top of our website, GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Tune in tomorrow for a look at another of Jesus' parables as our study, Stories With Purpose, continues. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.