Luke 16:19-21“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.”

Jesus paints a picture of two men. Can you tell which man was rich and which man was poor? Can you see which man was living in God’s blessing and which man was not? That seems easy, we might think. Doesn’t everyone want the first man’s life? Money, nice clothes, a life of luxury–that’s what sells lottery tickets, isn’t it? That’s why kids think they want to grow up to be celebrities. From all appearances, it looks like God was smiling on the first man Jesus introduces.

And notice that Jesus doesn’t say the man did anything particularly wrong. He didn’t make his millions as a mafia crime boss. He didn’t pay his workers slave-labor wages to line his own pockets. He didn’t get rich from fraudulent government contracts, charging the Pentagon a thousand dollars for a toilet seat or two hundred dollars for a hammer. He was just rich, that’s all. And he enjoyed it, just like we expect a rich person to do. It’s what we would do if we had the money.

There is just one hint of something missing in his life. At the entrance to his estate there was often a beggar sitting. The rich man hardly noticed him. The beggar was “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.” But the implication is that the beggar didn’t even get that from him. The beggar might have been happy to eat some of the food the rich man threw in the trash, but the rich man didn’t think to give the beggar his leftovers. The rich man didn’t abuse the beggar or mock the beggar. But his heart was empty, or we might say it was full only of himself, so he didn’t consider the beggar. The rich man lacked love. And love is the product of faith. And without faith it is impossible to please God, the book of Hebrews tells us, no matter how much it might look like God is smiling on our lives. But the rich man couldn’t see it, and neither can much of the world in which we live, because unbelief makes us blind to such things.

The rich man was just “a rich man.” The poor man had a name. He was known to God. His name was Lazarus, which means “God is my help.” One look at his life could drive us all to our knees praying that we don’t end up like this. Lazarus was a cripple. Someone had to carry him to the rich man’s gate and lay him down there. Lazarus was starving. The food the rich man threw away would have been an upgrade to his diet. Lazarus was sick and alone. The dogs came and licked his sores, and remember that for the Jews, dogs were disgusting, unclean vermin like rats or insects. Things couldn’t get much worse for Lazarus, humanly speaking, and there was no chance, short of a miracle, that it was going to get any better.

So you see why Lazarus is the more blessed of the two men in Jesus’ story? No? It is not because his poverty was a virtue any more than the rich man’s wealth was a vice. Those are just conditions by which a blind and unbelieving world draws all kinds of false conclusions. It becomes clearer in the second part of Jesus’ parable, but Lazarus was clearly the richer of the two men because, as his name suggests, God was his help. In spite of all the misery and hardship in his life, he clung to God in faith. He didn’t curse God for his condition. He didn’t abandon God when it didn’t change. He trusted him until the very end. Eternally, that makes all the difference.

Do you hear Jesus warning? Most of us find ourselves in the middle between these two men–not so rich, not so poor. On any given day our current condition may lean more towards wealth or more towards poverty, more towards success or more towards failure, more towards health or more towards sickness, more towards happiness or more towards depression and disappointment. These things are not the measures of our lives. They are certainly not the measure of where we stand with God. God is our help, too. The One who tells this parable is the great proof of that. You can trust him in the present. You can trust him for eternity.