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Luke 16 1-13 God's Regents 01 Regents and Viceroys of God
📖 Luke 16:1-13
20Mar2020 - *Regents and Viceroys of God* - _Luke 16:1-13_ - Bible reading: _Genesis 1:26-28_
_Luke 16:10 He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much. Luke 16:13 “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."_
We now enter the study of _Luke 16:1-13_ We will title this study as *God’s regents*. This study is usually known as the parable of the dishonest steward and has been one of the more difficult parables to understand.
I believe the Lord has great lessons for us to understand and apply in our lives, from this parable.
To begin this study, we must note the change in audience for this parable. In the previous chapter, chapter 15 of the Gospel of Luke, the audience were the Pharisees. The lesson that our Lord wanted the Pharisees to learn was that He had come to seek and to save the lost. Now, in chapter 16, the audience changes. The audience here is His disciples. This is teaching very specifically for us, who call ourselves disciples of Christ.
The disciples understood and were aligned to the pain of God’s heart, which is to seek and save the lost but what the disciples needed to know and live by is as God’s regents.
The key to open this parable is the two verses that I have quoted above, which are verse 10 and 13. The Lord has called us to be His stewards. The usual way in which we understand stewardship is more from a managerial perspective, which is acceptable but as we read the entire scriptures, we see that God has made us more than stewards. He has made us be those, who will have dominion over all of His creation.
_Genesis 1:26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."_
The Triune God created us in Their image and in the image of the Triune God, we are to have dominion over His creation. This implies that we are constantly growing into His character and into His nature. In adhering and growing into His image, we execute His thoughts and His desires over all of His creation. His character and nature breathe in and out of us. We cannot separate these two functions – our growth into His nature and our execution of His rule over creation. In other words, we cannot separate the sacred and the secular. Our walk with God runs over into our regentship.
*Thought to ponder*
Are you living your life in two separate compartments of the sacred and the secular?