Reading this morning, in John MacArthur’s Parables, about Jesus’ parable of the crooked steward (in Luke 16) reminded me of a news story from back in 1994: a prisoner escaped from jail in West Virginia by painstakingly braiding dental floss–dental floss, complete with minty flavoring!–into a sturdy rope which he used to get over the wall and out to freedom ( http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/prison-escapes-west-virginia ).
Remember that? I never forgot it. Imagine the labor of fashioning bits of dental floss into a rope sturdy enough to hold a full-grown man! That’s like something out of The Count of Monte Cristo. Imagine the patience, the self-discipline required!
You’d think that with such a combination of ingenuity, boldness, persistence, and attention to detail, a man could accomplish almost anything. He ought to have come up in the world, big-time.
But five weeks after his incredible escape, he robbed a drug store and wound up back in prison: this time, I presume, with only a limited supply of dental floss.
The crooked steward in Christ’s parable had all those qualities, and successfully used them to evade the worldly consequences of his crimes. But he was, like that mug in West Virginia, totally incapable of using his resources to accomplish anything good in God’s service or his fellow man’s. So he escaped for the time being… but I think we can guess where he wound up for all eternity.