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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - Luke 12:20 - 12:20
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Fool (ἄφρων)
Senseless. In Xenophon's “Memorabilia,” Socrates, addressing Aristodemus, says, “Which do you take to be the more worthy of admiration, those who make images without sense (ἀφρονά) or motion, or those who make intelligent and active creations?” (1, iv., 4). Sometimes, also, in the sense of crazed, frantic, but never in New Testament.
Is required (ἀπαιτοῦσιν)
Lit., they require; i.e., the messengers of God. The indefiniteness is impressive.
Whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?
The Greek order puts that first which was uppermost in the rich man's thought - his accumulations: “and the things which thou hast provided (Rev., prepared), whose shall they be?” God does not say, “the things which thou hast or possessest.” The whole question of the tenure of his property is opened for the rich man. He had said my fruits and my goods. Now his proprietorship is ignored. They are not his. Whose shall they be? He is to be dispossessed at once. Plato relates how Pluto complained to Zeus that the souls of the dead found their way to the wrong places, because the judged have their clothes on, and evil souls are clothed in fair bodies, so that the judges, who also have their clothes on and their souls veiled by their mortal part, are deceived. Zeus replies: “In the first place, I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death which they now have. In the second place, they shall be entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge, too, shall be naked; that is to say, dead. He, with his naked soul, shall pierce into the other naked soul, and they shall die suddenly and be deprived of all their kindred, and leave their brave attire strewn upon the earth” (“Gorgias,” 523).