Hidden Nuggets Series #98 – “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink and be merry.” – Luke 12:19
“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” is a popular refrain you may have felt or expressed at some point in your life. If you are like me maybe you said it as a joke when you were downing a pint of ice cream swirled with chocolate sauce. As some in recent years have expressed, “You only live once, right?”
Truth is there is great seriousness in the statement and the consequences of adopting this attitude are serious.
There are two basic elements to the “eat, drink and be merry” philosophy towards life:
1) we are all going to die, sooner rather than later and…
2) since #1 is true, then we should live for the moment, enjoying whatever pleasures we can.
But the issue goes even deeper than those two concepts. When we opt for the eat, drink and be merry philosophy we are choosing laziness, neglect of our responsibilities and a forfeiture of the future. We are resting on what we have accomplished and counting on that to sustain us indefinitely.
You may not know the phrase has its origins in the Bible, taken from a story Jesus told of a rich fool.
