“Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it? When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she had ten drachma coins, if she lost one drachma coin, wouldn’t light a lamp, sweep the house, and seek diligently until she found it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the drachma which I had lost.’ Even so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner repenting.”
He said, “A certain man had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of your property.’ He divided his livelihood between them. Not many days after, the younger son gathered all of this together and traveled into a far country. There he wasted his property with riotous living. When he had spent all of it, there arose a severe famine in that country, and he began to be in need. He went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed pigs. He wanted to fill his belly with the husks that the pigs ate, but no one gave him any. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough to spare, and I’m dying with hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and will tell him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight. I am no more worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.” ’
“He arose, and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe, and put it on him. Put a ring on his hand, and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let’s eat, and celebrate; for this, my son, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found.’ Then they began to celebrate.
“Now his elder son was in the field. As he came near to the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the servants to him, and asked what was going on. He said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and healthy.’ But he was angry, and would not go in. Therefore his father came out, and begged him. But he answered his father, ‘Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed a commandment of yours, but you never gave me a goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this your son came, who has devoured your living with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him.’
“He said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But it was appropriate to celebrate and be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found.’ ”
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv11, 17, 18, 21, 25 Men by their voluntary falling from God, having spoiled…
Men by their voluntary falling from God, having spoiled themselves of the benefits which they received of him, cast themselves headlong into infinite calamities: but God of his singular goodness, offering himself freely to them, whom he called to repentance, through the greatness of their misery wherewith they were tamed, doth not only gently receive them, but also enricheth them with far greater gifts, and blesseth them with the chiefest bliss.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv4–32 4 What man of you, having an hundred sheep,…
4 What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
Ver. 4. See Mat 18:13.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv8, 11, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25 This parable (as appeareth by the conclusion of it)…
This parable (as appeareth by the conclusion of it) is of the same import with the other, and needs no further explication. By both these parables our blessed Lord lets the Pharisees know the end he aimed at in conversing with publicans and sinners, viz. In order to their repentance and conversion, than which nothing could be more grateful and well pleasing to that God who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that they should turn from their wickedness and live. Of the same import is also the following parable, which taketh up all the remaining part of this chapter.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv8, 11, 25 The scope of this parable is the same with…
The scope of this parable is the same with the former.
1. To express the joy that is found with God and his holy angels, at the recovery and conversion of a notorious sinner.
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2. To justify Christ in conversing with such sinners in order to their repentance and conversion, from the malicious reflections of the Pharisees made upon our Saviour for so doing: the sense of the words seems to be this, "If you do all justify the diligence and care of a woman, using all possible means to recover the loss of a piece of silver that has Caesar’s image upon it, why (might our Saviour say) will you Pharisees censure and condemn me for seeking to recover and save lost sinners, that have the image of an holy God instamped upon them?"
Learn hence,
1. That the conversion of a sinner from a course and state of sin and wickedness, is highly acceptable and pleasing unto God.
2. That it is reasonable to suppose, that the holy angels in heaven do conceive a new joy at the notice and news of a sinner’s repentance and conversion unto God: how the angels come by this knowledge, whether by virtue of their ministry here below, or whether God is pleased to reveal it to them above, as a thing extremely welcome and delightful to good spirits, it is neither material to enquire, nor possible to determine. But their happiness not being intensively infinite, it is certain that they may be happier than they are.
Note 3. That God is not only willing to receive and embrace returning and repenting sinners, but the news of their repentance is entertained with so much joy in heaven, that if it be possible for the blessed inhabitants of that place to have any thing added to their happiness, this will be a new accession to it: for though the happiness of God himself be intensively infinite, and can have nothing added to it; yet the happiness of angels and glorified spirits being but finite, is capable of addition: and as their knowledge and love do increase, so their felicity may be growing and improving to all eternity; so that it is reasonable enough to suppose that there is really joy among the angels and spirits of just men made perfect, over every sinner that repenteth.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On v11 We have here the parable of the prodigal son,…
We have here the parable of the prodigal son, the scope of which is the same with those before, to show how pleasing to God the conversion of sinners is, of great sinners, and how ready he is to receive and entertain such, upon their repentance; but the circumstances of the parable do much more largely and fully set forth the riches of gospel grace than those did, and it has been, and will be while the world stands, of unspeakable use to poor sinners, both to direct and to encourage them in repenting and returning to God. Now,
I. The parable represents God as a common Father to all mankind, to the whole family of Adam. We are all his offspring, have all one Father, and one God created us, Mal 2:10. From him we had our being, in him we still have it, and from him we receive our maintenance. He is our Father, for he has the educating and portioning of us, and will put us in his testament, or leave us out, according as we are, or are not, dutiful children to him. Our Saviour hereby intimates to those proud Pharisees that these publicans and sinners, whom they thus despised, were their brethren, partakers of the same nature, and therefore they ought to be glad of any kindness shown them. God is the God, not of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles, (Rom 3:29): the same Lord over all, that is rich in mercy to all that call upon him.
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II. It represents the children of men as of different characters, though all related to God as their common Father. He had two sons, one of them a solid grave youth, reserved and austere, sober himself, but not at all good-humoured to those about him; such a one would adhere to his education, and not be easily drawn from it; but the other volatile and mercurial, and impatient of restraint, roving, and willing to try his fortune, and, if he fall into ill hands, likely to be a rake, notwithstanding his virtuous education. Now this latter represents the publicans and sinners, whom Christ is endeavouring to bring to repentance, and the Gentiles, to whom the apostles were to be sent forth to preach repentance. The former represents the Jews in general, and particularly the Pharisees, whom he was endeavouring to reconcile to that grace of God which was offered to, and bestowed upon, sinners.
The younger son is the prodigal, whose character and case are here designed to represent that of a sinner, that of every one of us in our natural state, but especially of some. Now we are to observe concerning him,
1. His riot and ramble when he was a prodigal, and the extravagances and miseries he fell into. We are told,
(1.) What his request to his father was (Luk 15:12): He said to his father, proudly and pertly enough, "Father, give me" - he might have put a little more in his mouth, and have said, Pray give me, or, Sir, if you please, give me, but he makes an imperious demand - "give me the portion of goods that falleth to me; not so much as you think fit to allot to me, but that which falls to me as my due." Note, It is bad, and the beginning of worse, when men look upon God's gifts as debts. "Give me the portion, all my child's part, that falls to me;" not, "Try me with a little, and see how I can manage that, and accordingly trust me with more;" but, "Give it me all at present in possession, and I will never expect any thing in reversion, any thing hereafter." Note, The great folly of sinners, and that which ruins them, is being content to have their portion in hand, now in this lifetime to receive their good things. They look only at the things that are seen, that are temporal, and covet only a present gratification, but have no care for a future felicity, when that is spent and gone. And why did he desire to have his portion in his own hands? Was it that he might apply himself to business, and trade with it, and so make it more? No, he had no thought of that. But, [1.] He was weary of his father's government, of the good order and discipline of his father's family, and was fond of liberty falsely so called, but indeed the greatest slavery, for such a liberty to sin is. See the folly of many young men, who are religiously educated, but are impatient of the confinement of their education, and never think themselves their own masters, their own men, till they have broken all God's bands in sunder, and cast away his cords from them, and, instead of them, bound themselves with the cords of their own lust. Here is the original of the apostasy of sinners from God; they will not be tied up to the rules of God's government; they will themselves be as gods, knowing no other good and evil than what themselves please. [2.] He was willing to get from under his father's eye, for that was always a check upon him, and often gave a check to him. A shyness of God, and a willingness to disbelieve his omniscience, are at the bottom of the wickedness of the wicked. [3.] He was distrustful of his father's management. He would have his portion of goods himself, for he thought that his father would be laying up for hereafter for him, and, in order to that, would limit him in his present expenses, and that he did not like. [4.] He was proud of himself, and had a great conceit of his own sufficiency. He thought that if he had but his portion in his own hands he could manage it better than his father did, and make a better figure with it. There are more young people ruined by pride than by any one lust whatsoever. Our first parents ruined themselves and all theirs by a foolish ambition to be independent, and not to be beholden even to God himself; and this is at the bottom of sinners' persisting in their sin - they will be for themselves.
(2.) How kind his father was to him: He divided unto them his living. He computed what he had to dispose of between his sons, and gave the younger son his share, and offered the elder his, which ought to be a double portion; but, it should seem, he desired his father to keep it in his own hands still, and we may see what he got by it (Luk 15:31): All that I have is thine. He got all by staying for something in reserve. He gave the younger son what he asked, and the son had no reason to complain that he did him any wrong in the dividend; he had as much as he expected, and perhaps more. [1.] Thus he might now see his father's kindness, how willing he was to please him and make him easy, and that he was not such an unkind father as he was willing to represent him when he wanted an excuse to be gone. [2.] Thus he would in a little time be made to see his own folly, and that he was not such a wise manager for himself as he would be thought to be. Note, God is a kind Father to all his children, and gives to them all life, and breath, and all things, even to the evil and unthankful, dieilen autois ton bion - He divided to them life. God's giving us life is putting us in a capacity to serve and glorify him.
(3.) How he managed himself when he had got his portion in his own hands. He set himself to spend it as fast as he could, and, as prodigals generally do, in a little time he made himself a beggar: not many days after, Luk 15:13. Note, if God leave us ever so little to ourselves, it will not be long ere we depart from him. When the bridle of restraining grace is taken off we are soon gone. That which the younger son determined was to be gone presently, and, in order to that, he gathered all together. Sinners, that go astray from God, venture their all.
Now the condition of the prodigal in this ramble of his represents to us a sinful state, that miserable state into which man is fallen.
[1.] A sinful state is a state of departure and distance from God. First, It is the sinfulness of sin that it is an apostasy from God. He took his journey from his father's house. Sinners are fled from God; they go a whoring from him; they revolt from their allegiance to him, as a servant that runs from his service, or a wife that treacherously departs from her husband, and they say unto God, Depart. They get as far off him as they can. The world is the far country in which they take up their residence, and are as at home; and in the service and enjoyment of it they spend their all. Secondly. It is the misery of sinners that they are afar off from God, from him who is the Fountain of all good, and are going further and further from him. What is hell itself, but being afar off from God?
[2.] A sinful state is a spending state: There he wasted his substance with riotous living (Luk 15:13), devoured it with harlots (Luk 15:30), and in a little time he had spent all, Luk 15:14. He bought fine clothes, spent a great deal in meat and drink, treated high, associated with those that helped him to make an end of what he had in a little time. As to this world, they that live riotously waste what they have, and will have a great deal to answer for, that they spend that upon their lusts which should be for the necessary substance of themselves and their families. But this is to be applied spiritually. Wilful sinners waste their patrimony; for they misemploy their thoughts and all the powers of their souls, misspend their time and all their opportunities, do not only bury, but embezzle, the talents they are entrusted to trade with for their Master's honour; and the gifts of Providence, which were intended to enable them to serve God and to do good with, are made the food and fuel of their lusts. The soul that is made a drudge, either to the world or to the flesh, wastes its substance, and lives riotously. One sinner destroys much good, Ecc 9:18. The good he destroys is valuable, and it is none of his own; they are his Lord's goods that he wastes, which must be accounted for.
[3.] A sinful state is a wanting state: When he had spent all upon his harlots, they left him, to seek such another prey; and there arose a mighty famine in that land, every thing was scarce and dear, and he began to be in want, Luk 15:14. Note, Wilful waste brings woeful want. Riotous living in time, perhaps in a little time, brings men to a morsel of bread, especially when bad times hasten on the consequences of bad husbandry, which good husbandry would have provided for. This represents the misery of sinners, who have thrown away their own mercies, the favour of God, their interest in Christ, the strivings of the Spirit, and admonitions of conscience; these they gave away for the pleasure of sense, and the wealth of the world, and then are ready to perish for want of them. Sinners want necessaries for their souls; they have neither food nor raiment for them, nor any provision for hereafter. A sinful state is like a land where famine reigns, a mighty famine; for the heaven is as brass (the dews of God's favour and blessing are withheld, and we must needs want good things if God deny them to us), and the earth is as iron (the sinner's heart, that should bring forth good things, is dry and barren, and has no good in it). Sinners are wretchedly and miserably poor, and, what aggravates it, they brought themselves into that condition, and keep themselves in it by refusing the supplies offered.
[4.] A sinful state is a vile servile state. When this young man's riot had brought him to want his want brought him to servitude. He went, and joined himself to a citizen of that country, Luk 15:15. The same wicked life that before was represented by riotous living is here represented by servile living; for sinners are perfect slaves. The devil is the citizen of that country; for he is both in city and country. Sinners join themselves to him, hire themselves into his service, to do his work, to be at his beck, and to depend upon him for maintenance and a portion. They that commit sin are the servants of sin, Joh 8:34. How did this young gentleman debase and disparage himself, when he hired himself into such a service and under such a master as this! He sent him into the fields, not to feed sheep (there had been some credit in that employment; Jacob, and Moses, and David, kept sheep), but to feed swine. The business of the devil's servants is to make provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof, and that is no better than feeding greedy, dirty, noisy swine; and how can rational immortal souls more disgrace themselves?
[5.] A sinful state is a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. When the prodigal began to be in want, he thought to help himself by going to service; and he must be content with the provision which not the house, but the field, afforded; but it is poor provision: He would fain have filled his belly, satisfied his hunger, and nourished his body, with the husks which the swine did eat, Luk 15:16. A fine pass my young master had brought himself to, to be fellow-commoner with the swine! Note, That which sinners, when they depart from God, promise themselves satisfaction in, will certainly disappoint them; they are labouring for that which satisfieth not, Isa 55:2. That which is the stumbling-block of their iniquity will never satisfy their souls, nor fill their bowels, Eze 7:19. Husks are food for swine, but not for men. The wealth of the world and the entertainments of sense will serve for bodies; but what are these to precious souls? They neither suit their nature, nor satisfy their desires, nor supply their needs. He that takes up with them feeds on wind (Hos 12:1), feeds on ashes, Isa 44:20.
[6.] A sinful state is a state which cannot expect relief from any creature. This prodigal, when he could not earn his bread by working, took to begging; but no man gave unto him, because they knew he had brought all this misery upon himself, and because he was rakish, and provoking to every body; such poor are least pitied. This, in the application of the parable, intimates that those who depart from God cannot be helped by any creature. In vain do we cry to the world and the flesh (those gods which we have served); they have that which will poison a soul, but have nothing to give it which will feed and nourish it. If thou refuse God's help, whence shall any creature help thee?
[7.] A sinful state is a state of death: This my son was dead, Luk 15:24, Luk 15:32. A sinner is not only dead in law, as he is under a sentence of death, but dead in state too, dead in trespasses and sins, destitute of spiritual life; no union with Christ, no spiritual senses exercised, no living to God, and therefore dead. The prodigal in the far country was dead to his father and his family, cut off from them, as a member from the body or a branch from the tree, and therefore dead, and it is his own doing.
[8.] A sinful state is a lost state: This my son was lost - lost to every thing that was good - lost to all virtue and honour - lost to his father's house; they had no joy of him. Souls that are separated from God are lost souls; lost as a traveller that is out of his way, and, if infinite mercy prevent not, will soon be lost as a ship that is sunk at sea, lost irrecoverably.
[9.] A sinful state is a state of madness and frenzy. This is intimated in that expression (Luk 15:17), when he came to himself, which intimates that he had been beside himself. Surely he was so when he left his father's house, and much more so when he joined himself to the citizen of that country. Madness is said to be in the heart of sinners, Ecc 9:3. Satan has got possession of the soul; and how raging mad was he that was possessed by Legion! Sinners, like those that are mad, destroy themselves with foolish lusts, and yet at the same time deceive themselves with foolish hopes; and they are, of all diseased persons, most enemies to their own cure.
2. We have here his return from this ramble, his penitent return to his father again. When he was brought to the last extremity, then he bethought himself how much it was his interest to go home. Note, We must not despair of the worst; for while there is life there is hope. The grace of God can soften the hardest heart, and give a happy turn to the strongest stream of corruption. Now observe here,
(1.) What was the occasion of his return and repentance. It was his affliction; when he was in want, then he came to himself. Note, Afflictions, when they are sanctified by divine grace, prove happy means of turning sinners from the error of their ways. By them the ear is opened to discipline and the heart disposed to receive instructions; and they are sensible proofs both of the vanity of the world and of the mischievousness of sin. Apply it spiritually. When we find the insufficiency of creatures to make us happy, and have tried all other ways of relief for our poor souls in vain, then it is time to think of returning to God. When we see what miserable comforters, what physicians of no value, all but Christ are, for a soul that groans under the guilt and power of sin, and no man gives unto us what we need, then surely we shall apply ourselves to Jesus Christ.
(2.) What was the preparative for it; it was consideration. He said within himself, he reasoned with himself, when he recovered his right mind, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough! Note, Consideration is the first step towards conversion, Eze 18:28. He considers, and turns. To consider is to retire into ourselves, to reflect upon ourselves, to compare one thing with another, and determine accordingly. Now observe what it was that he considered.
[1.] He considered how bad his condition was: I perish with hunger. Not only, "I am hungry," but, "I perish with hunger, for I see not what way to expect relief." Note, Sinners will not come to the service of Christ till they are brought to see themselves just ready to perish in the service of sin; and the consideration of that should drive us to Christ. Master, save us, we perish. And though we be thus driven to Christ he will not therefore reject us, nor think himself dishonoured by our being forced to him, but rather honoured by his being applied to in a desperate case.
[2.] He considered how much better it might be made if he would but return: How many hired servants of my father's, the meanest in his family, the very day-labourers, have bread enough, and to spare, such a good house does he keep! Note, First, In our Father's house there is bread for all his family. This was taught by the twelve loaves of showbread, that were constantly upon the holy table in the sanctuary, a loaf for every tribe. Secondly, There is enough and to spare, enough for all, enough for each, enough to spare for such as will join themselves to his domestics, enough and to spare for charity. Yet there is room; there are crumbs that fall from his table, which many would be glad of, and thankful for. Thirdly, Even the hired servants in God's family are well provided for; the meanest that will but hire themselves into his family, to do his work, and depend upon his rewards, shall be well provided for. Fourthly, The consideration of this should encourage sinners, that have gone astray from God, to think of returning to him. Thus the adulteress reasons with herself, when she is disappointed in her new lovers: I will go and return to my first husband, for then was it better with me than now, Hos 2:7.
(3.) What was the purpose of it. Since it is so, that his condition is so bad, and may be bettered by returning to his father, his consideration issues, at length, in this conclusion: I will arise, and go to my father. Note, Good purposes are good things, but still good performances are all in all.
[1.] He determined what to do: I will arise and go to my father. He will not take any longer time to consider of it, but will forthwith arise and go. Though he be in a far country, a great way off from his father's house, yet, far as it is, he will return; every step of backsliding from God must be a step back again in return to him. Though he be joined to a citizen of this country, he makes no difficulty of breaking his bargain with him. We are not debtors to the flesh; we are under no obligation at all to our Egyptian task-masters to give them warning, but are at liberty to quit the service when we will. Observe with what resolution he speaks: "I will arise, and go to my father: I am resolved I will, whatever the issue be, rather than stay here and starve."
[2.] He determined what to say. True repentance is a rising, and coming to God: Behold, we come unto thee. But what words shall we take with us? He here considers what to say. Note, In all our addresses to God, it is good to deliberate with ourselves beforehand what we shall say, that we may order our cause before him, and fill our mouth with arguments. We have liberty of speech, and we ought to consider seriously with ourselves, how we may use that liberty to the utmost, and yet not abuse it. Let us observe what he purposed to say.
First, He would confess his fault and folly: I have sinned. Note, Forasmuch as we have all sinned, it behoves us, and well becomes us, to own that we have sinned. The confession of sin is required and insisted upon, as a necessary condition of peace and pardon. If we plead not guilty, we put ourselves upon a trial by the covenant of innocency, which will certainly condemn us. If guilty, with a contrite, penitent, and obedient heart, we refer ourselves to the covenant of grace, which offers forgiveness to those that confess their sins.
Secondly, He would aggravate it, and would be so far from extenuating the matter that he would lay a load upon himself for it: I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee. Let those that are undutiful to their earthly parents think of this; they sin against heaven, and before God. Offences against them are offences against God. Let us all think of this, as that which renders our sin exceedingly sinful, and should render us exceedingly sorrowful for it. 1. Sin is committed in contempt of God's authority over us: We have sinned against Heaven. God is here called Heaven, to signify how highly he is exalted above us, and the dominion he has over us, for the Heavens do rule. The malignity of sin aims high; it is against Heaven. The daring sinner is said to have set his mouth against the heavens, Psa 63:9. Yet it is impotent malice, for we cannot hurt the heavens. Nay, it is foolish malice; what is shot against the heavens will return upon the head of him that shoots it, Psa 7:16. Sin is an affront to the God of heaven, it is a forfeiture of the glories and joys of heaven, and a contradiction to the designs of the kingdom of heaven. 2. It is committed in contempt of God's eye upon us: "I have sinned against Heaven and yet before thee, and under thine eye," than which there could not be a greater affront put upon him.
Thirdly, He would judge and condemn himself for it, and acknowledge himself to have forfeited all the privileges of the family: I am no more worthy to be called thy son, Luk 15:19. He does not deny the relation (for that was all he had to trust to), but he owns that his father might justly deny the relation, and shut his doors against him. He had, at his own demand, the portion of goods that belonged to him, and had reason to expect no more. Note, It becomes sinners to acknowledge themselves unworthy to receive any favour from God, and to humble and abase themselves before him.
Fourthly, He would nevertheless sue for admission into the family, though it were into the meanest post there: "Make me as one of thy hired servants: that is good enough, and too good for me." Note, True penitents have a high value for God's house, and the privileges of it, and will be glad of any place, so they may but be in it, though it be but as door-keepers, Psa 84:10. If it be imposed on him as a mortification to sit with the servants, he will not only submit to it, but count it a preferment, in comparison with his present state. Those that return to God, from whom they have revolted, cannot but be desirous some way or other to be employed for him, and put into a capacity of serving and honouring him: "Make me as a hired servant, that I may show I love my father's house as much as ever I slighted it."
Fifthly, In all this he would have an eye to his father as a father: "I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father." Note, Eyeing God as a Father, and our Father, will be of great use in our repentance and return to him. It will make our sorrow for sin genuine, our resolutions against it strong, and encourage us to hope for pardon. God delights to be called Father both by penitents and petitioners. Is not Ephraim a dear son?
(4.) What was the performance of this purpose: He arose, and came to his father. His good resolve he put in execution without delay; he struck while the iron was hot, and did not adjourn the thought to some more convenient season. Note, It is our interest speedily to close with our convictions. Have we said that we will arise and go? Let us immediately arise and come. He did not come halfway, and then pretend that he was tired and could get no further, but, weak and weary as he was, he made a thorough business of it. If thou wilt return, O Israel, return unto me, and do thy first works.
3. We have here his reception and entertainment with his father: He came to his father; but was he welcome? Yes, heartily welcome. And, by the way, it is an example to parents whose children have been foolish and disobedient, if they repent, and submit themselves, not to be harsh and severe with them, but to be governed in such a case by the wisdom that is from above, which is gentle and easy to be entreated; herein let them be followers of God, and merciful, as he is. But it is chiefly designed to set forth the grace and mercy of God to poor sinners that repent and return to him, and his readiness to forgive them. Now here observe,
(1.) The great love and affection wherewith the father received the son: When he was yet a great way off his father saw him, Luk 15:20. He expressed his kindness before the son expressed his repentance; for God prevents us with the blessings of his goodness. Even before we call he answers; for he knows what is in our hearts. I said, I will confess, and thou forgavest. How lively are the images presented here! [1.] Here were eyes of mercy, and those eyes quick-sighted: When he was yet a great way off his father saw him, before any other of the family were aware of him, as if from the top of some high tower he had been looking that way which his son was gone, with such a thought as this, "O that I could see yonder wretched son of mine coming home!" This intimates God's desire of the conversion of sinners, and his readiness to meet them that are coming towards him. He looketh on men, when they are gone astray from him, to see whether they will return to him, and he is aware of the first inclination towards him. [2.] Here were bowels of mercy, and those bowels turning within him, and yearning at the sight of his son: He had compassion. Misery is the object of pity, even the misery of a sinner; though he has brought it upon himself, yet God compassionates. His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel, Hos 11:8; Jdg 10:16. [3.] Here were feet of mercy, and those feet quick-paced: He ran. This denotes how swift God is to show mercy. The prodigal son came slowly, under a burden of shame and fear; but the tender father ran to meet him with his encouragements. [4.] Here were arms of mercy, and those arms stretched out to embrace him: He fell on his neck. Though guilty and deserving to be beaten, though dirty and newly come from feeding swine, so that any one who had not the strongest and tenderest compassions of a father would have loathed to touch him, yet he thus takes him in his arms, and lays him in his bosom. Thus dear are true penitents to God, thus welcome to the Lord Jesus. [5.] Here were lips of mercy, and those lips dropping as a honey-comb: He kissed him. This kiss not only assured him of his welcome, but sealed his pardon; his former follies shall be all forgiven, and not mentioned against him, nor is one word said by way of upbraiding. This was like David's kissing Absalom, Sa2 14:33. And this intimates how ready, and free, and forward the Lord Jesus is to receive and entertain poor returning repenting sinners, according to his Father's will.
(2.) The penitent submission which the poor prodigal made to his father (Luk 15:21): He said unto him, Father, I have sinned. As it commends the good father's kindness that he showed it before the prodigal expressed his repentance, so it commends the prodigal's repentance that he expressed it after his father had shown him so much kindness. When he had received the kiss which sealed his pardon, yet he said, Father, I have sinned. Note, Even those that have received the pardon of their sins, and the comfortable sense of their pardon, must have in their hearts a sincere contrition for it, and with their mouths must make a penitent confession of it, even of those sins which they have reason to hope are pardoned. David penned the fifty-first psalm after Nathan had said, The Lord has taken away thy sin, thou shall not die. Nay, the comfortable sense of the pardon of sin should increase our sorrow for it; and that is ingenuous evangelical sorrow which is increased by such a consideration. See Eze 16:63, Thou shalt be ashamed and confounded, when I am pacified towards thee. The more we see of God's readiness to forgive us, the more difficult it should be to us to forgive ourselves.
(3.) The splendid provision which this kind father made for the returning prodigal. He was going on in his submission, but one word we find in his purpose to say (Luk 15:19) which we do not find that he did say (Luk 15:21), and that was, Make me as one of thy hired servants. We cannot think that he forgot it, much less that he changed his mind, and was now either less desirous to be in the family or less willing to be a hired servant there than when he made that purpose; but his father interrupted him, prevented his saying it: "Hold, son, talk no more of thy unworthiness, thou art heartily welcome, and, though not worthy to be called a son, shalt be treated as a dear son, as a pleasant child." He who is thus entertained at first needs not ask to be made as a hired servant. Thus when Ephraim bemoaned himself God comforted him, Jer 31:18-20. It is strange that here is not one word of rebuke: "Why did you not stay with your harlots and your swine? You could never find the way home till beaten hither with your own rod." No, here is nothing like this; which intimates that, when God forgives the sins of true penitents, he forgets them, he remembers them no more, they shall not be mentioned against them, Eze 18:22. But this is not all; here is rich and royal provision made for him, according to his birth and quality, far beyond what he did or could expect. He would have thought it sufficient, and been very thankful, if his father had but taken notice of him, and bid him go to the kitchen, and get his dinner with his servants; but God does for those who return to their duty, and cast themselves upon his mercy, abundantly above what they are able to ask or think. The prodigal came home between hope and fear, fear of being rejected and hope of being received; but his father was not only better to him than his fears, but better to him than his hopes - not only received him, but received him with respect.
[1.] He came home in rags, and his father not only clothed him, but adorned him. He said to the servants, who all attended their master, upon notice that his son was come, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him. The worst old clothes in the house might have served, and these had been good enough for him; but the father calls not for a coat, but for a robe, the garment of princes and great men, the best robe - tēn stolēn tēn prōtēn. There is a double emphasis: "that robe, that principal robe, you know which I mean;" the first robe (so it may be read); the robe he wore before he ran his ramble. When backsliders repent and do their first works, they shall be received and dressed in their first robes. "Bring hither that robe, and put it on him; he will be ashamed to wear it, and think that it ill becomes him who comes home in such a dirty pickle, but put it on him, and do not merely offer it to him: and put a ring on his hand, a signet-ring, with the arms of the family, in token of his being owned as a branch of the family." Rich people wore rings, and his father hereby signified that though he had spent one portion, yet, upon his repentance, he intended him another. He came home barefoot, his feet perhaps sore with travel, and therefore, "Put shoes on his feet, to make him easy." Thus does the grace of God provide for true penitents. First, The righteousness of Christ is the robe, that principal robe, with which they a
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv4–32 What man of you having an hundred sheep,.... A…
What man of you having an hundred sheep,.... A flock of sheep, consisting of such a number; See Gill on Mat 18:12,
if he lose one of them, by straying from the flock,
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doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, upon the common where they were feeding,
and go after that which is lost until he find it? by which parable Christ vindicates his conduct in conversing with sinners, and neglecting the Scribes and Pharisees; for if it was right for an owner of an hundred sheep, when he had lost one of them, to leave all the rest, and go in search after that one till he had found it; then it was right in Christ to do what he did. The Jewish nation seems to be designed "by the hundred sheep", who are frequently represented as a flock of sheep, Psa 77:20 which are divided into ninety nine, and one: for by the "ninety nine" left in the wilderness, cannot be meant angels, as some have thought; for angels are never called sheep; and besides, the one lost sheep is of the same kind with the ninety and nine; and, according to this sense, must design an angel, or angels likewise; whereas none of the fallen angels are sought up, recovered, and saved. Moreover, when Christ became incarnate, he did not leave the angels; they accompanied and attended him in his state of humiliation; and much less in a wilderness, and still less can heaven be so called; to which may be added, that the angels in heaven are distinguished from the ninety nine as well as from the one lost sheep in Luk 15:7 nor can elect men be designed by them, who are already called by grace, whether they be in heaven or on earth; for though they in heaven are the spirits of just men made perfect, and are in a state that need no repentance, yet it cannot be said of them, that they went not astray, as in Mat 18:13 for all God's people have been like sheep going astray, and were as such considered when Christ was here on earth, and bore their sins; and especially those could never be said to be left in a wilderness: nor the saints on earth: for though they are just persons, being justified by the righteousness of Christ, yet they daily need repentance; nor can it be said of them that they went not astray; nor are they left by Christ in the wilderness of this world; nor can there be more joy in heaven over one repenting sinner, than over these; but the self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees, that murmured at our Lord's receiving sinners, are meant. These were sheep, at least were in sheep's clothing; they were nominal professors, and belonged to the Jewish fold, or national church state; their number was ninety nine, to one; which is not to be taken strictly, as though only one in a hundred of them were saved; but it shows, that the greater part of the Jews were of this sort. The dividing of an hundred after this manner, into ninety nine and one, was usual with the Jews; so in their traditions (p), concerning distributing filberts to the poor,
"R. Simeon says, if "ninety nine" say "divide", and "one" says spoil, or scatter, they hearken to him, because he speaks according to the constitution; but of a vine and date, it is not so: if "ninety and nine" say spoil, and "one" says divide, they hearken to him, for he speaks according to the constitution.''
And elsewhere (q) they say,
""ninety and nine" die by an (evil) eye, and "one" by the hand of heaven; R. Chanina and Samuel, both of them say, "ninety and nine" die by cold, and "one" by the hand of heaven---R. Samuel bar Nachman, in the name of R. Jonathan says, "ninety and nine" die by heat, and "one" by the hand of heaven; and the Rabbans say, "ninety and nine" die by transgression, and "one" by the hand of heaven. Says R. Eleazar, "ninety and nine" die by bitterness, and "one" by the hand of heaven.''
And in another place (r) it is said,
""ninety and nine" die by an evil eye, and "one" by the way of the earth;''
in the common way: once more it is said (s),
"of the "hundred" cries which a woman cries, when she sits upon the stool (in travail), "ninety and nine" are death, and "one" for life.''
And this way of speaking also prevailed in other eastern nations, as in Arabia; in the Alcoran of Mahomet (t) there is such an expression as this;
"this my brother had "ninety nine sheep", and I had only "one" ewe.''
The "one lost sheep" in this parable, though it may include all the elect of God, and be accommodated to a single elect sinner, yet chiefly respects the chosen of God among the Jews; which were very few, a remnant according to the election of grace: and which lay among the profane part of them, the publicans and sinners; Who are particularly pointed out here, as appears from the context: these are called "sheep", even before conversion; not because they had the agreeable properties of sheep, for they were all the reverse; nor could some things be said of them before as after, as, that they heard the voice of Christ, and followed him; nor because they were unprejudiced against, and predisposed to receive the Gospel: but they are so called by anticipation, because they would be so; or rather in virtue of electing grace, by which they were chosen, and separated from others, and made the care and charge of Christ the great shepherd, and were the sheep of his hand: these are represented as going astray from the shepherd, and from the fold, and out of the right way; and who being like sheep, stupid and insensible of their danger, wander about, and never return of themselves till they are returned to, and by the great shepherd and bishop of souls. And in their unregenerate estate they are lost sheep, not irretrievably and eternally lost, as the world's goats; for though they are lost in Adam, yet not in Christ; and though lost in themselves, so as there is no possibility of ever recovering and saving themselves; yet as they were preserved in Christ, they are recovered and saved by him; who is the owner and proprietor of the whole flock, of all the "hundred" sheep, of the whole body of the Jewish nation; who were his by creation, and by being chosen from, and above all other people; and were distinguished by peculiar favours, had the "Shekinah", and presence of God among them, and his worship, word, and ordinances. Christ was peculiarly promised to them, and was born of them; and was a minister of the circumcision, being sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel: though the "ninety and nine" were not his sheep in the most peculiar sense, or in such sense as the "one" lost sheep, which were his by his Father's gift, as all the elect are; hence he knows them, calls them, and receives them, and keeps them, and highly values them: he had them, they were put into his hands, he took the care and charge of there, he undertook to bring them in, to feed them, to die for them, and save them; and they are his by purchase, and he asserts his right to them, by calling them by his grace, and will distinguish them as his own, at the last day: and now, because of the different interest Christ has in the ninety and nine, and the one, different regards are had to them; the ninety and nine, the self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees,
he leaves in the wilderness, in a state of unregeneracy; so called, because in those that are in such a state, nothing is sown or planted, what grows there is natural; there is no seed of grace, no plants of pleasure, no ingrafted word, no fruits of righteousness, nothing but thorns and briers, of sins and corruptions: and also because of the want of provisions; no bread of life, nor water of life; no sincere milk of the word, no breasts of consolation; nothing but husks, and bread of deceit: and it is like a wilderness, because of solitariness; such as are in this state, are alone, without God, and Christ, and the blessed Spirit; they are aliens from the people of God, and converse with none but wicked men, comparable to savage beasts of the desert: moreover, it may be so called, because of the various perplexing cross ways in it; the ways of sin are many, and crooked, and dark; and indeed, such are the religious ways of unregenerate men: to which may be added, that it bears this name, because of the danger of it; for such as are in it are exposed to beasts of prey; particularly to Satan, the red dragon, and roaring lion; and to pits, gins, and snares, to hellfire, destruction, and misery. Christ's "leaving" persons in such a state, supposes they were in it, antecedent to their being left: man was originally placed in a garden, sinning against God, he forfeited his happy situation, and was drove out from it; and wandering from God he fell into this wilderness state. Christ does not lead any into it, but leaves them in it; which is done in consequence of his Father's act of preterition, or passing them by when he chose others; and this he does, when he does not call them by his grace, as he does others; does not manure, till, and cultivate them as he does his own husbandry and vines; makes no provision of food and pasture for them; leaves them to themselves, and without the enjoyment of himself; to follow their own ways, without a guide, and to beasts of prey without a guard. Now the persons he thus leaves are such whom the Father has left out in his choice and covenant; and who left Christ, rejected and despised him; and were persons that made great pretensions to religion, were righteous in their own eyes, and in their own account never were astray, nor needed repentance. On the other hand, the one lost sheep, the chosen of God among publicans and sinners, a special regard is had to them: Christ
goes after that which is lost until he find it; not after all mankind; for though they are all lost, yet they are not all redeemed by Christ; nor are they made sensible of their lost condition; nor effectually called by grace; nor brought home: nor does he go after the ninety nine, for Christ came not to call the righteous; though these were lost, and irretrievably too, yet they were not sensible of their condition: but God's elect among the Jews are the persons here said to be lost; to show their common condition with the rest of mankind; to express the love of Christ towards them the more; and to magnify the riches of his grace in their salvation: these he went after in redemption, he came forth from his Father, and came down from heaven for their sakes; he died to gather them together, and represented them all in his sufferings and death; he bore all their sins, and made reconciliation for them, and procured the full pardon of them; he satisfied the law and justice of God, wrought out an everlasting righteousness, and obtained eternal redemption, and a complete salvation for them: and he went after them in the effectual calling; before conversion an elect sinner is without Christ, and goes astray from him; nor does he ever come to Christ till Christ comes after him, and lays hold upon him; he sends his ministers after such, and his Spirit into them, and comes himself, and takes possession of them. To find his lost sheep by redeeming grace he came into this world, a world of wickedness, sorrow, and trouble, of cruelty, and barbarity; and the reason of his coming here was, because his sheep were here; he came after them, and on their account: and to find them by effectual calling, he still comes into the world by his word and Spirit; God's elect are in the world, Christ sends his Gospel into it, and by his Spirit and grace comes and separates them from the men of it. In Mat 18:12 he is said to go "into the mountains" after his lost sheep; which, with respect to redemption, may denote the difficulties that lay in the way of it; such as his incarnation, obedience, sufferings and death, and the many enemies he had to grapple with and subdue; and with respect to calling grace, may express the state and condition God's elect are in by nature, being on the mountains of sin, of Sinai, of the law, and of their own righteousness. Now Christ goes after them "till he finds" them; which denotes continuance, his indefatigable industry and diligence, his resolution and courage, and his success. The reasons why he thus goes after them are not their number, for they are the fewest of all; nor their nature, which is no better than others, nor any previous dispositions, or good characters, for those designed here were publicans and sinners; nor any future improvements and service by them, for they were the base and foolish things of this world; nor because near at hand, and so easily looked up, for they were afar off; but because of his love to them, and the relation between them as shepherd and sheep; and because of his Father's will, and his own obligation by covenant; and because of his own interest and glory.
(p) Misn. Pesach. c. 4. sect. 1, 2. (q) T. Hieros. Sabbat, fol. 14. 3. Vajikra Rabba, sect. 16. fol. 158. 4. (r) T. Bab. Bava Metzia, fol. 107. 2. (s) Vajikra Rabba, sect. 27. fol. 168. 3. (t) C. 38.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32 Leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness -…
Leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness - Where they used to feed: all uncultivated ground, like our commons, was by the Jews termed wilderness or desert. And go after - In recovering a lost soul, God as it were labours. May we not learn hence, that to let them alone who are in sin, is both unchristian and inhuman! Matt. xviii, 12.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 Verse 4. What man of you] Our Lord spoke…
Verse 4. What man of you] Our Lord spoke this and the following parable to justify his conduct in receiving and conversing with sinners or heathens.
A hundred sheep] Parables similar to this are frequent among the Jewish writers. The whole flock of mankind, both Jews and Gentiles, belongs unto this Divine Shepherd; and it is but reasonable to expect, that the gracious proprietor will look after those who have gone astray, and bring them back to the flock. The lost sheep is an emblem of a heedless, thoughtless sinner: one who follows the corrupt dictates of his own heart, without ever reflecting upon his conduct, or considering what will be the issue of his unholy course of life. No creature strays more easily than a sheep; none is more heedless; and none so incapable of finding its way back to the flock, when once gone astray: it will bleat for the flock, and still run on in an opposite direction to the place where the flock is: this I have often noticed. No creature is more defenceless than a sheep, and more exposed to be devoured by dogs and wild beasts. Even the fowls of the air seek their destruction. I have known ravens often attempt to destroy lambs by picking out their eyes, in which, when they have succeeded, as the creature does not see whither it is going, it soon falls an easy prey to its destroyer. Satan is ever going about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour; in order to succeed, he blinds the understanding of sinners, and then finds it an easy matter to tumble them into the pit of perdition. Who but a Pharisee or a devil would find fault with the shepherd who endeavours to rescue his sheep from so much danger and ruin!
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv8, 11, 13, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 29, 32 Luk 15:8-10. Either what woman — As if he…
Luk 15:8-10. Either what woman — As if he had said, To illustrate the matter by another obvious similitude, that it may yet more powerfully strike your minds, what woman, having ten pieces of silver — Though each of them but of the value of a drachma; or about seven pence halfpenny, and the whole only about six shillings three pence sterling money: if she lose one piece — Out of her little stock; doth not light a candle, &c. — Will not immediately make search for it, and take all possible pains to find it. And when she hath found it, calleth her female friends — To acquaint them with her good success, concluding it will be agreeable news to them. It might seem hardly worth while to ask the congratulation of her friends on so small an occasion as finding a drachma; but it is represented as the tenth part of her little stock, and the impressible and social temper of the sex may, perhaps, be considered as adding some propriety to the representation. Likewise, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God, &c. — We may conclude from hence, that, at least in some extraordinary cases, the angels are, either by immediate revelation, or otherwise, informed of the conversion of sinners, which must, to those benevolent spirits, be an occasion of joy; nor could any thing have been suggested more proper to encourage the humble penitent, to expose the repining Pharisee, or to animate all to zeal in so good a work, as endeavouring to promote the repentance and conversion of others. Indeed this part of both these parables is finely imagined. The angels, though high in nature, and perfect in blessedness, are represented as bearing a friendly regard to, and as having exact knowledge of, many things done here below. Thus, from men’s conduct in the common affairs of life, described in these parables, Christ proves it to be the general sense of mankind, that every sinner should be sought after by the teachers of religion. For, as men are so moved with the loss of any part of their property, that they seem to neglect what remains while they are employed in endeavouring to recover what happens to be missing; and, when they have found it, are so overjoyed, that, calling their friends, to whom they had given an account of their misfortune, they tell them the good news, that they may rejoice with them; so the servants of God should labour with the greatest solicitude to recover whatever part of his property is lost, namely, his reasonable creatures, who, having strayed from him, are in danger of perishing eternally. And they have powerful encouragement to do so, as the reformation of a single sinner occasions more joy in heaven than the steadfastness of ninety and nine righteous persons. By this circumstance, likewise, he insinuated that the Pharisees, who pretended to more holiness than others, instead of repining at his conversing with, and instructing sinners, ought to have imitated the example of the heavenly beings, and to have rejoiced to find these men delighted with his company and discourses, who enjoined them a much stricter life than they hitherto had been used to, inasmuch as this was a certain token of their repentance, and seemed to promise a speedy and thorough reformation. The drift of both parables is to show, that the conversion of sinners is a thing highly acceptable to God, and, consequently, that whatever is necessary thereto is so far from being inconsistent with goodness, that it is the very perfection and excellence of it. Dan 12:3.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31 See the notes at Mat 18:12-13.
See the notes at Mat 18:12-13.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 22, 24, 25, 29 What man, &c. Christ left the ninety-nine in the…
What man, &c. Christ left the ninety-nine in the desert, when he descended from the angelic choirs, in order to seek last man on the earth, that he might fill up the number of the sheepfold of heaven, from which his sins had excluded him. (St. Ambrose) --- Neither did his affection for the last sheep make him behave cruelly to the rest; for he left them in safety, under the protection of his omnipotent hand. (St. Cyril in St. Thomas Aquinas)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v11 3. The Prodigal Son (Luk_15:11-32)
3. The Prodigal Son (Luk_15:11-32)
11And he said, A certain man had two sons: 12And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. 13And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. 14And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. 15And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks 17[pods] that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him [therefrom]. And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish [am perishing here2] with hunger! 18I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before 19thee, And [for “And” read “I”3] am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. 20And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had [or, was moved with] compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. 21And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and Amos 4 no more worthy to be called thy son. 22But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe [a robe, the best5], and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: 23And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: 24For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
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25Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. 26And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. 27And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. 28And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore [and] came his father out, and entreated him. 29And he answering said to his6 father, Lo, these many years do I serve [so many years have I served] thee, neither transgressed I [have I transgressed] at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: 30But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. 31And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever 32with me, and all that I have is thine. It [But it] was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
Luk_15:11. A certain man.—The simple, unpretentious beginning of the most beautiful of all the parables, is even in and of itself a beauty. The man is here the image of God; the Son anthropomorphizes the Father in a very unique manner. The two sons denote not exactly the Jews and the Heathen, (Augustine, Bede, and the Tübingen school), nor yet angels and men (Herberger), but the mass of men, as divided at this moment before the Saviour, into Publicans and Pharisees. Strictly speaking, both the sons here sketched are lost,—the one through the unrighteousness that degrades him, the other through the self-righteousness which blinds him.
Luk_15:12. The younger.—The most light-minded, and as such the most easily led astray. The goods which come to him only after the death of the father, he wishes to possess already in his father’s lifetime, in order to be entirely free and his own master.—Τὸ ἐπιβάλλον μέρος, somewhat singular, but yet a genuinely Greek expression (see Grotius), to indicate what he of right can demand as his property out of his father’s possessions.—And he divided unto them, αὐτυῖς.—Therefore not only to the younger, but also to the elder, with the distinction however that the younger now received in hand his own portion, while the elder could regard his as his property, although the father yet administered it, and he still remained as the child in his father’s house.
Luk_15:13. Gathered together.—It very soon appears what the youngest one really meant to do. The false craving for freedom, which the father does not suppress by violence, drives him to seek his fortune abroad. All that he has received he gathers together, partly, probably, in natura (De Wette), and journeys as far as possible away. The far-distant land, an image of the sinner’s deep apostasy from God. The beauty of the parable is heightened still more by this fact, that with forbearing tenderness, the depth of his degradation is not depicted in many strokes, but afterwards, Luk_15:30, is for the first time learned somewhat more in detail from the mouth of the elder son. His mode of life is plainly enough characterized, as ἀσώτως, a word which is found only here, but which is sufficiently explained by the use of the substantive, Eph_5:18; Tit_1:6; 1Pe_4:4. Then does the inward separation from the father become quite as great as the outward was. “Qui se a Christo separat, exul est patriœ, civis est mundi.” Ambrosius.
Luk_15:14. And when … a mighty famine.—The natural consequences of such a mode of life are only hastened by the famine that arises (ἰσχυρὰ λιμός, here feminine according to the Doric dialect and the latter usage; Luk_4:25, it still appears as masculine, and the reading of the Recepta, ἰσχυρός, is only an emendation, according to the customary usage). The external want which he now begins to suffer, becomes a transition to the turning-point of his inner life. But he does not yet come to this turning-point without a last desperate endeavor to remedy his own distress from his own means.
Luk_15:15. Joined himself, ἐκολλήθη, attached himself, as it were, to him by force, that he might assist him in his necessity. He has therefore remained a stranger in the land in which he has consumed all. “Quem reditus ad frugem manet, is sœpe etiam in medio errore suo quiddam a propriis mundi civibus distinctum retinet.” Bengel. But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. The citizen of the strange land sends him (ἔπεμψεν, change of the subject of discourse) to his fields, (ἀγρούς in the plural), in order there to keep swine, where he should by no means lack the necessary sustenance: perhaps an intentional insult which the rich heathen put upon the suffering, necessitous Jew, but certainly a striking image of the inconceivable wretchedness into which sin drags man down. And yet this very deep leads up to the height, and among the χοίροις it will soon fare better with the unhappy man than with the πόρναις.
Luk_15:16. Have filled his belly.—An uncomely expression in itself, but entirely agreeable to the uncomeliness of the fact, and so far an additional beauty of the parable. Somewhat of (ἀπό) the swine’s fodder is now his highest desire, without however his being able even to obtain a part of that.—With the pods, κεράτια, a wild fruit, found in Syria and Egypt, which was used for swine’s fodder. Perhaps the sweetish fruit of the Caratonia siliqua (Linnæus), which, on account of the great abundance of them, was of the least possible value, and although they tasted sweet were not wholesome. “The hull of the marrowy pod, one foot in length (κεράτια), was thrown to the swine; but the kernel (Gerah, grain) passed for the smallest weight among the Hebrews.”—And no one gave unto him (therefrom).—“Either because the feeding of the swine was committed to others than him that pastured them, or because he saw the access to the swine-trough closed to him; perhaps because the steward under whom he served was avaricious and malicious.” De Wette. At all events, the only thing that could have reconciled him to his degrading employment, the satisfaction of his raging hunger, he saw still withheld from him in this way.
Luk_15:17. And when he came to himself.—An admirable expression for the inward change in the heart of the man who had been hitherto beside himself, but now awakes from the dream. Εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐλθών, Luther: da schlug er in sich. The sinner must first return unto himself, if he will be truly converted to God. He first compares his external condition with that of the more highly privileged. The μίσθιοι have bread, and indeed περισσεύουσιν ἄρτων. He, the son of the family, has not even κεράτια. By the μίσθιοι, we have to understand laborers that are engaged from day to day. Among the παῖδες. Luk_15:26, we have to understand the meanest of the permanent domestic servants, who stand without, without taking part in the feast; among the δοῦλοι, Luk_15:22, on the other hand, servants of higher rank, overseers of farms, vineyards, and the like, who personally took part in the joy of the feast. It appears therefore, that the Prodigal Son actually envies the good fortune of those who stood on the last step. Now, when the pride of his heart is broken, no false shame holds him longer back from considering his condition in its true light.
Luk_15:18. I will arise.—Not precisely the primordia pœnitentiæ (Bengel), for these are already indicated in the εἰς ἑαυτὸν ἐλθών, but the transition from the inward to the now also outward change. In this especially is shown the sincerity of his repentance, that it is joined with the not yet extinguished trust in the love of his father, that he seeks not a single excuse, and without delay arises to carry out the resolution taken.—Against heaven and before thee; ἐνώπιον σοῦ, that is, “in relation to thee.” Since however this relation is ordained by heaven (general indication of the dwelling-place of the higher spiritual world), he feels at the same time how this holy, heavenly world is injured by the fact, that he on earth has infringed in such a way upon the inalienable rights of his father. It is ever a token of the sincerity of repentance, when one views even the sins committed against others, as transgressions against the Heavenly Father.—Make me as one.—He wishes not only tractari tanquam mercenarius, but to be accounted on a level with such in every respect; on ὡς an emphasis is to be laid. He wishes that there may be no distinction between him and the least of the day-laborers, and promises thereby that he will diligently serve, and be obedient as a day-laborer. That he however hopes in this way once more to deserve the name of a son, he does not say a word of, and it is therefore perhaps much too refined (Stier) to remark in this entreaty a trace of self-righteousness. He wishes simply to be released at any price from his wretched condition, and with deeds to prove the sincerity of his confession of sin.
Luk_15:20. But when … his father saw him.—The father is represented as daily expecting the return of the strayed one, with longing desire; he is moved with compassion for the unfortunate one, at the view of the wretched garment, and the pitiable condition in which he sees him coming at a distance. The kiss which he impresses on his lips, comp. Gen_33:4; Mat_26:48, is the token of the prevenient love which is shown even before the confession of sin, which the father reads in the heart of the returned son, has had time to pass over his lips. The conclusion of the previously meditated address: “Make me,” &c., is in fact kept back “by the demeanor of fatherly love; the agitated son cannot bring these words out in view of such paternal love; a psychologically tender and delicate representation.” Meyer.
Luk_15:22. But the father.—Ταχέως may certainly be added in though, even though it should not be inserted in the text.—See notes on the Greek text.—The father assures the son of his forgiveness, not by replying to his address, but by giving in his presence a definite command to the servants standing by. First, there must a garment, and that the best (see notes on the text), be brought out; the father cannot look on these hateful beggar’s rags. Thus is he again brought into his former position of honor; for the Talar was the long and white upper garment of the principal Jews, see Mar_12:38. The seal-ring and the shoes are to show that he was recognized as a free man (slaves went commonly barefoot). The (τό) fatted calf, which stands in the stall already prepared for slaughter, can be destined for no more joyful occasion than this. Without delay must all the members of the family assemble at the feast-table, and it is as if now the inventiveness of love exhausted itself to prove to the returned wanderer how welcome he is to the happy father’s heart. The ground for all this is indicated in the assurance: For this my son, &c. Death and life is in the usage of the Scripture the designation of sin and conversion, see Eph_2:1; 1Ti_5:6, and other passages. The father means not only that the son has been dead for him (Paulus, De Wette), but that he in himself has risen in a moral respect from the condition of death to a new and higher life. What he has been and now is in the view of the father—once lost, now found,—is expressed in the second antithesis. The parallelism of the expression is therefore not to be taken tautologically.
Luk_15:24. And they began to be merry.—Of course at the feast, although, in itself, εὐφραίνεσθαι is not to be taken in the sense of epulari (Kuinoel). The parable has here reached the point which is designated in the first parable in Luk_15:7, and in the second in Luk_15:10; for the joy in the father’s house corresponds perfectly to that in heaven and before the angels of God. Not impossible is it, however, that it was especially this third intimation of the same chief thought, which awakened a visible displeasure among the Pharisaic hearers, and that the Saviour therefore felt impelled so much the more to set forth yet more in detail, in the person of the second son, an intimation already given, Luk_15:7, by portraying his unloving selfishness. Here also we owe to human opposition and malice one of the most beautiful pages of the Gospel.
Luk_15:25. His elder son.—The less the Pharisees could recognize in the description of the younger son their own image, so much the more must their conscience hold up before them a mirror in the image of the eldest son. Even at the very beginning, the vividness and beauty of the representation is heightened by the fact, that the eldest son at the return of the youngest brother is not in the house, but has spent the day in hard, self-chosen, slavish service, and now first returns home at even-time, when the feast was already in progress.—Music and dancing.—Without the article. As to the customariness of this at the feasts of the ancients, comp. Mat_14:6. Even this fact, that such a thing had taken place in the dwelling entirely without his knowledge, secretly angers him, and with an astonishment which betrays displeasure, he calls one of the servants to him.
Luk_15:27. Thy brother is come.—Entirely without reason have some found (Berl. Bibl.) in the answer of the servant something secretly malicious. He gives to the returned son, after the example of his master, the rank befitting him & he does not relate in what condition the brother had come home, but only that he had returned in good health.—The slave speaks of ὐγιαίνειν undoubtedly in the physical sense, as the father had before spoken of death and life in the moral sense; and at the same time mentions the fatted calf, which he had perhaps slaughtered with his own hand, and which was for him, as a servant, very likely the chief matter. In so good-natured an answer there lies nothing at all, in and of itself, which could have given the elder brother just ground for bitterness. It is rather the state of the case itself that is sufficient (in his temper of mind) to fill him with anger. This last stroke of the pencil also proves satisfactorily the unreasonableness of the singular interpretation, that by the elder brother we are to understand unfallen angels.
Luk_15:28. His father … entreated him, παρεκάλει. Luther: Begged him. Kuinoel: Called him to him. Meyer: Summoned him to come in. Only the last is somewhat too strong, since then the refusal of the son would have been, in contradiction to his own declaration, Luk_15:29, a direct disobedience. We prefer explaining it in the sense that the father with soft words sought to move him to judge otherwise, and then also to act otherwise, comp. Act_16:39. So much the more strikingly does the not-to-be wearied and long-suffering love of the father, who for his sake even leaves for a moment the feast of joy, contrast with the refractory and selfish disposition of the elder son.
Luk_15:29. These many years.—He addresses the father, yet the youngest son’s tender πάτερ does not pass his lips. On the other hand, he brings up to him his external obedience and service for reward, with as little modesty as possible. Reward for it he has, according to his own opinion, never yet received, and indeed has not yet enjoyed the only true reward in his heart. It is noticeable (see the notes on the text) that his highest wish appears to have concentrated itself in a kid, ἐρίφιον. (the he-goat, the image of lewdness) [There is not the slightest reason to suppose that any such reference is implied in ἐρίφιον.—C. C. S.], while he looks down with contempt upon the immoral conduct of his brother. Ὁ υΐός σου οὗτος. He visibly avoids giving him the brother’s name, which, however, the father does, Luk_15:32, but he tears the veil which was spread over his sinful life. For him the paternal love also concentrates itself in the fatted calf, that had far higher value than the vainly wished for ἐρίφιον.
Luk_15:31. Son, thou art.—Although self-righteousness has already condemned itself by its own words, it is now even to redundance rebuked by the mild answer of the father. With an affectionate τέκνον, he seeks once again to bring him to a kinder disposition, and show him that his uninterrupted dwelling with his father and his prospect of the whole paternal inheritance, Luk_15:12, should have raised him above so unloving a judgment. An entirely different disposition was now the natural one, and required by the course of events. To make merry and be glad was what one must now do, instead of bringing bitter imputations. The father does not say definitely that the eldest son also should now do this. The σέ is now omitted; but he speaks in general of the ethical necessity that it now must be just thus, and not otherwise. In no event, therefore, will the feast of joy be for his sake interrupted, but he himself must judge whether he, after the explanation received, will yet longer stand without in displeasure. The father has the last word, and it is as if the Saviour asked therewith His Pharisaical listeners: Decide yourselves how the parable shall end; will you still refuse to take part in the joy of heaven over the conversion of sinners?
In relation to the parable as a whole, we must remark, in addition, that it belongs perfectly in the Pauline Gospel of Luke. “The Pauline representation of the incapacity of the νόμος to confer the true δικαιοσύνη, and of the necessity of another way of salvation through the πίστις and χάρις, constitutes the best commentary on these parables.” Olshausen. But in a pitiable way has the Paulinistic and liberal character of this teaching of the Saviour been misused by the Tübingen school, to the support of their understanding of original Christianity, and of the peculiarity of the third Gospel. Ritzschl (formerly), Zeller, Schwegler, nor least, Von Baur, have, with different modifications, insisted on finding here a symbolical representation of the distinct relation in which Jews and Gentiles stood to the Messianic kingdom. The Prodigal Son then represents heathenism in its degeneracy, return, and restoration; the eldest son, on the other hand, represents the proud and hostile disposition of the Jewish Christians against these later-called and highly privileged. “Who does not here see the behavior of the Jewish Christians towards the Gentile Christians and the Pauline Christianity which we know from the Epistle to the Romans?” It is impossible to read this whole construction of the oldest church history without doing justice to the extra ordinary talent and the brilliant gift of combination of which it is the undeniable fruit. But even the noblest building must fall in ruin when it lacks the firm foundation. The latter is here the case, and it has, therefore, been justly remarked that Hilgenfeld and others confound the applicability of the parable to their darling theme, with its original occasion and intention. That a noticeable agreement exists between the Jewish Christians and the eldest son, between the Gentile Christians and the youngest, is plain, and should be willingly conceded; but that the Saviour’s design was to direct attention to this is in direct conflict with Luk_15:1-2; Luk_15:7; Luk_15:10. With the same right we might be able to find the antitype of the two sons, in the Catholic and in the Evangelical Church in their mutual relations. As to the rest, we already find a trace of the Tübingen idea in Vitringa and others.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. There is no parable of the Saviour whose beauty and high value has been so generally and openly acknowledged as that of the Prodigal Son. Nothing would be easier than to collect a Chrestomathy of enthusiastic eulogies on this parable, even from rationalists and unbelievers. “In the style of Lavater, whoever loves this style might speak long and much; might exclaim and wonder: How simple and how deep, how unforgettably retainable in its words, unfathomable and inexhaustible in its sense; related with what dramatic life, this parable of the Saviour, the crown and pearl of all His parables, is!” Stier. But mindful that the Divine, least of anything, needs our human praise, we will rather direct the eye to that which is here portrayed, and to the somewhat more particular consideration of the great antithesis of Sin and Grace, which appears in this so popular and yet so profound instruction.
2. Sin appears here before us not only in one but in a twofold form, as it develops itself not only in the widely wandering but also in the self-righteous man, who remains outwardly within the limits of obedience required by God. Against every theory which explains sin from the metaphysical imperfection of human nature, or interprets the fall as a kind of moral progress (Schiller), this parable utters the sentence of condemnation.
3. The essence of sin presents itself to us in the younger son as Self-seeking. This awakens in him discontent with the good that he enjoys in the house of his father, impels him to seek independent freedom, sensual enjoyment and honor, and makes him a wretched slave of his unfettered, passions. From the root of self-seeking grow two different branches, the sins of sensuality on the one hand and those of pride on the other. The former we see coming to mournful development principally in the younger, the latter in the elder, son. Sensuality degrades man, blinds him and leads him finally to the brink of the abyss, but God is far from abridging the sinner’s use of his freedom; He permits him, on the other hand, to walk his own ways, and makes even the bitter fruits of evil serviceable to his healing and recovery. Through false craving for freedom the Prodigal Son falls into unhappy wandering; through wandering into wretched slavery; through slavery into an unspeakable depth of misery.
4. Quite otherwise does moral corruption reveal itself in the elder son. Outwardly he remains in the house of his father and serves him, yet he is guided only by a mechanical obedience, to which the impelling power of love is wanting. He seeks his reward not in his father’s recognition, but in the kid for which he longs and for which he vainly hopes. He vaunts in his vain pride of his fancied fulfilment of duty, although to this there was lacking the heart, and with this everything, and betrays his inner character by his anger at the gracious reception of his deeply-fallen brother. He believes himself, in his blindness, never to have transgressed a commandment, and yet forgets precisely that which is weightiest in the law, mercy and love. Neither his father nor his brother does he love, and yet believes that he may demand all for himself. How self-righteousness stands related to God and mankind is here drawn from life. On the other side, the Saviour shows also how God demeans Himself towards such fools and blind. He endures them in His long-suffering; He addresses them kindly; He excludes them not at once from the enjoyment of His fatherly favor, but yet lets them feel that they are on the way to exclude themselves therefrom, and that if they persist in their error, the joy of heaven over the conversion of the lost sinner can, on their account, be by no means disturbed or postponed.
5. The nature of the conversion of which no one repents, is in the image of the younger son sketched for all following ages. Its beginning is to be found where the sinner comes to himself, and becomes acquainted, not only with his deep wretchedness, but, above all, with his inexcusable guilt. The consciousness of guilt is, according to this parable, by no means a subjective illusion of the sinner, but the expression of an everlasting truth of the voice of God which is heard in the conscience, and which the father in no wise contradicts, which he, on the other hand, answers with the overwhelming revelation of his forgiving love. The knowledge of the nature of sin—that it is not a weakness but an infinite debt—brings about an inward sorrow, 2Co_7:10; this sorrow impels to the confession of sin; this confession is joined with longing after immediate return. It is precisely in this that the nature of true repentance is here revealed; that it joins the deepest humility with not yet extinguished faith in the love of the Father; that the good resolution, how much soever it may cost, is without delay put into execution, and that the son will rather, if it is possible, take the last place in the house of his Father than even for a moment longer look around for a better lot outside of the Father’s house. With undoubted justice, it is true, the remark could be made that in this parable it is especially “human activity in the work of conversion that is portrayed.” (Olshausen.) However, it is also true, on the other side, that “the Divine activity also is not lacking in this parable.” Lange.
6. The grace of God for the Prodigal Son comes in this parable in its compassionate and all-restoring side before our eyes. The father does not this time seek for the lost son as the shepherd had sought for the sheep and the woman for the coin. For neither is it here an irrational being but a rational man, who must be brought himself to choose the way of conversion. Mediately the father has labored for his delivery, for while he has permitted him to bear all the consequences of the evil committed, he has, moreover, patiently waited and kept his house and heart open to him. Scarcely does the son take the first step homeward, when the father regards him with compassionate look, goes kindly towards him (prevenient grace), and refuses not, it is true, the confession of sin, but remits to him whatever it has of pain and humiliation. Ha not only testifies his joy over the returned wanderer, but he gives it active expression, and not only pardons the wanderer, but restores him again to the full possession and enjoyment of his forfeited filial rights. It is not, however, necessary to see in every feature of the parable, on this point, the intimation of a definite saving truth of the Gospel. Whoever (Olshausen) finds signified in the ring the seal of the Holy Spirit; in the sandals, the being shod as in Eph_6:15; in the Talar, the garment of the perfect righteousness of Christ, easily loses out of mind the distinction between parable and allegory—a point of view where nothing could reasonably withhold us from going a step farther, and, with Jerome, Augustine, and Melanchthon, seeing in the fatted calf the image of Christ. For other examples of arbitrary interpretation, see Lisco, ad loc. Here also we are carefully to distinguish between the practical applicability and the historical intention of the parable.
7. It is well known what consequences have been drawn from the fact that in this parable the Prodigal Son is received by the father without the intervention of any mediator. “All dogmatical imaginations of the supralapsarians and infralapsarians, nay, even of the demanders of bloody satisfaction, who have no sense of the heaven-wide distinction between Divine and human righteousness, vanish like oppressive nightmares before this single parable, in which Jesus reveals the heavenly secret of human redemption, not according to a mystical or criminal theory of punishment, but anthropologically, psychologically, and theologically to every pure eye that looks into the law of perfect liberty.” Von Ammon, L. J., iii. p. 50. But, with the same right, one from this parable might have been able to deduce a proof against the biblical Satanology, since, forsooth, the young man is allured and misled by sin alone; or against the doctrine of sanctification, since the parable adds nothing concerning the new life of the grateful son in his father’s house. Quod nimium, nihil probat. Silence is not necessarily contradiction, and it is entirely natural that the Saviour, months before His atoning death, before an audience of Pharisees and publicans, should have left this wholly a mystery. It is well known how little He, especially according to the Synoptical Gospels, spoke of the highest goal of His suffering and death even to His familiar disciples; it belonged to the things which He described, Joh_16:12, concerning which the Paraclete should afterwards instruct His church. Whoever uses this parable as a weapon against the Pauline doctrine of atonement, acts as foolishly as he who, pointing to the friendly morning light, would prove thereby the uselessness of the full mid-day sun. The demand that the Saviour must in a single parable have described the whole way of salvation, is excessively arbitrary; nor does the Gospel teach anywhere that the Father had to be, by the death of His Son, first moved to be gracious to sinners. “One parable cannot exhaust the whole truth; but in the parable of the Prodigal Son we may say that the Saviour and Mediator is concealed in the kiss which the father gives the son.” Riggenbach.
If we now, in conclusion, direct once again our view to this triad of parables, we find a rich variety, and yet an admirable agreement. The first parable depicts to us the sinner in his pitiable folly: the sheep exchanges voluntarily the green meadow for the barren waste. The second portrays to us the sinner in his wretched self-degradation: the coin falls down upon the earth, and lies, although the stamp is not erased, yet buried under the dust, from which it comes, only after much seeking and sweeping, again to the light of day. The third teaches us to know the sinner especially in his unthankfulness: the free love of the father is requited by the Prodigal Son with the squandering of his inheritance;—the sheep in the wilderness, the coin in the dust, the son at the swine-trough, all show us the image of the sinner’s deep wretchedness. But since that which is lost is a man only in the third parable, it is implied in the nature of the case that only here can a wandering soul’s conversion be placed before us in different gradations and transitions. The Divine love of sinners, on the other hand, is vividly portrayed to us in all three parables, although each time under a somewhat different character. In all it is God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (who, even in the Old Testament, is compared with a Shepherd and a Woman, Eze_34:28; Psalms 23; Isa_40:11), from whom the revelation of this love proceeds. But the shepherd is yet especially the image of seeking love, the woman that of restlessly laboring and careful love, while in the father this love comes before us as a prevenient, compassionate, and all-restoring love. In the representation of the value of what is lost there is an unmistakable climax: first one of a hundred, then one of ten, finally one of two: first a beast, then a coin, finally a man. [But the coin, according to the author’s own showing, is worth much less than a sheep. In the relative proportion of each to the wealth of the possessor, however, there is undoubtedly a climax.—C. C. S.] Even so there is found a beautiful harmony in the representation of the persons who rejoice with the finder: the neighbors who rejoice with the shepherd, the female friends who rejoice with the woman, the servants of the house who rejoice with the father, are necessary figures of the picture, and all represent the angels who take part in the joy of God in the conversion of even one that is lost. In the first and second parable all that the Divine love adventures and effects in order to find the lost is represented as on its own plane entirely natural. But on the other hand again the benignity, the beneficence, the sublimity of the Divine love to sinners strike the eye most strongly in the third, as it is here a man, whom love can adorn with robe and ring and sandals: features which in the two other parables could find no place. While, finally, coin and sheep are only passive towards the grace that seeks and recovers them, in the image of the Prodigal Son, on the other hand, the spontaneity of the sinner in his return to God comes into the foreground; yet so that it is by no means in a Pelagian sense the fruit of an isolated act of will, but in the sense that this resolution to return is occasioned by the course of circumstances into which he has come entirely against his own will under higher guidance, and in which he feels the bitterness of sin. The conclusion of the third parable not only adds to this a component part of admirable value over and above the first and second, but by it at the same time the whole triad of parables is applied to the shaming and rebuking of the Pharisaical hearers.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
The parable of the Prodigal Son as it represents to us the history: 1. Of each man; 2. of all mankind. —The parable of the two lost sons, or the two main forms of the essence of sin.
The younger son: 1. The descending way of destruction: a. pride, b. wandering, c. servile bondage, d. wretchedness. 2. the ascending way of redemption: a. humility, b. return, c. freedom, d. life.—The younger son: 1. In his father’s house; 2. in a far country; 3. among the swine; 4. on the homeward way; 5. at the feast.—Self-seeking as it reveals itself: 1. In false craving for freedom; 2. in shameless covetousness; 3. in unbounded craving for enjoyment.—The Prodigal Son first inwardly, soon outwardly also, separated from his father.—Selfishness desires only God’s gifts, true love God Himself.—The enjoyment of sin is short, remorse for it long.—The associates of sinful joy remain no longer than the soon-squandered goods.—Often external calamities have the work of hastening the revelation of the inward wretchedness of sin.—The child of the house constrained: 1. To attach himself to one of the citizens of the far country; 2. to keep the swine; 3. to crave their fodder; 4. to find that he cannot even get this.—To “come to himself”: 1. The end of the old sinful, 2. the beginning of the new penitent, life.—The awakening: 1. Of the conscience; 2. of the understanding; 3. of the sensibility; 4. of the will.—How infinitely better it fares with the meanest day-laborer of the Father than with the sinner at the swine-trough, and even at the riotous banquet.—He “began to be in want,” the last word of the wretched history of every sinner. He suffers lack: 1. Of that which he once enjoyed; 2. of that which the world enjoys; 3. of that which the meanest hirelings of his Father enjoy.—The decisive resolve: “I will arise”: 1. How much it says; 2. how hard it is to carry out; 3. how richly it rewards.—The consciousness of guilt no fancy, but the expression of a terrible truth; happy he who has learned at the right time to impute to himself his sins as so many debts to God.—Even sin against others is still as ever sin against God.—The confession of sin before God a necessity of the repentant child.—The first step on the way to conversion.—Even when we are yet far from Him the Father sees us.—God’s love to sinners: 1. A compassionate; 2. a prevenient; 3. a forgiving; 4. an all-restoring, love.—God Himself longs not less for the wandering sinner than the sinner for Him, and tears down all the walls of division.—Many a humiliation which the sinner deserves, and which the penitent will impose upon himself, is remitted to him by God’s love.—The Prodigal Son reinstated: 1. In the former possession; 2. in the old rank; 3. in the lost happiness.—The best in the father’s house is for the lost son not too good.—The children of God and members of His family must rejoice with the Father over the return of the sinner.—The service of sin, death; conversion, a birth unto life.—The joy in the Father’s house over the returned son is perfect, even though the self-righteous take no part therein.
The elder son: 1. How much better he appears than the younger: a. the younger forsook the father, he remains; b. the younger squandered the father’s goods, he administered and increased them; c. the younger sought the company of harlots, he contents himself with his friends even without a kid; d. the younger comes even now from the swine, he from the field. 2. How wretchedly lost he is: a. he serves the father with a selfish, not with a childlike, mind; b. he has enjoyed the father’s love, and complains of having received no reward; c. he asserts himself never to have transgressed a commandment, and has never yet fulfilled one; d. he vaunts himself of his virtue, and in the same moment his transgression has increased. 3. How immeasurably wretched he becomes: he is on the way to lose, a. the love of his father, b. the heart of his brother, c. the joy in the parental dwelling, d. nay even the repute of his seeming virtue.—Did he also forsake his father’s house, and how have we then to represent to ourselves the end of his history? Michaelis thinks that we might continue the image so: he forsook his father with indignation, went into a strange land, became there much more unhappy, more despised, more vicious than ever his brother had been; he was held as a slave, and finally captured in company with bands of robbers. [If the Saviour meant us to understand all this, we have a right to believe that He would have expressed it. It is quite as fair to suppose that the son might have been brought to a better mind by this tender admonition. But what He leaves ambiguous here, He probably meant to remain uncertain.—C. C. S.]—How the self-righteous man stands related to God, and how God stands related to the self-righteous man.—“My child, what is mine is thine, and what is thine is mine.”—There exists a moral necessity of rejoicing over the conversion of the sinner, which the proud Pharisee despises.—Whom, therefore, does the image of the elder son represent, and which is better, to be like him or like the youngest?
Starke:—Dissimilar brothers.—Quesnel:—How dangerous when one will live for himself on his own account, to be subject to no one and rule himself.—If the soul has departed from God, it departs more and more from Him.—Nova Bibl. Tub.:—Many a young man goes adventurously into strange lands to make his fortune, but let him look well to it that he does not come to harm.—Let one learn to manage frugally; times change; how good is it then to have a penny in need!—Voluptuous swine belong among the swine.—How holy are God’s judgments!—Whoever will not be called God’s child may become a swine-herd and slave of the world.
Hedinger:—Distress furthers self-knowledge, misfortune sharpens the wits. Jer_2:19.—Brentius:—God disciplines through love and sorrow. If love cannot help, distress and all manner of plagues must come.—To true repentance belongs especially a spirit in which there is no falsehood; tempt God not.—A penitent man holds himself unworthy of the grace of the Heavenly Father.—Bibl. Wirt.:—The door of grace stands ever open, and God is much more disposed to forgive us our sins than we to pray for grace.—Cramer:—God’s grace is great, but not so great that a sinner can be partaker of the same without repentance.—Canstein:—Joy in the Lord should be common to all true Christians when they hear of true conversions.—Whoever repents becomes living again and dies never, but lives unto eternity—Anger makes enmity and finally separation.—Nova Bibl. Tub.:—Hypocrites are ever imagining that wrong is done them.—To those that are penitent one must not be bringing up their former sins or troubling them anew.—Quesnel:—Let us have a brother’s heart towards our brother, as God has a Father’s heart towards His children.
Heubner:—The original relation of man to God is that of a son to the father.—God lets men try to live without God, that it may be for them a memorial to eternity.—“Omnis locus, quem patre incolimus absente, famis, penuriœ et egestatis est.”—Out of God everything is husks, though it is tendered thee in gold and silver vessels, and even though it were poundcake.—The sinner finds from the world and its lords no compassion.—No repentance is nobler, even though bitterer, than repentance for having contemned love.—The son, from shame and fear, went timidly; the father ran.—The conversion of the sinner a high feast of joy.—Pride of virtue is hard towards the fallen.—Even in long service for the kingdom of God there may creep in a lukewarm, reward-craving temper.—God’s grace is never exhausted or diminished.
We may compare the explanations and the homiletical expositions of the parable by Ewald, Arndt, Eylert, Lisco, as also an excellent Dutch one by M. Cohen Stuart, Utrecht, 1859.—Massillon, an excellent sermon upon Unchastity in his Lent sermons.—Palmer:—The parable contains, a. the history of us all, b. an admonition for us all, c. a consolation for us all.—The miracle of grace wrought on the sinner.—Beck:—The sinner’s way to life.—Maier:—That light hearts must become heavy heavy light.—Ahlfeld:—The Prodigal Son: Seven Sermons for the season between Easter and Whitsuntide, 1849, Halle, 1850.—Heubner:—Three Sermons upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, Halle, 1840.—Couard:—Sermons.—Carl Zimmermann:—Four Special Sermons.—Van Oosterzee:—(upon the three parables together) The worth of a single soul: 1. The harm that is wrought on a single soul; 2. the compassion that is felt on account of a single soul; 3. the care that is expended on a single soul; 4. the grace that is glorified in one soul; 5. the joy that is experienced on account of one soul.—From this follows: 1. That carelessness of our soul is the most terrible transgression; 2. care for the good of others’ souls the highest duty; 3. glorifying of the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls the most fitting thank-offering.—N. B. Luk_15:18 an excellent text preparatory for the communion, or for New Year’s Eve.
Footnotes:
[2]Luk_15:17.—With Griesbach, Scholz, and Meyer, (Lachmann, Bleek, Tregelles, Alford, Cod. Sin.,] we believe that we must receive ῶ̓δε into the text, but place it before λιμῷ.
[3]Luk_15:19.—Rec.: καὶ οὐκέτι εἰμὶ, κ.τ.λ., without sufficient grounds; καί may be omitted, and then the broken character of the soliloquy forms a beauty the more.
[4]Luk_15:21.—See note 2.
[5]Luk_15:22.—Τὴν before στολήν should he expunged, see Tischendorf; this makes the first mention of στολήν quite indefinite, with τὴν πρώτην afterwards added as apposition; see Winer, Grammatik, § 204. Although ταχύ (D., ταχέως) has some authorities of weight for it, B., [Cod. Sin.,] L., X., &c., yet it is probable that this word was interpolated later, in order to heighten yet more the force of the father’s word. [Lachmann, Meyer, Alford retain ταχύ; Tregelles brackets it. Found in B., D., Cod. Sin., L., X.—C. C. S.]
[6]Luk_15:29.—Αὐτοῦ ought, on the authority of A., B., D., P., and others, to be received in the text, as by Lachmann and Tischendorf, [Meyer, Tregelles, Alford.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32 leave the ninety and nine--bend all His attention and…
leave the ninety and nine--bend all His attention and care, as it were, to the one object of recovering the lost sheep; not saying. "It is but one; let it go; enough remain."
go after . . . until, &c.--pointing to all the diversified means which God sets in operation for recovering sinners.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31 The Lost Sheep—The stupid sinner, Luk_15:3-7.
FIRST PARABLE.
The Lost Sheep—The stupid sinner, Luk_15:3-7.
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4. What man of you—Our Lord puts the case home to them as the official shepherds of the people, grounding his appeal on their own conscience.
Having a hundred sheep—The hundred and one was a favourite comparison among the Jewish teachers.
Sheep—The emblem of the flock of Israel; and, hence, here more principally the Jewish sinner, who more or less knew the law or ought to know it. It hence takes in the case of the publican whom he is defending.
In the wilderness—In the pastures of the rural sections. The term does not imply that the ninety and nine are abandoned, or left out of the shepherd’s care.
Until he find it—There is no giving over the search until the lost is found; for even here, in the outskirts of Israel, I am seeking and finding them.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 4. an hundred sheep] And yet out of this…
4. an hundred sheep] And yet out of this large flock the good shepherd grieves for one which strays. There is an Arab saying that God has divided pity into a hundred parts, and kept ninety-nine for Himself.
in the wilderness] i.e. the Midbar, or pastures; see Luk_2:8. The sheep are left of course under minor shepherds, not uncared for. Some see in the Lost Sheep the whole human race, and in the ninety-nine the Angels: as though mankind were but a hundredth part of God’s flock.
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until he find it] Strange that utterances so gracious as this should be utterly passed over, when so many darker details are rigidly pressed!
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 (4) What man of you, having an hundred sheep…
(4) What man of you, having an hundred sheep . . .?—The meaning of the parable is so clear that it requires but little in the way of explanation. It gains, however, fresh force and interest if we remember that it followed on the great parable of the Good Shepherd in Joh_10:1-16, and on the compassion for the lost sheep of which we read in Mat_9:36. The thought was, if we may use the language which rises to our lips, a dominant idea in the mind of Him who spoke. The primary application of that idea is clearly to be found in the immediate occasion of the parable, in the love which bids the Son of Man to concentrate His thoughts and energy and prayers on some one soul among those publicans and sinners who were thus gathered together; but it is, at least, a legitimate extension of it to think of it as embracing also His whole redemptive work as the Son of God, leaving the “ninety and nine,” the hosts of unfallen angels and archangels, or, it may be, unfallen beings more like ourselves in other worlds than ours, and coming to the rescue of the collective humanity which had fallen and wandered from the fold.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31 And when he cometh home, he calleth together his…
And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. And here the shepherd craves for sympathy from his fellows; he would have others share in his joy in finding the perishing, suffering sheep. This sympathy with his effort to win the lost the Galilaean Master had looked for among the rulers and teachers of Israel in vain. Now, sympathy, it must be remembered, is not merely sentiment or courtesy. True sympathy with a cause means working in good earnest for the cause. This, however, the ruling spirits in Israel, in every sect, coldly refused. They not only declined their sympathy with the acts of Jesus; they positively condemned his works, his efforts, his teaching.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv8, 10, 11 Either what woman having ten pieces of silver
Luk_15:8-10
Either what woman having ten pieces of silver
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Man resembled to silver coin
1.
And that in regard of matter. No metal except gold (which indeed is most solid and perfectly concocted with sufficient heat, so that it never corrupteth by rust) is to be compared with it. So man is the excellentest of all Gods creatures except angels, and but a little inferior unto them Psa_8:5).
2. In regard of lustre. For albeit silver in the ore be base and unsightly to look on, yet coming out of the mint purified and fined, it is beautiful. Thus, though man, while he was in the lump of clay, was without beauty; yet being formed, God put upon him great glory and majesty (Psa_8:1-9.), so that in beauty and fairness he excelled all other visible creatures, as by those relics yet remaining, and to be found in sinful men, we may gather. As the complexion of David (1Sa_16:12). The beauty of Absalom, in whom there was not a blemish from top to toe (2Sa_14:1-33.). The stature of Saul (1Sa_10:1-27.)
3. In regard of stamp. Money hath some impress and image on it, as the Jewish shekel, which on the one side had Aarons rod, and on the other side the pot of manna. So the Romans had Caesars image upon their coin, whereby they acknowledged subjection; and the coin which Jacob paid unto the Shechemites was stamped with a lamb (Gen_33:19). Thus had man the image of his Maker, which God stamped on him as a mark of his possession.
4. Money hath its stamp and form from regal authority; it must be refined and made (for it makes not itself) by the princes royalty. Thus man was the work of Gods bands (Psa_100:1-5.), and His alone (Job_10:8).
5. Silver hath a good sound above other metals. And hence it was that trumpets of silver were commanded by the Lord to be made (Num_10:1-2) for shrillness and clearness. Thus man above other creatures had a tongue given him to praise his Maker with, which is therefore called the glory of man (Gen_49:6; Psa_16:9).
6. Silver commands all things, and answers all things, as speaketh Solomon Ecc_10:19). There is nothing (whether holy or profane) but are at the beck and command of it. Such a commanding power had man by his creation over all creatures (Psa_8:6). Thou hast made him to have dominion in the works of Thy hands; such authority God gave him Gen_1:28), willing him to rule over the fishes of the sea, over the fowls of heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth. Silver is not all of a like worth; there are different pieces and of different value. The Jews had their gerah, and half shekel, and shekel (Exo_30:13), with divers other corns of silver. So all were not of a like degree in the creation, though all excellent and good; for God observed order from the beginning. Amongst the angels some are superior, and some inferior; there are degrees amongst them (Col_1:16). (N. Rogers.)
The lost coin
I. LOOK AT THE THING LOST, AND YOU WILL FIND SEVERAL POINTS OF IMPORTANCE THEREBY SUGGESTED.
1. It was a coin. That is to say, it was not simply a piece of a precious metal, but that metal moulded and minted into money, bearing on it the kings image and superscription, and witnessing to his authority wherever it circulated.
2. But the corn was lost, and this suggests that in sinful man the image of his Maker has gone out of sight, and the great purpose of his being has been frustrated. His intellect does not like to retain God in its knowledge; his heart has estranged its love from God; and his life is devoted to another lord than his Creator. He is lost.
3. Yet he is not absolutely worthless. The coin, though lost, has still a value. If it can be recovered, it will be worth as much as ever.
4. But yet, again, this coin was lost in the house. The woman did not let it fall as she was crossing the wild and trackless moor, neither did she drop it into the unfathomed depths of ocean. Had she done so, she would never have thought of seeking for it; she would have given it up as irrecoverable. Now, this points to the fact that the soul of the sinner is recoverable. It is capable of being restored to its original dignity and honour. It has in it still potentialities as great and glorious as those which ever belonged to it.
II. This brings me to the consideration of THE SEARCH, WHEREIN WE HAVE ALSO SOME THINGS SUGGESTED WHICH ARE PECULIAR TO THIS PARABLE. Eastern houses, unlike our own, are constructed in such a way as to keep out the light and heat of the sun as much as possible. They have few windows, and even the few which they have are shaded with such latticework as tends to exclude rather than admit the sunbeam. Hence the rooms are generally dark; and so, even if the coin were lost at noonday, the light of a candle would be required to seek for it. Nor was there, in Eastern dwellings, the same scrupulous cleanliness that we love to see in so many homes around us. The floors were often covered with rushes, which, being changed only at rare intervals, collected a vast amount of dust and filth, among which a piece of money might be most readily lost. Hence the lighting of a candle and the sweeping of the house were the most natural things to be done in such a case. But whom does this woman represent? and what, spiritually, are we to understand by the lighting of a candle and the sweeping of the house? The woman, in my judgment, symbolizes the Holy Spirit, and I look upon the means which she employed in her search for the lost coin as denoting the efforts made by the Holy Spirit for the recovery of a lost soul. Now let us see what these were. She lighted a candle, and swept the house, and searched diligently. The light most evidently represents the truth; but what are we to make of the sweeping? Some would take it to illustrate the purifying work of the Holy Ghost in the heart. But that view cannot be maintained, since the purifying of the soul is not a work in order to, but rather subsequent upon, its recovery. I take it rather, therefore, to represent that disturbance of settled opinions and practices--that turning of the soul, as it were, upside down--which is frequently seen as a forerunner of conversion; that confusion and disorder occasioned by some providential dealing with the man, such as personal illness, or business difficulties, or family bereavement, or the like, and which frequently issues in the coming of the soul to God; for here also chaos often precedes the new creation. Truth introduced into the heart, and providential disturbances and unsettlements in order to its introduction--these are the things symbolized by the lighting of the candle and the sweeping of the house. The truth which the Holy Spirit employs for the purpose of conversion is the Word of God, all of which has been given to men by His own inspiration; and the especial portion of that Word which He uses for His saving work is the wondrous story of the Cross.
III. We come now, in the third place, to look at THE JOY OVER THE RECOVERED COIN; and here, as before, we shall restrict ourselves to that which is peculiar to this parable. In the story of the lost sheep, while the social character of the joy is certainly referred to, the speciality in the gladness of the shepherd over its finding lay in the fact, to which prominence is given in the appended note of interpretation, that it was greater than over the ninety and nine which had never strayed. Here, however, the peculiarity is in the sociality of the joy. Gods joy, if I may dare to use the words, needs society to make it complete; and the fact that there are those beside Him to whom He can make known the story of each recovered soul, redoubles His own gladness, and diffuses among them His own Divine delight. Nor let it be supposed that this is a mere fanciful idea, for which there is no foundation in Scripture apart from the teaching of this parable. What says Paul? God hath created all things by Jesus Christ; to the intent that now, unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places, might be known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God Eph_3:10). Now, these words mean, if they mean anything at all, that through means of the Church, God designed to show to principalities and powers in heavenly places His manifold wisdom. In the manifestation of this wisdom God has His highest work, and, in its appreciation by spiritual intelligences, through the Church of Christ, He has His greatest joy. (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)
The search of love
Type of a soul ignorant of its death, utterly unconcerned with the thought of sin. Yet a coin, having image and superscription. It may be covered with dust, it may be half defaced or hidden under heaps of rubbish; but it has not returned, and cannot return, into the uncoined state. Meet emblem of mans soul in its lowest estate. I am Gods coin, said one of old; from His treasure-house I have wandered. And it is because we are Gods, that He seeks.
I. GODS LOVE LIGHTS A LAMP OF REVELATION IN THE WORLD. Though you may care little about your lost soul, God cares for it much. He has lit His candle--the candle of Divine revelation, and He is throwing its illumination upon you. Hinder not, thwart not, His search for your soul. Love herself might light the candle, and yet the lost coin not be found under the long accumulation of dirt--of easily-besetting sins and long-indulged habits. So the parable goes on to speak of a sweeping.
II. THE LOVE OF GOD SWEEPS THE HOUSE, WHICH IS THE MAN. Is not this the real meaning of that sickness, that bereavement, that disappointment which seemed to you so casual, or so wanton, or so cruel? It was the love of God still.
III. THE SEEKING IS UNTO FINDING. Love will not stay till she finds. Help her. Kick not against the goad.
IV. TREAT THE TEXT AS A PRECEPT. Light a candle, sweep the house, and seek diligently till you find. (Dean Vaughan.)
The lost groat
I. THE LOST GROAT.
1. It is a symbol of the human soul.
(1) The soul seems to be of little value, if considered in its imperfections, in its inability to perform supernatural acts, and even more so, if compared to the holy angels, who are purer than gold, brighter than diamonds.
(2) Nevertheless, the groat, as a coin, has its value. So is the human soul of great value, because it is created according to the image and likeness of God, redeemed by His precious blood, sealed by the Holy Spirit. Thus it is raised to a supernatural state, and enabled to merit the glory and bliss of heaven.
2. How the groat, the human soul, is lost.
(1) By the deceitfulness of the devil, who, driven by envy and hatred, endeavours to deprive the Divine Master of His coin, the coin of its splendour. He buries the soul in the mire of sin.
(2) Through the fault of man. Whilst he is unmindful of being Gods own property, undervalues the worth of his soul, keeps company with thieves, his soul is lost.
3. The consequences are most deplorable.
(1) The lost soul is covered with the filth of sin, from which it can never cleanse itself by its own power.
(2) The value of the soul diminishes. The merits of the past are lost, the power of ignorance and concupiscence increases.
(3) The coinage disappears. Sin deforms the Divine image and likeness; at its entrance grace leaves the soul; and man falls under the curse and displeasure of God.
II. THE SEEKING WOMAN.
1. This woman is the Church.
2. The candle is Christ, the light of the world.
3. The friends and neighbours are the angels and saints. (W. Reischl.)
The parable of the lost silver
I. AS THE SILVER WAS PRECIOUS TO THE WOMAN, SO ARE OUR SOULS IN THE SIGHT OF GOD OUR SAVIOUR. We estimate a persons value for a thing by the price he gives, the sacrifice he makes, to obtain or recover it. How dear, then, was man to God, who loved him when fallen; yea who so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish, but have eternal life.
II. AS THE PIECE OF MONEY WAS LOST TO THE WOMAN, SO IS EVERY ONE WHO CONTINUES IN SIN LOST TO GOD. He is alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in him.
III. AS THE WOMAN SEARCHED FOR HER LOST TREASURE, AND SPARED NO PAINS TO RECOVER IT; SO DOES JESUS CHRIST SEEK THE SOUL THAT IS LOST BY SIN.
IV. AS THE WOMAN CALLS HER FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS TO REJOICE WITH HER, FOR THE LOST PIECE FOUND; SO IS THERE JOY IN HEAVEN, IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ANGELS OF GOD, OVER ONE REPENTING SINNER. For this joy, Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame. Thus He sees of the travail of His soul, and is satisfied. And His joy is shared by the angels that surround His throne.
1. Let this parable, then, rebuke self-righteousness; let it teach humility.
2. Again--let this parable suggest the most powerful motive to instant repentance. For what motive is there, like Christs enduring and seeking love? (E. Blencowe, M. A.)
Mans fall Gods loss
This parable pictures God as the Redeemer of man in three different modes or attitudes--shall I say of feeling?
I. The first division of the picture represents GOD AS CONTEMPLATING AS A LOSS TO HIMSELF THE STATE OF SIN INTO WHICH MAN HAS FALLEN. No one but God could have ventured thus to represent God. God mourns the fall of man as a lost treasure, as something in which He delighted, and of which sin has robbed Him. God has a property of the heart in mans welfare.
II. In the second part of the picture, God is REPRESENTED AS MAKING AN EFFORT FOR THE RECOVERY OF MAN FROM THE SIN AND MISERY INTO WHICH HE HAS FALLEN. The fact of atonement is here; the quickening work of the Holy Ghost is here, and the manifold ministry to man is here; by all which God is seeking to bring men to Himself and save them from sin; and the more one seeks to look at this, the more one feels how true it is that the inflexible righteousness of God, that the infinite love of God, is full of a determination not to let His human treasure go without an effort to recover it.
III. The third point is that GOD AND THE GOOD ANGELS REJOICE IN HEAVEN OVER THE RECOVERY OF MEN. (A. Hannay.)
A priceless gem
I. THE HOMELY STORY.
1. It may seem like a little thing to you--this sixpence; but what is great to a child is not small to the father; and that is not little to God that is great to any man. He who knows all about the homes, and the hearts that beat in London in such homes, knows that sometimes the difference between sixpence and no sixpence may mean all the difference between food and no food, shelter and no shelter for the night, ease from pain, or no ease from pain. Oh, what magic that prosaic thing, the piece of silver, can work! Look at our Nonconformist father. Lawrence. See him seated under a hedgerow on the morning of the great Puritan exodus in 1662; see him looking as if fit to die, for he thinks about his hungry and homeless little ones. What is it that suddenly makes the eye flash, and the face quiver, and the foot spring? Only the sight of a lost piece of silver. He had just found a sixpence in the ditch before him, and it fairly seemed to him as if it had come down into that ditch from the very Throne of thrones that very moment.
2. The central person in this story is a woman--not some stately Cleopatra, not some gay Herodias, not some grand lady with face beautiful as a dream, and step graceful as a wave, who, having possessed ten gems of rarest water, or ten pearls of great price, has lost one of them; but only a poor village woman, who, having saved up for the rent, or a rainy day, ten pieces of silver, has lost one. She searches; finds; calls her neighbours together to rejoice with her. The event was not enough to electrify a cabinet but it was enough to lighten her heart, and to send a sensation all through her little world.
II. THE DIVINE MEANING.
1. Look at the coin, and then think of the value of the soul. Souls look through those waiting, gazing eyes around me, souls look out from those listening ears, souls thrill along those nerves. Souls! Why will ye cleave to the dust? Awake, know yourselves, and try to think about your own unimaginable value.
2. Look at the coin lost, and think of the soul lost in the house of this world. Some years ago the men working on the Thames Embankment--laying its foundations--found a lost piece of silver, stamped with the image of a Roman Emperor. Perhaps that piece of silver had been lost 1,800 years. My spirit flashes back to that spot, and to that moment, and I see the scene just how it all happened. I see a man coming down from the green solitudes of Camberwell, where the Roman station is, coming down to the edge of the river. I see him cross from what we now call the Surrey side, to what we now call the city side. I see him, as he step| out of the boat, take his purse out to pay the ferryman, and I see the piece of silver slip from his fingers through the water, and there it stuck in the black slime of the river. It was for ages lost to the purpose for which it was made. It might as well not have been silver. Now I say there are souls lost like that coin.
3. Look at the coin lost, but not knowing that it is lost, and think of the soul lost in this house and not knowing that it is lost. The frivolist. The sensualist. The formalist. These no more know they are lost than does the coin when it has rippled along the floor and slipped into a chink in the darkness! But it is a fact all the same. Once, certain explorers on an Arctic expedition were working their way through the still, gray air in the eternal silence, when they suddenly came upon an antique, spectral-looking ship locked in blocks of ice. They boarded it, and one man took his lantern and ran down the campanion-ladder into the state-cabin. He held it up. He found all the ships company there. There sat the captain, with his hand upon the log-book; and there sat the mate, and there sat the doctor, and there sat the others. Captain! There was no stir. He cried again, Captain! But there was only the silence that creeps and shudders. Captain! He held his light up again and flashed it around--and what did that light reveal? Dead hands! dead lips! dead eyes!--dead men! The cold that had been strong enough to steel them through, and to freeze the life of their blood, had been strong enough to arrest the touch of Decays hastening fingers, and to keep fixed in the form and attitude of life Death itself, and to keep it thus--so it was said--for nearly half a century. Oh I man do but think of what it is of which I am speaking. Dead souls! Lost souls!
4. Look at the search which this woman is making in the house, and think of the Holy Spirits part in searching for the lost soul. There was once heard in the Isle of Wight a little girl say to her mother, when sweeping the cottage floor, Mother, mother, pull the blind down, the sunshine makes the room so dusty. And so it is that the light in the house of the Interpreter may seem to make the room dusty, but it seems to create what it only reveals: it makes us think that we are worse than we are when we are only wiser than we were; it make us see ourselves, see our Saviour, and then, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God. (C. Standford, D. D.)
The lost silver piece
I. First, the parable treats of man, the object of Divine mercy, as LOST.
1. Notice, first, the treasure was lost in the dust. The woman had lost her piece of silver, and in order to find it she had to sweep for it, which proves that it had fallen into a dusty place, fallen to the earth, where it might be hidden and concealed amid rubbish and dirt. Every man of Adam born is as a piece of silver lost, fallen, dishonoured, and some are buried amid foulness and dust. Thou art lost by nature, and thou must be found by grace, whoever thou mayst be.
2. In this parable that which was lost was altogether ignorant of its being lost. The silver coin was not a living thing, and therefore had no consciousness of its being lost or sought after. The piece of money lost was quite as content to be on the floor or in the dust, as it was to be in the purse of its owner amongst its like. It knew nothing about its being lost, and could not know. And it is just so with the sinner who is spiritually dead in sin, he is unconscious of his state, nor can we make him understand the danger and terror of his condition. The insensibility of the piece of money fairly pictures the utter indifference of souls unquickened by Divine grace.
3. The silver piece was lost but not forgotten. The woman knew that she had ten pieces of silver originally; she counted them over carefully, for they were all bet little store, and she found only nine, but she well remembered that one more was hers and ought to be in her hand. This is our hope for the Lords lost ones, they are lost but not forgotten, the heart of the Saviour remembers them, and prays for them.
4. Next, the piece of silver was lost but still claimed. Observe that the woman called the money, my piece which was lost. When she lost its possession she did not lose her right to it; it did not become somebody elses when it slipped out of her hand and fell upon the floor. Those for whom Christ hath died, whom He hath peculiarly redeemed, are not Satans even when they are dead in sin. They may come under the devils usurped dominion, but the monster shall be chased from his throne.
5. Further, observe that the lost piece of money was not only remembered and claimed, but it was also valued. In these three parables the value of the lost article steadily rises. This is not very clear at first sight, because it may be said that a sheep is of more value than a piece of money; but notice that the shepherd only lost one sheep out of a hundred, but the woman lost one piece out of ten, and the father one son out of two. To the Lord of love a lost soul is very precious: it is not because of its intrinsic value, but it has a relative value which God sets at a high rate.
6. The piece of money was lost, but it was not lost hopelessly. The woman had hopes of recovering it, and therefore she did not despair, but set to work at once. I congratulate the Christian Church too, that her piece of money has not fallen where she cannot find it. I rejoice that the fallen around us are not past hope; yea, though they dwell in the worst dens of
London, though they be thieves and harlots, they are not beyond the reach of mercy. Up, O Church of God, while possibilities of mercy remain!
7. One other point is worthy of notice. The piece of silver was lost, but it was lost in the house, and the woman knew it to be so. What thankfulness there ought to be in your minds that you are not lost as heathens, nor lost amid Romish or Mohammedan superstition, but lost where the gospel is faithfully and plainly preached to you; where you are lovingly told, that whosoever believeth in Christ Jesus is not condemned. Lost, but lost where the Churchs business is to look after you, where it is the Spirits work to seek and to find you. This is the condition of the lost soul, depicted as a lest piece of silver.
II. Secondly, we shall notice the soul under another condition, we shall view it as SOUGHT. By whom was the piece of silver sought?
1. It was sought by its owner personally.
2. This seeking became a matter of chief concern with the woman.
3. Now note, that the woman having thus set her heart to find her money, she used the most fit and proper means to accomplish her end. First, she lit a candle. So doth the Holy Spirit in the Church. But she was not content with her candle, she fetched her broom, she swept the house. If she could not find the silver as things were in the house, she brought the broom to bear upon the accumulated dust. Oh, how a Christian Church, when it is moved by the Holy Spirit, cleanses herself and purges all her work!
4. Carefully note that this seeking after the lost piece of silver with fitting instruments the broom and the candle, was attended with no small stir. She swept the house--there was dust for her eyes; if any neighbours were in the house there was dust for them. You cannot sweep a house without causing some confusion and temporary discomfort. It is to be remarked, also, that in the seeking of this piece of silver the coin was sought in a most engrossing manner.
5. This woman sought continuously--till she found it.
III. The piece of silver FOUND. Found!
1. In the first place, this was the womans ultimatum, and nothing short of it. She never stopped until the coin was found. So it is the Holy Spirits design, not that the sinner should be brought into a hopeful state, but that he should be actually saved: and this is the Churchs great concern, not that people be made hearers, not that they be made orthodox professors, but that they be really changed and renewed, regenerated and born again.
2. The woman herself found the piece of money. It did not turn up by accident, nor did some neighbour step in and find it. The Spirit of God himself finds sinners, and the Church of God herself, as a rule, is the instrument of their recovery.
3. Now notice when she had found it what she did--she rejoiced. The greater her trouble in searching, the higher her joy in finding. What joy there is in the Church of God when sinners are converted!
4. Next, she calls her friends and neighbours to share her joy. I am afraid we do not treat our friends and neighbours with quite enough respect, or remember to invite them to our joys. Who are they? I think the angels are here meant; not only the angels in heaven, but those who are watching here below. The angels are wherever the saints are, beholding our orders and rejoicing in our joy. The joy is a present joy; it is a joy in the house, in the Church in her own sphere; it is the joy of her neighbours who are round about her here below. All other joy seems swallowed up in this: as every other occupation was suspended to find the lost silver, so every other joy is hushed when the precious thing is found. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The lost piece of money
I. WHAT BEFELL THIS WOMAN. She had ten pieces of silver, and of these she lost one--only one. That lost piece is mans soul. We were not always, not once, not at first, what we are now.
II. WHAT THIS WOMAN DID TO FIND THE MONEY. She did everything proper in the circumstances. She could not have done more. Assuming that the woman symbolizes the Spirit of God, the candle shining in her hand is the Bible, Gods revealed Word, which He takes and carries into the recesses of the sinners soul, revealing its foulness and danger and misery, and making him feel his need of a Saviour. As to the sweeping, which disturbs the house and reveals a foulness that, so long as it lay unstirred, was perhaps never suspected: that may indicate the convictions, the alarms, the dread discoveries, the searchings and agitations of heart, which not unfrequently accompany conversion. It is not till the glassy pool is stirred that the mud at the bottom rises to light; it is when storms sweep the sea that what it hides in its depths is thrown up on the shore; it is when brooms sweep walls and floor that the sunbeams, struggling through a cloud of dust, reveal the foulness of the house; and it is agitations and perturbations of the heart which reveal its corruption, and are preludes to the purity and peace that sooner or later follow on conversion.
III. THE WOMANS JOY AT FINDING THE PIECE OF SILVER. There is a peculiar pleasure felt in recovering what we have lost; or in having anything placed beyond the reach of danger which we are afraid of losing. No boat making the harbour over a glassy sea, its snowy canvas filled by the gentle breeze, and shining on the blue waters like a sea birds wing, is watched with such interest, or, as with sail flapping on the mast, it grates on the shingle, is welcomed with such joy, as one which, leaving the wreck on the thundering reef, comes through the roaring tempest, boldly breasts the billows, and bringing off the half-drowned, half-dead survivors, shoots within the harbour amid flowing tears and cheers that, bursting from the happy crowd, rise above the rage and din of elements. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
The Bible a moveable light
The candle is a moveable light, carried by the woman from place to place. Wherever a lost piece of money is to be sought, there the candle must be carried that the searching may be thorough. This carrying of the candle, first into one place and then into another, is the Churchs part in seeking for lost souls. While the whole truth for mans salvation is presented in Holy Scripture, and any man who would inquire as to the way of life may there find the light he needs to guide him aright, men do not readily search the Scriptures for themselves, that their own souls may be saved. In recognition of this neglect, illustrated in one way under the image of the wandering sheep, in another under the image of the lost piece of money, the necessity for the active work of seeking is acknowledged by the Church, as it is here taught by the Saviour. (Calderwood.)
A womans loss
You will have noticed that whereas in the other two parables of the sheep, and the prodigal, it is a man who is represented as rejoicing over the returning one--here it is a woman. This may, indeed, be only to show that every kind of affection combines in the joy over the penitent--the mans strength and the womans tenderness. But there may be more. At least, almost all the ancient divines have seen another sense in it. They consider that under the female appellation is meant here, as in many other places, the Church; and that the thought intended to be conveyed is of the Church having sustained the loss, and the Church, as a Church, seeking diligently for the lost one. And yet not altogether the Church, as something distinct and independent in itself--but the Church as that in which the Holy Ghost dwells--the HolyGhost acting through the means of grace which constitute a Church. So, in the three parables, they would see the Trinity all combined in the same feeling of love and happiness--the Son designated by the Shepherd; the Holy Spirit in the Church, by the woman; and the Father, by the parent of the prodigal. A great thought and a true one, even though the steps by which we here arrive at it may appear to some fanciful. Certain it is, that every soul which is in a condition to perish, is lost, not only to God, but to the Church. And well were it if the Church always so regarded it. And well if every member of the Church so felt it a personal loss to himself that any one single soul should die, that he could not help but stir up himself, and stir up others, to seek that soul till it was found. Would that the Holy Ghost were going forth in the one great Catholic Church, uniting in this feeling and in this resolve--that she would give herself no rest so long as there was one precious soul committed to her care which was lying undiscovered and unredeemed. For mark, brethren, the woman--different in this from the shepherd and the prodigals father--seeks a thing which her own folly and her own carelessness had lost. First, she lights a candle--the well-known emblem in the Bible of three things--first, the Spirit ofGod in a mans soul; secondly, the Word of God; thirdly, the consistent lives of ministers and other servants of God. And these three together make the great detective force, and so ultimately the great restorative power which God uses in this world. O that every Church had lighted their candle! O that our candles were burning better! O that the Holy Ghost--prayed for and honoured, cherished and magnified in His own office--were here to be a great Illuminator in the midst of us! O that every baptized person were shining as he ought to be, in his daily walk, in good works, and kind acts, and witnesses of Gods truth in this world! O think you, brethren, how then would the dark places of our land begin to grow bright again! How would the whole house shine! How would the poor lost ones be found! So, with the lighted candle, the woman went to sweep the house. It is a great commotion and disturbance to sweep; but then it leads to cleanliness and order. So Gods sweepings are severe things! But then it is only to brush away what had no right to be there. It is only to disclose precious things out of the rubbish. And there are precious things in our souls so covered with dust that they need sweeping. Afflictions will come, and scatter to the winds the incrusted sediment that has been so long thickening upon a mans mind. And for the time, while the sweeping is going on, the confusion and the obscurity will seem only the greater. But you will not presently complain--you will not regret the turmoil--when the costly thing, that was almost hidden, sparkles again in the hand of its great Proprietor. Sweep our house, Lord, for we need it--not with the bosom of destruction, though we deserve it--but sweep away, Lord, as thou knowest best, every refuge of lies where our soul lies buried! All the parables agree in the one, blessed, crowning thought--till she find it. It is not a light achievement. It was not a days work--it was not a weeks work--or a years work--the recovery of that soul of yours. Many an enterprise was begun and laid down again, and never ended by men, in that very interval which elapsed between the time when God--your faithful, untiring God--began to deal with your soul, and the time when He made you go to Him. (J. Vaughan, M. A.)
The Churchs neglect of souls
Sometimes, in visions of a mournful fancy, I seem to see this Mother-Church of ours sitting within her ancient and noble house, sitting as a woman exceeding fair, but very cold and still; and so she sitteth with her hands folded before her, as though she said to herself, I shall be a lady for ever; f shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children. And year by year, century after century, the dust falls and gathers, and falls in the silence around her, and all things are covered as with a shroud, and the precious coins are lost to sight and buried deep beneath. And then I seem to see her arousing herself at last from her long waking dream, and looking about with dismay for her lost treasures--bestirring herself to find them, sweeping the dust away here and there, bringing to light with busy toil many a shining effigy of the great King. And then I seem to hear indignant voices of those who clamour and storm against her for disturbing quiet things, and making unnecessary agitation, and raising an unpleasant dust; all the rich people, and the comfortable people, and the people that are well at ease, and all that have no care for souls--all are angry with her, and cry out to her, Why can you not sit still as you did before, and if the dust falls, let it fall, and if the coins of the King be lost, let them be lost? only trouble us not, only do not vex our souls with all this stir and dust. Once again I seem to see her that sometime sat as a queen and was not moved; I seem to see her disconcerted and perplexed, anxious to recover the lost, yet anxious not to give offence; I see her hesitate and quail, and lay aside her search with sorrow, and sit down again, but not at ease; I see the dust begin to fall and settle again, and fall and gather around her thicker and thicker, until every shining coin be lost beneath the growing litter of neglect. Last of all, I see a day arise, black with wind and rain, against that ancient house wherein the woman sits; I see the tempest of Gods anger loosed upon it, I see the lightning of His indignation launched against it; I see her crushed and buried beneath the wreck, among the silver pieces which she lost and did not find. (R. Winterbotham, M. A.)
The Oriental setting of this parable
The touches about lighting the candle (or better, lamp, or light), sweeping the house, and seeking diligently, and calling the friends and neighbours together, are not without some pertinent modem Oriental illustrations. Most of the native houses are without glass windows, and are very dark when shut up. Often the windows are small, and sometimes kept shut, as a rule depending on the door for light. They are dark places. The floor, too, is often earth, or perhaps mortar, and very dirty. Where animals dwell with the family, as is very common, the dirt is such as is best left to the imagination. In such cases the particulars mentioned in verse eight are by no means superfluous. So, too, the calling of the friends and neighbours together. One of the difficulties in picking up the Arabic language among the common people is the paucity of subjects of conversation. Little is to be heard except bargaining among the men, and accounts of the most ordinary household operations among the women--except in the case of some rather public scolds, whose voices, without a particle of exaggeration, sounds to the Occidental like the falling and rattling of boards. The occasion of losing and finding a piece of money would be a piece of great good fortune to the gossips, as the writer has actually witnessed. It would be an incident for a nine days talk. And such terrible busybodies as they are I Every one knows, at least, all his or her neighbours business, and more besides, to an extent not readily defined. The woman who loses and finds a piece of money would not be long in calling her friends and neighbours together; nor would they be slow to come even uninvited. The babel of telling the story and commenting and congratulating is not to be imagined in our land. The talk could be heard a long distance. (Professor Isaac H. Hall.)
The ten pieces of silver
In the three parables recorded in this chapter there is so evidently a progress and ascent of thought, they mount so naturally to a climax in their revelation of the redeeming love of God, that if at any point we fail to make that progress out, if we encounter anything in them which wears the aspect of an anti-climax, we are checked, disappointed, perplexed. And yet in the second of these parables there is at one point an apparent retrocession, where all else implies a forward and upward movement of thought. Every one can see how immense an interval there is between the one sheep lost out of a hundred, and the one son out of two, and that the younger--and in the Bible commonly the dearer--of the two. But where is the connecting link? How should the lost piece of money be dearer to the careful housewife than the lost sheep to the faithful shepherd, who knows and cares for every one of his flock and calleth them each by his name? One out of ten marks a great advance upon one out of a hundred indeed; but would it not be less to lose even ten silver coins than a single sheep--less in value, less in love? The answer to that question, the solution of the difficulty, is to be found in an Eastern custom, the application of which to the parable before us all commentators on it have, so far as I know, overlooked. The women of Bethlehem, and of other parts of the Holy Land, still wear a row of coins sewn upon their heart-dress, and pendant over their brows. And the number of the coins is very commonly ten, as I, in common with other travellers, have ascertained by counting. The custom reaches back far beyond the Christian era. In all probability, therefore, it was not simply a piece of silver which was lost out of her purse by the woman of our parable, but one of the ten precious coins which formed her most cherished ornament; and this would be a loss even more vividly felt than that of the shepherd when one out of his flock of a hundred went astray. So that immense as is the advance from both the care of the shepherd for his sheep, and of the pride of the woman in the burnished coins which gleamed upon her forehead, to the yearning and pitiful love of the father for his prodigal and self-banished son, we can nevertheless find a link between the first and last terms of the climax, and trace an advance even between the grief of the shepherd over his stray sheep, and that of the woman over her lost coin. A piece of money in her purse might easily be stolen or spent; but a coin from the head-dress could not be so much as touched by any stranger, nor even taken from its wearer by her husband unless she cut it off of her own accord and placed it in his hands. It was safe, sacred, dear. It was a strictly personal possession, and might very well be an heirloom--like the silvers of the Swiss women--hallowed by many fond and gracious memories. (A. G. Weld.)
Broken harmony
If, as has been alleged, the ten pieces of silver form the brides necklace, and constitute a marriage token, like our wedding ring, the work of the whole is marred by the destruction of its unity. And thus we can gauge more accurately Gods loss by mans sin. The oneness of the creative plan is broken. From those beings whom God made for the harmonious unfolding of His purposes, for the manifestation of His glory, and for the beautifying of His universe, one order has broken loose and impaired the symmetry and perfect working of the whole. (J. W. Burn.)
Lost to use
Whatever ornamental or symbolical uses this coin might serve, it was the Roman denarius, and had, therefore, a money value.
Stamped with the monarchs image and superscription, it was a means of purchase, and was capable of self-multiplication in the way of usury. So, made in the Divine likeness, man is the current coin of the Lords universe. He is so constituted in mind and body as to be of use to God in executing His sovereign purposes, and in multiplying himself in sought and rescued souls. No agency for these ends is comparable to man, and men failing in this high vocation are lost. And how many are thus lost? lost as utterly to usefulness as though they themselves, as well as their talent, were wrapped in a napkin and buried in the earth! And amongst them are many who are painfully anxious about their precious souls, but are lost because they act as though there were no precious souls but their own. For the solemn admonition of the Saviour holds good here: Whosoever will seek to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospels, the same shall save it. (J. W. Burn.)
Lost in the house
What a meaning this parable has for those who are lost in a Christian home, school, sanctuary, and who, while neither blasphemers, nor infidels, nor libertines, and while maintaining a nominal connection with God and His cause, are lost! Lost to duty, with all around them conducive to consecration; lost to the love of God, while daily loaded with Divine benefits! (J. W. Burn.)
The Spirits work in the soul
He is Christs fan and Christs fire. He thoroughly purges His floor and throws a lurid light on the sinners state. He sweeps away the cobwebs of error by His powerful convictions, and pours the truth of sin and righteousness and judgment into the mind. He overturns the temple of formalism by the might of His power and lays bare the hollowness of those who worship God with their lips while their hearts are far from Him. The dust of self-deception flies as His sharp appeals to the conscience leave the self-deluded without excuse. Some dire affliction clears the soul of its worldliness, and the lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God are confronted with their doom. He strips the sham of all his dissimulation by the manifestation of the stern realities of God and of eternity, and demonstrates the futility of the profession of religion without the possession of its power. Often His work has to be repeated. Encumbrances removed are replaced and removed again. Hunted from one corner the sinner takes refuge in another, and is still pursued. Nor does the Spirit cease to strive with man until resistance becomes hopeless obduracy, and until the final quenching of His light leaves the sinner in outer darkness. (J. W. Burn.)
The utility of disturbance
And as mere habit and neglect hide souls from themselves, and from the just sympathy and care of their fellows, Gods Spirit sends its great disturbing agencies into the society, the nation, the age, or into the narrower bounds of the family. The besom does not really make the new dust; but it only brings the old and long-gathering deposit more, for a time, into the air and upon the lungs. The messengers of the gospel are, for the time, regarded as turning the world upside down. Or Gods providences in calamities, and wars, and social revolutions, show men the magnitude of past hereditary errors. The besom of judgment goes shaking society out of its torpor and equanimity. It was so in Luthers day, and in Calvins. It was so in the Puritans of our ancestral Britain, and in their colonists who crossed to this country. God, by them, broke up many a pile of quiet litter; and brushed aside many a film of long-settled green mould, picturesque in its verdure, or venerable in its grey, hoar antiquity, which had gathered upon the national conscience. But a Bunyan, and a Milton, and a Baxter, and an Owen, and a Howe were precious medals brought out by the besoming; and constitutional freedom and national morality, and English literature, and Christian piety were greatly enriched by the agitation. It was so in the revolution that made us a nation. It was so in the agitations that went over Europe in the train of our first revolution. It was so in our last great struggle. It has been so in modern missions. Would you put that shaking and bosoming peremptorily and effectually down? We hear, behind the turmoil and the thick streaming clouds of dust, as Gods great besoms sweep along, the words of an august cry: I will overturn, and overturn, and overturn until He, whose right it is to reign, shall come. (W. R. Williams.)
Gods search for the lost
God is as incapable of being indifferent towards His lost mankind, as is a mother towards her lost child. Lost mankind are not only His lost, but His lost children. His piece of money is money indeed, for originally it came out of the mine of His eternal nature. Heathen poets, Christian apostles, and modern philosophy are agreed that mankind are His offspring. And does not the Source of all hearts feel? And is He not concerned for His lost? In the Divinity of indifference I cannot believe. And yet I am strongly inclined to think that, to many, one great offence of the gospel is, that it is too gracious, too tender, too womanly. They can conceive God to have Almighty power, infinite wisdom and justice, but they cannot give Him credit for infinite affection. They know that a woman will light a candle and go into every hole and corner, stooping and searching, until she find that which she has missed; but they have no idea that this can be a true parable of Gods concern for His lost children. They are not surprised to find a heart in my Lady Franklin: they are not surprised at any measures that she may set on foot to recover the lost one. They are not surprised that the British and American Governments should be concerned to seek, and if possible, to save Sir John and his crew. No one said, they are not worth the expense and labour of seeking, because they are few. Not far from a million pounds were sacrificed in this search. Besides money, good brothers were not found backward to expose their own lives to danger, in the distant hope of finding and relieving their missing brothers. Have the English Government and people so great a concern to recover their lost, and has God none? Better say that a drop contains more than the ocean, that a candle gives more light than the sun, that there are higher virtues in a stream than in its source, and that the creature has more heart than God. Otherwise confess, that the gospel is infinitely worthy of the heart of God; and never more imagine the great Father to find rest under the loss of His human family, in the consolation: They are nothing compared with My universe, they will never be missed. (J. Pulsford.)
Lost treasure
In the parable of the lost coin the first thing that strikes us is, that something considered of value had been lost. The lighting of the candle, the sweeping of the house, the diligent search, everything else being laid aside to attend to this matter, all showed that the thing lost was regarded as quite important. So when the soul of man becomes lost through sin, the most valuable object in the world is lost. Whether we reflect upon the souls vast power of endless progress; its wonderful capacity of investigating the universe, from the lowest depths of earth to the highest star; its ability to hold converse and communion with the great God Himself, and there to find its highest delight; its rapidity of thought by which it can move through the universe in the twinkling of an eye; or the great interest that has been manifested in it by all heaven--we must see its amazing value. The exceeding value of mans soul is seen in what Jesus has done for it. Men often put forth great efforts for very insignificant objects. But when we see the Saviour leave His bright throne in the heavens, and become a homeless wanderer upon the earth, that He might save lost souls, we are able to form some estimate of the souls value. Oh, yes; in Calvary we see how much is lost when the soul is lost! This is the precious thing that was lost. What a loss I The loss of reputation, of wealth, of health, of property, of life--all are nothing to such a loss as this. And such is mans position out of Christ. (J. R. Boyd.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv7, 8, 11 7. There shall be joy in heaven. The Father…
7. There shall be joy in heaven. The Father rejoices and the Son and the angels with him. Over one sinner that repenteth. That “comes to himself,” decides to leave off sin and to serve God. Repentance means a change of mind or heart. Than over ninety and nine just persons. Over those who are already in Christ, safe, and need no repentance. It is the saving of the lost that brings the greatest joy.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On v11 Luk_15:11. A certain man.—Our heavenly Father, since Christ never…
CRITICAL NOTES
Luk_15:11. A certain man.—Our heavenly Father, since Christ never represents Himself thus. He always speaks of Himself as a Son, though often as a possessor, or lord. Two sons.—I.e., to represent the professedly religious and openly irreligious classes of men, whose presence led to the discourse. Both are Jews. The idea that the elder son represents the Jews and the younger the Gentiles seems foreign to the parable; for
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(1) the Jew can scarcely be said to be the elder son, as the call of Abraham took place a couple of thousand years after the Creation, and
(2) the reception of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God was not yet plainly revealed. But in character the sons may be said to be representative of mankind, for we have in them examples of two great phases of alienation from God—the elder is blinded by his self-righteousness, the younger degraded by his unrighteousness.
Luk_15:12. The younger.—As the more thoughtless and easily deceived. Give me the portion, etc.—Not an unheard-of request, though it does not seem to have been customary among the Jews to do as here described. Something like it, however, occurs in the life of Abraham (Gen_25:6). The law prescribed that two-thirds fell to the elder son (Deu_21:17). “In this case the father reserves to himself the power during his life over the portion of the first-born” (Luk_15:31) (Alford). The yielding to the request of the younger son strikingly sets forth the permission of free-will to man, and also the fact of God’s bestowing many gifts upon even the unthankful and disobedient. The request indicates a state of mind from which every kind of sin takes its rise—the desire to be independent of God and to enjoy a liberty which is just another name for licence. So was it with our first parents, who were attracted by the prospect of “being as gods, knowing good and evil.”
Luk_15:13. Not many days.—The purpose he had had in view was soon disclosed. Far country.—To be rid of all restraint. The distance to which he wanders suggests a likeness to the strayed sheep of the earlier parable (Luk_15:4); his manner of life in the far country recalls the condition of the silver piece lying in the dust (Luk_15:8). Wasted.—From this he gets his name of “the prodigal,” the waster (Latin, prodigus).
Luk_15:14. When he had spent all.—Probably very soon, as the course of sin is usually a brief one. Began.—This marks a crisis in his life. To be in want.—He had “spent his money for that which is not bread” (Isa_55:2). “This famine is the shepherd seeking his strayed sheep—the woman sweeping to find the lost. The famine, in the interpretation, is to be subjectively taken—he begins to feel the emptiness of soul which precedes either utter abandonment or true penitence” (Alford). In this figurative manner the weariness and disgust which naturally result from a sinful course are set forth.
Luk_15:15. Joined himself.—The word is a strong one—“he clave unto”—became a hanger-on—sponged upon another, and was forced to do dirty work. A citizen.—Rather, “one of the citizens” (R.V.) We may take this “citizen” as representing the tyrannous power of sin. The Prodigal had broken away from a loving father, and found himself in subjection to a hard task-master. To feed swine.—Doubly degrading—the task of a slave, and one intensely repulsive to a Jew. This represents the degradation at the end of a sinful course to which a man is subjected, as it were, against his will.
Luk_15:16. He would fain.—He craved and got his desire (cf. for similar use of the verb, chap. Luk_16:21). He was driven to assuage his hunger with what could scarcely be called food. Husks.—Not pods of some other fruit, but the fruit of the carob-tree, used for feeding domestic animals. No man gave.—I.e., anything else, anything better. It is absurd to imagine that it means “No man gave even husks to him.” He could provide himself with them, even if the swine were thereby stinted in their food. The desertion by those on whom he had wasted his substance, and whom he had probably reckoned as friends, is a very natural touch in the parable.
Luk_15:17. He came to himself.—Sin is in reality a being beside oneself: true life is that lived, not in gratification of self, but in subordination to God and in communion with God. Here we are evidently on a higher spiritual plane than in the two preceding parables; the whole process of loss and recovery is transacted within the soul of the Prodigal. It is of his own free-will that he wanders away; but then, his return is voluntary also. How many hired servants!—His own hard lot as a hired servant reminds him of the happier condition of those of the same class in his father’s house. And I.—Who am still a son, though an unworthy one.
Luk_15:18. I have sinned.—Perhaps rather, “I sinned”—referring not merely to the riotous life he had lately led, but to the initial act of leaving his father’s house (so in Luk_15:21). Against heaven and before thee.—In the spiritual interpretation these two are one and the same; it is the parabolical form that necessitates the double expression.
Luk_15:19. It is noticeable that he nowhere gives up his sonship. He uses the address “father,” and asks to be reinstated in his place as a son (though he confesses that he is unworthy of it). For even in the request which he thinks of proffering, but which he afterwards omits, he does not wish to become a hired servant, but to be made as one of the hired servants.
Luk_15:20. Arose and came.—Not always the usual course followed, but certainly the proper course—for the Prodigal is now an example of penitence. A great way off.—The idea is suggested by the father’s having been on the outlook for the son’s return, and of his having been animated by a love which made him quick-sighted to discern the distant figure of the penitent Prodigal. The running to welcome, and the touching signs of joy at the son’s return, correspond to the “seeking” in the other parables, for they strengthen the resolution of the penitent, which might not have been strong enough to enable him to carry through his purpose.
Luk_15:21. It is significant that he omits the request to be made “as a hired servant.” The love with which he was met awakens the filial spirit in all its intensity, and any such request would have been a kind of outrage.
Luk_15:22. Said to his servants.—His joy is too full to allow him to answer his son; he instantly issues orders to the servants to celebrate his return. Bring forth.—A better reading is, “Bring forth quickly” (R.V.). Best robe.—For him who came in rags. “Best.”—Lit., “first.” No reference to a dress he had formerly worn as a son—for it was as a son that he had left his father’s house. Ring, etc.—Signs of being a free man. Slaves wore no rings and went bare-footed.
Luk_15:23. The fatted calf.—Reserved for some special feast or anniversary. Let us eat and be merry.—Joy again alluded to as resulting from recovery of the lost, as in Luk_15:6; Luk_15:9. “Us”—including servants, as entering into the joy of their Lord (Mat_25:21-22).
Luk_15:24. Was dead.—Cf. Rev_3:1; Eph_5:14; Eph_2:1; Rom_6:13, for similar comparison of a state of impenitence to that of death.
Luk_15:25. Now, his elder son.—A reproof to the Pharisees and scribes. Some have wished the parable had closed with Luk_15:24. But the elder son is still a son and in need of repentance. In one respect he is, though less heinously guilty than his brother, in greater danger, because of the risk of self-deception. “As regards the penitent, this part of the parable sets forth the reception he meets with from his fellow-men, in contrast to that from his father” (Alford). In the field.—Probably working—part of the hard, but self-chosen service of which he complains in Luk_15:29. Music and dancing.—Surely this mention of appropriate signs of joy on such a solemn occasion should prove that these amusements are not necessarily worldly, or sinful, or unbecoming, for a Christian. Meant.—Lit., “might be.”
Luk_15:27. Safe and sound.—Lit., “in good health.” “A very prosaic rendering of the father’s enthusiastic and even poetical utterances” (Luk_15:24; Luk_15:32) (Speaker’s Commentary). No stress need, however, be laid upon this—the servant simply describes matters as they appear from his point of view.
Luk_15:28. Entreated him.—As Christ was now by this parable entreating the Pharisees and scribes.
Luk_15:29. Lo, these many years, etc.—He does not say “father,” and he speaks of his past service as having been like that of a slave. Neither transgressed.—The virtual boast of the Pharisaic party (cf. chap. Luk_18:11-12). Never gavest me a kid.—This answers to the younger son’s “give me” (Luk_15:12); a similar sin in both cases—a separation of their interests from the interests of their father. My friends.—Respectable people, very different from my brother’s disreputable associates. The “kid” is contrasted with “the fatted calf.”
Luk_15:30. Thy son.—He will not say “my brother.” Devoured thy living.—Implying blame to his father for giving him the means and opportunity for running riot. With harlots.—A detail implied, perhaps, in Luk_15:13, but out of place on his brother’s lips. Only the bitterest jealousy could have prompted the reproach. Killed for him.—“Making him not only my equal, but my superior,”
Luk_15:31. Son.—The father still affectionate even towards the self-righteous and uncharitable son. Ever with me.—No need for extraordinary joy in his case. All that I have.—Rather “all that is mine is thine” (R.V.). The younger son had wasted his share; all that the father had was the elder son’s. There is no impoverishment to the righteous in consequence of favour shown to sinners (cf. Mat_20:14).
Luk_15:32. It was meet.—The form is general—“it was a right” thing—justifying the joy and leaving it still open for the elder son to join in it. Thy brother.—In contrast with the words “thy son” (Luk_15:30).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Luk_15:11-32
The Prodigal Son.—In the parable of the Prodigal Son we have the most luminous statement anywhere to be found of the original development of evil in the soul of man, and also of the awakening of those better elements in the nature which prove the kinship between man and his Creator. The Prodigal, whose story is given with such detail, serves two purposes: I. In the first part of his career he is a warning—he is a typical sinner. II. In the second he is an example—he is a model penitent. In the representation of the headstrong, disobedient son we may recognise some of the lineaments of our own characters, and learn to hate the sins that defile us; while in the account of his penitence and humility we may see in what attitude of heart, and with what words upon our lips, we should return to our heavenly Father.
I. The typical sinner.—The germ of evil—the bitter root from which so much that is hurtful springs—is plainly disclosed to us here. It is self-will. The ill-disposed son resented his father’s authority, and wished to be free to do what he chose without being checked or remonstrated with—to feel, in short, that he was his own master. Of course, in the actual human story a good deal might be said in favour of his desire to live his life on his own responsibility. The condition of childhood and tutelage, in the natural course of things, lasts only for a time, and it is a mistake to prolong it unduly. A time comes when each individual must feel the responsibilities that belong to maturity of age, and when the continued exercise of an external control does more harm than good. And it is a test of the wisdom of a parent to know when to relax the yoke which it was a good thing for his children to bear in their youth. The desire of the younger son to leave his father’s house and to begin life on his own responsibility might have been a perfectly natural and healthy feeling, and might have been gratified with the full consent of his father, and with the best feelings on both sides. It is only when we consider the spiritual meaning of the parable that the heinousness of this son’s feelings and actions comes clearly into view. God is the father, man is the son. The rule of the Father is a spiritual one: His voice is the voice of conscience. The desire to escape from His control is wholly unjustifiable—it is the desire to put pleasure in the place of duty, to shake off the obedience which we as creatures owe to the law of God, and to defy all prohibitions that debar our taking those things that seem good and pleasant to the eye. Subjection to the will of God is the condition of our being and happiness: ruin and desolation follow upon a repudiation of that condition. And if we interpret the parable according to this principle, we may say that the fall of the younger son dates from the moment when he claimed his rights—when he separated his interests from the interests of his father—and not simply when, in the far country, he wasted his substance in riotous living. Morally he was as guilty the day he left his father’s house as he was at any subsequent period: all the evil was in germ in his heart which afterwards appeared in full maturity in his life. And our understanding this fact makes clear to us the many peremptory statements of the Word of God that all men, the respectable as well as the disreputable, are guilty before God. The fact of disobedience and depravity may be more apparent in some cases than in others, but that all are guilty is undeniable. For if the essence of sin lies in self-will, who can claim to be innocent? There are, of course, gross vices and disorderly habits into which we may never have fallen, but the root of them all is in that self-will which has often led us wrong, and self-righteous congratulations upon our comparative cleanliness are utterly out of place in view of that besmirched goodness which is all that the best of us have to boast of. The Prodigal being depicted by Christ as a typical sinner, we are to expect to find in him sin at its very worst, and it is very instructive to notice wherein the baseness of his conduct consists. In reading the parable, this is perhaps the last thing in it that we notice—if, indeed, it does not escape our notice altogether. We use the word “prodigal” glibly enough, and perhaps think of it as meaning one who “breaks out” into a very disorderly life, and goes on recklessly in the bad way. It has quite a different meaning. The Prodigal is the waster; and though the word is not found in the parable, it is derived from the phrase in Luk_15:13, “he wasted his substance in riotous living.” His prodigality is his sin: he begins by asking for a share of his father’s goods; he gets it, carries it off, and wastes it. It is true that he wastes it in riotous living, but no stress is laid on that circumstance. The elder brother, with a rancour which we can easily understand and excuse, insists upon the shamelessness of the vice into which the Prodigal had fallen; but even with him the essence of the fault he was unwilling to allow to be forgiven did not lie in it, but is expressed in the words, “he hath devoured thy living.” Nay, it is not the sensual life which the penitent accuses himself of, or which the manner of his punishment accuses him of, but the wasteful life. It is not said that he had become corrupt in soul, or that his health was shattered by his riotous courses, but that his waste brought him to want—that at last he would fain have filled his belly with husks, and could not. It is not said that he was struck with remorse for the consequencess of his evil passions, but only that he remembered that there was bread enough, and to spare, for the servants at home. Is prodigality, then, such a hateful thing that it should be branded as the lowest form of sin? Are there not worse vices than it? Scarcely, if we look at it aright. It is selfishness, pure and simple—the sin of an ignoble or undeveloped creature. Nothing baser can be found than the resolution to indulge self, whatever it may cost—heedless of how others may suffer, heedless of the loss involved, heedless of the voice of conscience, and of the law of God, and of the terrible sentence of condemnation which such conduct is bound to draw down upon itself. It is not without reason that Christ lays stress upon the Prodigality of the Prodigal as the essence of his baseness; for, compared with this utter and brutish selfishness, other forms of sin have a certain air of dignity and superiority. Evil passions are often the errors and backfalls of noble souls: they are often the perversion of feelings which, if they had been rightly curbed and directed, would have brought no shame with them. But the resolute determination to indulge self in spite of all checks of conscience and religion is the final gulf in which the sinner lands; or, to change the figure, it is the root from which everything that is mean, and foul, and corrupt, springs, and by which it is fed. And therefore it is that all vital religion begins with the breaking down of the stubborn will, and its subjection to the wise and holy will of God. The Prodigal, then, is the typical sinner, on whose tragical history all should look with sympathy and terror—with sympathy because he is akin to us, and with terror because we perceive the likeness between ourselves and him.
The model penitent.—We may see in him the model penitent, and learn in what attitude of soul, and with what words upon our lips, we should return to our heavenly Father. In the manner in which the better mind was awakened in him, he is not necessarily an example to us. It was when the sting of hunger, of absolute beggary, penetrated his soul that he returned to himself and thought, with scorn, of the evil courses that had brought him to that pass. But that is only one of many ways in which the voice of God makes itself heard. There are many other kinds of experience that lead to the wholesome change and repentance manifested by this penitent. A severe illness, the sudden death of a friend, an unexpected calamity, a word of warning, the discovery that an evil habit has taken strong hold of us,—in some one of these ways the attention may be directed to our spiritual danger, to the vast distance by which sin has separated us from God, to the loss and risk to which we are exposed by remaining away from Him and in rebellion against Him. But however it may be that we “come to ourselves,” we can find no better pattern of penitence in word and action than the Prodigal affords us in the later part of his history. We can be quite sure of this, for Christ of set purpose draws the picture to show both how true repentance expresses itself, and how it is received by the Almighty Father. Note—
1. The penitent Prodigal complains of no one but himself, and speaks of no unworthiness but his own. He says nothing against his evil companions—nothing against those who lured him on to fresh courses of vice—nothing against the citizen who left him to feed on husks—nothing of the false friends of whom no man gave unto him; above all, he has nothing to say of the corruption of human nature, or the corruption of things in general. He says that he himself is unworthy, as distinguished from honourable persons, and that he himself has sinned, as distinguished from righteous persons. An outsider might notice that he was weak, and had been led into sin by companions more hardened and corrupt than himself. But that is nothing to him. All he knows is that he was led because he was willing and eager to go, and he does not cast a stone at his associates because he knows he was as morally guilty as any of them. This is a mark of true penitence. Whenever you hear any one excusing himself or herself on the ground of bad companions prevailing over a disposition that was naturally good, you may surely conclude that the penitence is insincere, even if your suspicions that such is the case have not been aroused by the whining tone of voice in which the words are always uttered. There are no excuses that avail to cover guilt. No stress of temptation, no inexperience, no inherent weakness of the nature, no solicitation of evil companions—are worth mentioning. The sinner has no right to mention them, though the judge may take them into account. The fact remains, when all is said, that the sinner is responsible for his guilt, and his only resource is to make the manly, the simply true confession, “I have sinned; I am unworthy.” And that is the hard lesson to learn, and the beginning of faithful lessons. All right and fruitful humility, and purging of heart, is in that. Then too,
(2) another mark of true penitence is discernible in the shame of the Prodigal. He abases himself before his earthly father, as well as before God. That is well worth noticing. “It is easy to call yourself the chief of sinners, expecting every sinner round you to decline, or return the compliment; but learn to measure the real degrees of your own relative baseness, and to be ashamed, not only in heaven’s sight, but in man’s sight, and redemption is indeed begun.” Observe the phrase, “I have sinned against heaven”—against the great law of that, and “before thee”—visibly degraded before my human sire and guide, unworthy any more of being esteemed of his blood, and desirous only of taking the place I deserve among his servants. This element of shame is essential to true penitence, and often seems to be wanting in those who retail their religious experience, and describe the depth of depravity in which they were once sunk. If their statements are true, shame should seal their lips. Another mark
(3) of true penitence is the desire to be henceforward subject to authority; not simply to have the past wiped out, and to be at liberty to enter on another course of self-pleasing and freedom. The Prodigal had left a father’s house; he desires to come back to a master’s—“make me as one of thy hired servants.” This is the spirit in which he returns, though the actual request is not proffered. Redemption must begin in subjection, and in the recovery of the sense of fatherhood and authority; just as all ruin and desolation began in the loss of that sense. “The lost son began by claiming his rights. He is found when he resigns them. He is lost by flying from his father, when his father’s authority was only paternal: he is found by returning to his father, and desiring that his authority may be absolute, as over a hired stranger.” By all these marks—by humbly confessing our guilt, by feeling shame on account of it, and by sincerely desiring to be ruled and controlled by the will of God—is that true penitence to be recognised which will avail to open to us our Father’s house and our Father’s heart.
Wandering.—After the younger son had secured his portion of the family inheritance, he went out of his father’s house and “took his journey into a far country.” At last he was free! The old restrictions that had fettered his childhood and youth were thrown off; the old duties that had waited upon him and dogged his comings and goings these many years were cast aside and forgotten; the monotonous orderliness and subordination of the peaceful home was a thing of the past. Henceforth he was his own master, and the world was at his feet. It is this delusive sense of freedom which lends a kind of enchantment to the early stages of wrong-doing; which persuades a man that he is evidencing his strength; that he has ceased to be a child under a wiser care and guidance, and become old enough to see the world and learn something of life. There are few things more tragic than to hear young men talking about “seeing life,” when it is really death they are seeing. And when a man begins to talk much or loudly about being free, it means, as a rule, that he is enslaving himself. At the start, however, there is a delusive sense of freedom. It is no longer necessary to keep hours, obey rules, perform tasks; the world is before one, with its mysteries, its joys, and its vastness; the home, with its subordination and restriction, is behind. The young man has his portion in his wallet; his staff is in his hand; he has strength, freshness, youth; why should he not throw himself into the tumult of life, and test his power? And so the wanderings begin, and the father’s house grows dim and shadowy in a past that seems pallid and vague beside the rich, full present. There is no rest, it is true; but there is the variety of constant change. There is nothing by the way that satisfies; but expectation points on to new sensations and experiences. From city to city, from country to country, the ardent traveller makes his way. He has no plans; that is part of his emancipation; he is doing as he pleases. If he wishes to stay, he stays; if he feels impelled to go, he goes. He sees men about him who are tied to times and places by duties, and whose necks are bowed by yokes of care; he has no duties and cares. He has broken out of that venerable old prison in which so many good but commonplace people have locked themselves all their lives; he breathes the open air, and lives on the broad earth. If he wishes to pluck a certain fruit, the fact that it is forbidden gives it a higher flavour; if he is drawn to do a certain deed, the fact that it is sinful makes it more attractive. He is no longer a child in leading-strings, to be frightened by the bugaboos of law, duty, morality, God; he is a grown man, and he has put away those childish things. He is free! And all the time the father’s house, builded in purity, self-sacrifice, love, and service, grows dimmer against the horizon, until it dips below that faint, far line. He has exchanged it for the world, and henceforth the world is his home.—“The Outlook.”
Luk_15:17-19. The Prodigal Son.—This young man was like a good many young men of our own time and all times. He thought himself too wise to be longer guided by his father; he thought himself too strong to be longer governed at home. So he went away from home. When he loses his money, he loses his friends; for friends that are bought with money disappear when the money disappears. He had never learned a trade; he had never acquired the art of honest industry; he had never acquired the simple ability to give the community enough to make it worth while for the community to give him enough to live on. I think he must have acquired one virtue—patience—or he could not have taken care of swine. Perhaps he acquired honesty also, and would not even take the husks without permission. When he came to himself, he said, “What a fool I have been! Here I am, cold, houseless, friendless, starving, and in my father’s house the servants have enough, and more than enough. I will go back, and apply for a position as servant in my father’s household.” What I want you to see is that this whole course of this young man separating himself from his father was a course of folly, and the return to his father was a return to wisdom. It was when he came to himself that he said, “I will arise and go to my father.” Sin is madness. To say of a man that he is shrewd, but wicked, is a lie. No shrewd man is wicked; no wicked man is shrewd. Sin is short-sighted. To begin with, the man who disregards God’s laws is a foolish man. In one realm we all recognise that. No man would call a man wise who disregarded the laws of nature. We all understand that natural laws do operate, and no man can say, “I will act as though natural laws do not operate.” But when we get the natural laws that come closest to us, then we are more doubtful. Sanitary laws—those we think we can disregard. We cannot violate the law of gravitation, but we can violate the laws of health, and that will not hurt much! O fools and blind! The laws of God are immutable, eternal, unchanging; no man can disregard them. Has not science taught us even so much as that? And yet the world is full of men who disregard the moral laws. If the policeman tells us to halt, most of us are wise enough to halt; we do not attempt to brush him aside. But when God says, “Halt!” when God comes to a man who is going in the course that he knows is leading down to hell, and thinks he can turn around and go up-hill again, and God says in his conscience, “Stop! you are going in the wrong direction!” he brushes God aside and goes on. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” But there are greater fools than he. There is the fool who says, “There is a God; but I am going to live as though there was not any; and there are thousands of them—tens of thousands of them.” But God is more than a Law-giver; he is a Life-giver; and when a man tries to live without God, he is trying to live without the source and reservoir of life. No man knows what life is. Science traces back phenomena to their origin; but when it gets to this question—What is life? no man can answer. Once, when a boy, starting at a brook that flowed through my grandfather’s place, I followed it up for miles and miles, until at last I came to its source, the little springs in the hills, and the little baby rivulets that, flowing together, formed the beginning of that brook. But the water in the hill that gave forth the springs was hidden from sight. I had gone as far as I could when I got to the original springs; but what lay behind the springs, the reservoir in the hill—that I could not see. So we have followed life back to its source, traced the life of man through the various forms of science back to the original germ, the very beginning; but there we are stopped. Where does this spring, this baby rivulet, come from, which, growing larger and larger, makes this stream of wondrous life, with all the diversified phenomena, in one nation? It is God. God is life, and all phenomena are the manifestation and the revelation of the Divine life that lives and moves in every living thing. Man can make almost everything but life; that he cannot make. All vital phenomena are the forth-putting of life—that is, the forth-putting of God Himself; and when a man undertakes to live without God, do you know what he is doing? He is trying to live without life. There is just so much God in you as there is life in you. If you have some little intellect, that intellect is of God; if you have some little affection, that affection is of God; if you have some little honesty, that honesty is of God. And if you come up to this point, and stop and say, “I will have no more of God,” you are saying, “I will have no more of life.” That is what the wise Hebrew prophet meant, “Whoso findeth Me, findeth life; whoever sinneth against Me, wrongeth his own life. And they that hate Me love death.” Oh, to live in this world that is all full of God, with God knocking at every door, God knocking at the heart, the brain, the eye, the ear, God knocking at every avenue of sense, every avenue of a man’s being, and then to say, “I will live without Him”! But how many there are that are doing it! All the desires that are in men, all their eager quest for wealth, all their strenuous pushing for power, all their outreachings for knowledge, all their aspirations and dreams of love and hope, all their desires to be in any respect greater than they are to-day, are the hungerings of a child after its father. The Law-giver and Life-giver, He is also the Love-giver. We have not sounded the depths of the meaning of the simple text, “God is love.” It is the very nature of the Divine to pour Himself out. He is not like Brahm—absorbed, silent, abstracted; He is for ever pouring Himself forth for the sake of others. He did not wake up one morning six thousand years ago, and say, “Go to, I will make a world.” No, no; He has always been living; the whole universe is full of the Fatherhood of God; the universe is infinite as God is infinite, and love is infinite as God is infinite; and it is the nature of God to be for ever pouring Himself out that others may share His life, that others may be created to be life-bearers, living souls. God is love. Then you may turn it about—Love is God. And all the forms of love that life makes us familiar with are utterances of God. And God is perpetually trying to tell us who He is and what He is, not merely through the broken utterances of preachers, scribes, and prophets, but through the eloquent voices of life. The babe looks up into its mother’s eyes, and says to the mother, “God is love.” The little boy nestles up to the mother’s breast, and falls asleep in her arms, and, filled by the love surging through her, is saying to her, “God is love.” The young man goes away from home, and in his home-sickness writes back to mother with the thirstings and the hungerings of love; and the thirstings, and the hungerings, and the home-sickness, are saying to him, “God is love.” To live as though there were no Law-giver, to live as though there were no Life-giver, to live as though there were no Love-giver, is also to live as though there were no Hope-giver. Do you know how full this nineteenth century is of despair? And do you know that all pessimism is atheistic, and all atheism is pessimistic? Man may have a certain measure of virtue without God; he may stand in the trenches, and fight bravely, and be willing to die, borne through the peril and the storm by his mere fatalism or his mere human courage, as a trained horse may stand in the battle till he is shot down. But no intelligent man can keep alive his hopes unless he keeps alive his faith in God. To be without God is to be without hope in the world. And the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and the gloom in Amiel and Allard, all bear the same witness: to be without God, without the sense of God, the knowledge of God, the faith in God, the assurance of God, is to be without hope. And, on the other hand, to be with Him is to be sure of hope, sure of the future. I am not certain what I can do. Are you certain what you can do? I am not certain what all good men put together can do. Are you certain what they can do? But I do know what God can do. God has undertaken to make out of this human race a family of children like Himself, bearing His image, loving Him with His love, and returning His life back to Him, and receiving it from Him again. I know that He who has undertaken to do this will do it. The earth, which feels the brooding spring, does so because it is turning its face to the sun. It could not feel the brooding spring if there were no sun; and humanity, when it feels within itself the brooding of hope, the beginning of that nearer and larger and better life which it anticipates, turns its face toward God, and takes this life and light from Him. You are not living without God, and cannot. When you get rid entirely of God, you will get rid entirely of life. When a man comes to himself, he turn his face toward God. It is so simple: first, to see in God the Law-giver, and obey your conscience, whatever it tells you to do or be; for it is God’s voice. Next, to see that life is ever larger and wider, and still larger and wider, and that it is from the God that is about you and would be within you. Then, to hear in all love-songs and love-voices the voice of God speaking to you, and to find God in every voice of love in all the world. And so, with your face toward God and your heart full of hope, to rejoice, as the strong man to run a race, because God is in you. For all that is noble, all that is worth having, all that is worth being, is God in you; and all you need to do is to open your eyes to see Him, and your ears to hear Him, and your hearts to take Him in, that your life may be His life.—Abbott.
Luk_15:11-32. The Prodigal and His Brother.—Most readers must sometimes have wished that this parable had closed with Luk_15:24, and left us rejoicing in the joy of the father over his regained and penitent son. The second part of the parable seems to jar with the first. The “elder brother” is a mere discord in its music and robs it of its natural and happy close. The oldest interpretation (naturally suggested by Luk_15:1-2) sees in the younger son a type of the publicans and sinners, and in his elder brother a type of the scribes and Pharisees. But this interpretation is not wide enough. We feel that our Lord is dealing, not with men, but with man; not with classes or nationalities, but with the entire race: and hence we demand an interpretation of His words that shall cover all classes and include the whole family of man. If the earliest interpreter saw in the younger son a type of the publicans, why may we not see in the publicans a type of all sinful but penitent men of every race? If they saw in the elder brother a type of the Pharisees, why may we not see in the Pharisees a type of all who trust in themselves that they are righteous, and despise others? Nay, more; if we can each find in ourselves that which identifies us with the prodigal but penitent son, may we not also each of us find in ourselves some traces of his narrow and self-righteous and unloving brother? This gives us an interpretation in which we can rest. Our Lord spoke to the publicans and the Pharisees, and in speaking to them He showed every man the publican and the Pharisee in his own breast. The great aim of His ministry was to convince men that they were the sons of God, and to impart to them a filial spirit. If we were set to define a good son, on what more essential points could we fix than these?
1. That his father’s service was his delight.
2. That on the mere prompting of love he at all times kept his father’s commandments.
3. That under all changes and temptations to distrust, he confided in his father’s wisdom and care. In all these characteristics of sonship the Prodigal was for a time frankly and glaringly deficient. So far from affectionately depending on his father’s bounty and love, he claimed what he called “his own portion of goods,” that he might expend it as he would. So far from rendering his father a free and willing obedience, he felt that he should never be free until he had escaped from his father’s control. So far from taking a delight in service, and finding no place so dear as home, and no society so congenial as that of the inmates of his home, he was persuaded that he should never taste real pleasure till he could break away from the restraints of his father’s service and follow the impulses of his own will. Here, then, we have the open and jovial sinner depicted to the very life. But is the elder son in any way a better son? Does he show a more filial spirit? Not a whit. Loving dependence, free obedience, glad and disinterested service, are the distinctive marks of sonship. He has not one of these. On his own showing, he is a servant rather than a son; his father is much more a master to him than a father. He dislikes the restraints to which he has submitted at least as much as the Prodigal who would not submit to them. His obedience is not free, but servile. He has been serving for wages, for reward, and he complains that his wages have been calculated on far too low a scale—that he has earned far more than he has received. Obviously, then, the elder son was as far away from his father’s heart and spirit as the younger son had been from his father’s home, and had sunk into a bondage from which it was still harder to redeem him. We must remember that in this parable we have the story of two prodigals, rather than of one; of two men, that is, who wandered away from God—who lost their standing as sons by losing the spirit of sons; and that the self-righteous censor of his brother, the cold and insolent critic of his father, although he had never left his house, had strayed even farther from God than the reckless Prodigal who, under all his sins and sinful impulses, had a son’s heart in him, and was at last drawn back by it to his father’s arms. The parable teaches that those who esteem themselves saints, because they busy themselves with religious dogmas and rules, may be made of harder and more impenetrable stuff than the transgressors whom they eye with sour suspicion and disdain. But it teaches us a lesson still more surprising than this. It teaches us that, let men be as bad as they may, and whether they show a wild, wilful, and wanton spirit, or a cautious, selfish, and mercenary spirit, or whether they are the slaves of impulse or of conventionalism, God is always a good Father to them all. The truth is that we may each of us only too easily find both these men in himself, and therefore God’s grace to the one should be as welcome and pathetic as His grace to the other. As there is some hope that even the Pharisee may become a penitent, so there is much danger that even the penitent may become a Pharisee—that when he is “converted” he may become as narrow, and hard, and bigoted as ever his brother was, and sit in judgment and condemn those who were “in Christ” long before he was, and who have done far more to serve Him. We may well rejoice, therefore, that our Father in heaven is good to both—that when we return to Him, He has compassion on us; and that, even when we are angry with Him, and will not go in, He is not angry with us, but comes out and entreats us, re-kindling a filial and fraternal spirit in us by His fatherly generosity and love.—Cox.
Luk_15:18. Going to the Father.—It is only necessary to remind you very briefly of the story of the Prodigal Son, from which this sentence is taken: how this younger son had grown weary of the restraints and the companionships at home; how he had demanded that the father should divide the estate while the father was still living; how the father had consented; how, a little while after that, the boy, still dissatisfied, had taken all and gone off into a far country. How long it took this prodigal son to come to himself, how long it took him to decide that he was foolish, and to make the resolve to arise and go back to his father, we do not know. But we know how the modern prodigal does; how long he cogitates; how many hindrances stand in his way. He has lived his worldly life, and at length grows dissatisfied, and begins to think that he will seek for satisfaction somewhere else. And first there comes to him a citizen of the far country, who says, “You are mistaken; you do not need to go outside this far country. It is true you have been a failure; you have lived with harlots; but you do not need to do that. There are very reputable women living in this country, there are very excellent men in this country; be temperate, be honest, be industrious; the carob-pods are not bad eating if you know how to cook them. And if you are frugal and honest—but not too honest—you may come in time to own herds of swine—yes, and employ a swineherd—who knows? You do not need religion; all you need is to be a reformed and reputable citizen of this far country.” Still he is not satisfied; still he thinks he will go and find this Father of his. Then Philosophy comes to him, clad in academic robes and with its book in hand. “My friend,” it says, “you are mistaken; there is not any Father, and there is not any home; your notion that once you were with your Father and at home is a dream; I have been on the highest hill hereabout, and I have swept the whole horizon, from north to south, and from east to west, with my spy-glass, and I cannot see any Father’s home nor any Father. It is true this far country is a poor one; nevertheless, there is nothing better; certainly you and I do not know of anything better. Do not waste your time in going after a Father who, for aught you know, has no existence.” Still this young man is not satisfied. He looks about for some wiser and better counsellor. And then the dogmatist comes, holding a Creed in one hand and a Bible in the other; and the dogmatist says, “These men are all wrong; this far country cannot satisfy you; carob-pods are poor eating; you do need a Father, and there is a Father; but you are mistaken in thinking you can find Him now; He is afar off, and you are in a far country, and you must wait until you die before you can see your Father. But I have a splendid definition of Him; it describes all His attributes, and gives a full account of His government: take that. Or, if you are not satisfied with that, here is a book which tells about Him; for He was once in this far country, and lived here with certain of His children, and this book tells what His children knew about Him: either take what His children have said He says, or take our definition. That is the very best you can do.” Still he is not satisfied, and he turns to find another counsellor at his side, clad in a long white robe, and with the cross upon his breast. This counsellor says, “They are all mistaken; the citizen of this country is mistaken—the world will never satisfy you; the agnostic is mistaken—there is a Father; the dogmatist is mistaken—you do not have to wait until you die. But still the Father is not here. You are in a far country, and you cannot get away from the confines of it; but the Father has sent the Church here to take His place; the Church is the vicegerent of the Father, the representative of the Father; the Church will tell you more or less infallibly what you ought to know, and more or less infallibly what you ought to do; the Church will hear the confession of your sins and will pronounce absolution, and so take from you the burden of your sins. Give up the idea that you can see your Father here, and take a Church.” Those are the four counsellors that stand at the side of every man who is wondering whether he can arise and go to his Father. Over against them all—citizen of the world, agnostic philosopher, dogmatist, ecclesiastic—I want to put before you the simple truth that you can go to your Father here and now. In the first place, it is certain that the far country will not satisfy you. It has never satisfied. You are immortal, and this world is transient. Suppose you do succeed—suppose you get all you desire. You are fond of study, and you get books and opportunity to study; you are fond of influence, and you get that; you are fond of the power that money gives you, and you get money and the power that money gives. What then? In ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years, the ship that never failed to touch at every door will touch at yours, and you will go on board and will leave your books, and your bonds, and your stocks, and your influence, all behind. You cannot take them with you What then? You are spiritual, and this world is earthly and terrestrial; how can you expect it will feed you? If a man is hungry, and you show him a picture, will a picture satisfy his stomach? How can you expect things will satisfy the hunger for reverence, for hope, for love—in one word, for God? You are more than a machine, more than an animal. The man who says to you, “Be honest, be true, be pure, be good, leave the harlots alone, lead an honest and temperate life and you will succeed,” gives you wise counsel; but if he tells you that that is enough, he is telling you a lie. Then there is that other counsellor, the agnostic. He tells you that there is no Father and there is no home—at all events, no Father and no home than we can know about. I affirm, on the contrary, that we can and do know the invisible and spiritual, directly and immediately. You have eyes to see the outward thing and you have ears to hear the outward voice, you have senses that deal with this world in which you live; use them, use them carefully, follow them whithersoever they lead, but do not think that you have no other sense and no other knowledge than that. You have also a power of vision that deals with the infinite and the eternal; you have in you an eye that can see the invisible, and an ear that can hear the inaudible. God is not a dream; the home is not a vision; and God and the home are not mere pictures which poets have painted out of their imagination; they are the reality which men of Divine vision have seen and presented to men of duller sight. The dogmatist comes to you with his Bible and his Creed, and he tells you that you cannot hope to see and know God here and now: meanwhile, take what the Creed and the Bible tell you. What do the Creed and Bible tell you? This: that God is a living God; that God is in the hearts of His children, inspiring them, talking with them. If to-day any man in the Church should say, “God does not hear prayer,” orthodox theology would condemn him. But the Bible does not more distinctly reveal the truth that God hears prayer than it does the truth that God speaks to man. It is imagined that this Bible remains to show that God was once upon the earth, though He has gone now; He did inspire Isaiah, but He inspires no one to-day; He did speak to prophets, but He speaks to no one now. No: God was in His world: God is in His world. If any man holds up the Creed, therefore, to you and says, “Take a definition of God, instead of God,” he is offering you what is not bread. The Creed is a definition of God; if it will help you to find Him, take it. The Bible is a guide-book to God; if it will guide you to Him, take it. But take it that it may guide you to Him; never take it in the place of Him. Enoch walks the world to-day, and God is with Him. I call you to God—not to a Creed, not to a book. And, finally, the ecclesiastic stands by your side; offers a Church—a Church as God’s representative in the world. Of course, I do not object to the Church, or I should not be a member of it. What I do object to is the statement that the Church is the representative of God in the world, as though God were not here Himself. If the Church has not God in the heart of it, the Church is nothing; it is a mere ethical institution. The very message, the very ministry, the very function of the Church is to say to the world, not, “We are a representative of God, we personate God,” but “We are the witness to a God who is in the heart of His children here and now.” So I call you to arise and go to your Father. I call the little children to go to their Father. They cannot understand the Creed; they need not. They cannot comprehend the Bible; they need not. They cannot comprehend theology; they need not. But a little child, better than most older people, can understand that God is in conscience and in love—in father-love and mother-love. I call you, young men, to arise and go to your Father. We should be glad to have you flocking into our church, but I do not call you to the Church; I wish I could meet you in the Sunday-school, studying the Bible, but I am not calling you to the Bible. I call on you to arise and go to your Father, and I declare to you that there is in you a power of vision, and that you can see Him face to face. Fathers and mothers, I call on you to go to your Father. How can you take this little child who is put into your hands and train Him for this life and beyond, unless you have a better, a wiser Friend than the minister or the school teacher? Old men that draw near to the confines of eternity, come, come to your Father. If the book will help you, take the book; if the Creed will help you, take the Creed; if the Church will help you, take the Church; but do not stop content with any one of them. Do not wait for death—God is here; do not think to look back across the centuries for Him; He who was there is here. “The far country,” says Augustine, “is forgetfulness of God.” You have come out of the far country when you have turned your thought, your inspiration, your love, to your Father, and forget Him no more.—L. Abbott.
Luk_15:18-19. Not Worthy to be called God’s Son.—The estimate which we have of ourselves depends upon the standard with which we compare ourselves. This man had formed a different measure of himself in his previous experience, because his standard had been different. He had thought himself a good fellow, and all his companions assured him that he was a good fellow. Liberal, generous-handed, flinging money right and left—measured by the harlots and drunkards, he was a good fellow. The judgment was not strong, so measured. When he ceased spending his money riotously, and had come to settle down to something like industry, and measured himself with the swineherds that were about him, he thought himself perhaps better than the average. Very likely he was. He was of a good family, and they very possibly looked up to him. Measuring himself by the swineherds with whom he was living, he was superior. But when he turned his thoughts backward, and compared himself with the father whose home he had abandoned, then he said, “I am no more worthy to be called thy son.” It was a new standard that he had adopted, and therefore a new judgment that he reached. This is the question I want to put before you: Are you worthy to be called God’s son? Lawyer—you are worthy to be called good lawyer; merchant—worthy to be called good merchant; friend—worthy to be called good friend;—all of it true. But now take this other standard: God’s son—are you worthy to be called God’s son? What does this phrase, “God’s son,” mean? How shall we apply the measurement? We will look across the centuries, and gaze for a few moments at the portrait of One who was called God’s Son; we will try to think how He lived, under what impulses, under what guidance, with what deeds; and then we will lay our lives alongside His life and ask ourselves, Are we worthy to be called God’s son? Eighteen centuries ago, then, this Man was born in the province of Rome. Man, you say? do you call Him Man? Yes, I call Him Man. Like ordinary men? Ah, that is just the question I want you to answer. I want you to put yourself beside Him, and see whether ordinary men are like this Man. But He was Man and Son of God, and we are men and sons of God. Are we worthy to be called sons of God? This is the very question. This Man comes out into life at thirty years of age with His purpose fully set. How He had formed it we do not know. He appears as unexpectedly and as surprisingly as Elijah in the Old-Testament and John the Baptist in the New-Testament time; but when He appears His purpose is fully set, His life is consecrated to one great, resplendent idea—to bring about the kingdom of God in the world—and from that purpose He never turned aside. With this consecrated, settled, resolute purpose went a great, inspiring, ardent, consuming love. I hardly know how we can apply the word “self-sacrifice” to Christ. There was no self to be sacrificed. He lived as a man that did not think of Himself. So ardent was He in His work that He went without His meals, and forgot to be hungry. How easily He puts aside the ordinary things for which we live, we all know, but other and subtler appeals also spoke to unheeding ears. The poet and the prophet long at times for solitude. Who has not sung to himself the psalmist’s song, “Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest!” And we may be sure that all the triumph of apparent popularity, and the jostling crowds, were more odious to Him than to any poet or prophet that ever walked the earth. The subtle temptations to the life of a recluse, the life of simple prayer and meditation, He put behind Him, as the grosser temptations that appeal to grosser men. The lark flies from the earth, and carries its song heavenward; but this Singer flew down to earth and went into the cage that He might sing to men who were encaged. Where pain, and gloom, and suffering, and sin were, there this Singer carried His song and His prayer. Sometimes, on the other hand, the poet and the prophet long for companionship. He grows utterly lonely; he wants some one to walk beside, some one at least that will understand him and commune with him. And so did this Man. And He gathered twelve about Him; the best He could find, nearest to Him in spirit and in purpose—and yet how far away! They could not understand Him. They could not understand Him, because they were not free from selfishness. When they sat about the Last Supper, they quarrelled for precedence. These were the men he had to depend on; these the very best; and yet how He lived for them, and loved them—through their misunderstandings, their narrownesses, their quarrels, their desertions, their denials! And yet this love of His was not a Puritan’s love. It was love, not conscience. He did not do the things of which He might have said, “I ought to do”; He did all the things that all the impulses of His nature moved Him to do; for all those impulses were to love and service. And so His heart was full of sympathy for men. Though they could not touch Him, yet He could touch them. He is walking the highway; the crowds are about Him; in the distance is heard the cry, “Room for the leper! room for the leper!” It was not enough to say, “Be well?”—He touched Him.
This love was shown in nothing so much, I think, as in His wrath. He could be angry—and He was at times. And when He was angry, how the men were afraid of Him! When He stood in the Temple courts, surrounded by the Pharisees, and launched out indignant denunciation against those that made long prayers for a pretence and devoured widows’ houses, He faced a crowd of angry men, but they dared not touch Him; there was a flashing in His eye, and a thunder in His voice, that held them back. With all this love, with all this sympathy, with all this loneliness at times, there was a wonderful purity. Perhaps you will think me irreverent, or, at least, unorthodox, if I say it—sometimes it seems to me that Paul understood human nature better than Jesus Christ did. Paul understood how the spirit and the flesh battle against each other. Paul understood how the animal is pulling the spirit down, and the spirit, shackled and bound, cannot emancipate itself. It was Paul who wrote, “For what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do”; and Paul who wrote, “Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?” But Christ says, “The prince of the world cometh, and hath nothing in Me.” With all this love, with all this purity, with all this service went a wonderful hopefulness. Jesus of Nazareth was the Optimist of the centuries. Coming forth at the time when the world was at it lowest moral ebb, when there had been no prophet in Palestine for centuries, when there was nothing but corruption, when there was no virtue and no true civilisation even in Rome, when literature there was well-nigh dead and moral life had died, this Man rang out His clarion note from pulpit to pulpit, and from valley to valley, and from hillside to hillside, “The kingdom of God is at hand!” And, inspiring all, the source of all this, He walked with God. “The words that I speak to you, I speak not of Myself; the Father doeth the works.” And He so walked with God that in His hours of loneliness He found in God His companionship, in God His Rest and His Refuge. Take this life and put it alongside your life, and then answer the question, “Am I worthy to be called my Father’s son?” In the coming days let this Presence go with you. If sometimes your will grows weak, let His strong Manhood nerve you to a better consecration; if sometimes the world, with its subtle temptations, comes in upon you, let His unselfish service drive out the motives that belong only to the far country; if sometimes you are discouraged and in despair, let His smile rest upon you and His strong words say to you, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world”; if sometimes you look on another’s wrong with unblushing cheek, catch the tones of His voice, and let there be thunder in your heart against others’ iniquity; if sometimes the wrong upon yourself brings the blush of anger to your cheek, look on Him who looked on Peter with forgiving eyes, and be ashamed that your selfishness is angry, and not your love. Am I worthy to be called God’s son? What are you doing? You are trying to make bread out of stone—good bread, doubtless, for yourself, for your children perhaps, and for others; but this is not Christ’s work. And you—you are tempted to fly from the top of some great pinnacle and let all the world look on and clap and say, “Wonderful man he is!” This is not God’s work. And you—you are trying to do God’s work in the world, but the devil has stayed at your side and said, “Promise to follow me, and I will show you a better way to purify politics, cleanse the Church, set society right.” This also is not the work of God’s son. To be God’s son, it is at least this: To have a life wholly consecrated to God’s service; to have a heart wholly full of His unselfishness and self-forgetting love. Are you worthy to be called God’s son?—Ibid.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Luk_15:11-32
Luk_15:11-32. The Two Brothers.—The point of this parable, as of the two preceding, is God’s joyful welcome to a returning sinner, in contrast with the angry jealousy of the Pharisees. That is the lesson of the story, and hence it is essentially a repetition of the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin.
I. But the conduct of the Pharisees, implied before, is now plainly held up to view.—For the elder son represents the Pharisee, and no one else. All other applications are beside the mark. The two verses which open the chapter vindicate this as the only correct interpretation. And so the elder son’s conduct is no episode, but an essential part of the parable, the statement, in fact, of what is half the lesson of all three parables. If it is objected that Christ could not speak of the unloving and unlovely Pharisees in the words “Son, thou art ever with me,” the answer is ready. Here, as often, Christ simply takes him at his own estimate for the moment, shows him thereby how unlovely he really is, and so makes manifest in the only possible way his need of repentance and restoration.
II. The younger son is the “publican and sinner,” the openly irreligious everywhere. His sin is not denied or palliated. It is drawn in imperishable colours. But Christ had a gospel for such. The Pharisees had none. They did not think God could forgive such. Not so, says Jesus, God goes after the lost, seeks diligently, welcomes back with great and generous joy.—Hastings.
Two Types of Sinners, and God’s Love for Them.
I. The outcast but penitent sinner.—
1. His home privileges.
2. His selfish and wicked life.
3. His misery and unrest.
4. His penitence.
II. How the father dealt with him.—
1. Readiness to receive.
2. Free and complete forgiveness.
3. Restoration to sonship and privileges.
III. The self-righteous and proud sinner.—1 Equally unworthy with his brother, for he was boastful, unbrotherly, unfilial—a picture of the Pharisees, and of the self-righteous generally.
IV. How the father dealt with him.—
1. Loving and gentle entreaty. No rebuke.
2. Still recognises him as a Song of Solomon 3. Still offers him all the undeserved privileges of sonship.
V. Which of the two do we most resemble?—Taylor.
The Revelation of the Father.—The locus classicus for Christ’s teaching as to the revelation of the Father, the belief of which tends to make men become citizens of the kingdom, is the fifteenth chapter of Luke, and especially the parable of the Prodigal Son. There God appears as One who takes pleasure in the repentance of sinners, such as the reprobates of Jewish society, because in these penitents He sees prodigal children returning to their Father’s house. By these parabolic utterances Jesus said to all, however far from righteousness, God loves you as His children, no more worthy to be called sons, yet regarded as such; He deplores your departure from Him, and desires your return; and He will receive you graciously, when, taught wisdom by misery, you direct your footsteps homewards. It is not allegorising exegesis to take this meaning out of the parable. Jesus was on His defence for loving classes of men despised or despaired of, and His defence in part consisted in this, that His bearing toward the outcasts was that of the Divine Being. He loved them as a Brother; God loved them as a Father.—Bruce.
The Lost One’s Return.—Some have called this parable a gospel within a gospel. It is full of tender and loving teaching.
I. The son at home.
II. The son far from home.
III. The son at home again.—Watson.
The Lost Son.—
I. The son glad to leave home.—
1. The choice.
2. The parting.
3. The absence.
II. The son glad to return home.—
1. Thoughts of home.
2. The home ward journey.
3. The happy meeting.
III. The lessons of the story.—How like the ingratitude of many is the younger son’s conduct! How bitter the fruits of selfishness! How tender the Divine forgiveness!—Taylor.
A Parable of Two Sons.—
I. There are two ways in which people fall from their right attitude to God.—
1. Some men ignore God, or choose to forget Him.
2. Others dread God too much to revolt from Him, and do what they can to earn the Divine favour. The two varieties run down to the same identical root. In the one case you are an alien, in the other a slave; in neither a child. Both are proud and selfish. Neither is loving.
II. The methods by which our Father is for ever seeking to bring us into a childlike relation to Himself.—
1. Of God’s way with the prodigal.
2. With the legalist.—Dykes.
The Condition of Humanity.—Man, viewed as the object of the Saviour’s solicitude, is lost
(1) as a straying sheep is lost, through thoughtlessness;
(2) as a piece of money is lost to use, when its owner cannot find it;
(3) as a prodigal is lost, who in waywardness and self-will departs from his father’s house to a distant land, and there lives a life utterly diverse from that of the home he has left, and so living has no correspondence with his family, but is content to be as dead to them, and that they, in return, should be as dead to him. Such were the thoughts of Jesus concerning man when He described him as “lost.”—Bruce.
I. The Prodigal Son: his
(1) self-will;
(2) folly;
(3) misery;
(4) repentance.
II. The loving father:
1. His long waiting for his Song of Solomon 2. The fervency and rapture of his joy on receiving him.
III. The relentless elder brother:
1. His moral correctness.
2. His severity and pride.
The Parable tells us—
I. Of man’s original estate, as a child in his father’s house, happy, and wanting nothing.
II. Of the misery that waits on sin, especially heavy in the cases of those who go to great excess in evil.
III. Of the true way in which to return to God.
IV. Of the Divine compassion that hastens to welcome the penitent.
V. Of the envy which some, even of God’s children, manifest at such great kindness being spent on such as have been grossly sinful.
VI. Of God’s forbearance towards our infirmities and unbecoming feelings.
I. The Prodigal’s departure.
II. His return.
III. The reception he meets with.
IV. The character and conduct of the elder brother.
Luk_15:11-24. The Prodigal.
I. His departure.—Multitudes tread this path. The way to death is thronged. The “seven devils” that hold the reins, and direct the course, urge myriads of “younger sons” to their ruin. Yet there is hope. There are two pieces of good news for every prodigal:
1. God is angry with you, not pleased. His anger is against your departing. Were He pleased when you go away, you could not expect Him to be pleased when you come back.
2. Christ Himself, by His word in this parable, makes a path for the prodigal’s return. Why did He paint this picture? To leave open a way from the “far country “to the Father’s home and bosom.
II. His return.—“He came to himself.” This suggestive word marks the turning-point. His conduct had been madness as well as sin. He makes self-discovery, and resolves to return. Worthless though he is, the father gladly receives the penitent prodigal. It is the history of one actual case. A story made by Christ, and so made as to serve a purpose. The purpose is to show how He receives even the chief of sinners. No conceivable degree of provocation closes His heart against him that cometh.—Arnot.
The Lost Son.—There is, perhaps, no page in the Bible which comes home so perfectly to the understanding of every human being as this. But, human as the story is, the parable is truly Divine. There are two distinct pictures, or compartments rather, in the one composition.
I. The prodigal’s progress.—Apostasy, profligacy, penalty. The picture is not overdrawn.
II. The penitent’s return and reception.—Reflection, resolution, return and reception, confession, restoration, rejoicing. Man’s redemption is a momentous event in the annals of God. He alone perfectly understands it, and most of all rejoices over it, for to Him our nature belongs, and He alone knows what it is worth. Other beings, however, including men themselves, are called to rejoice along with God in this. The mark of their nearness to God in spirit will be the degree in which they are taken up about human salvation—are concerned for it, and delight in its accomplishment.—Laidlaw.
Five Phases of Religious Experience.—Five scenes which correspond to the phases of religious experience through which the Prodigal Son passes:
1. Departure from home (Luk_15:1-13)—his sin.
2. His miserable plight (Luk_15:14-16)—his punishment.
3. His regrets (Luk_15:17-19)—his repentance.
4. His return (Luk_15:20-21)—his conversion.
5. His restoration to his place as a son and to his father’s favour (Luk_15:22-24)—his justification.
Luk_15:11. Grace and Faith.—In spite of the admirable manner in which Jesus had employed the two former figures, since they are borrowed from the world of nature, they do not fully serve His purpose. They do, indeed, to some extent, describe the feelings towards the sinner which fill the heart of God, but they do not set forth the part which the sinner himself plays in the drama of conversion. He needs to find a figure, borrowed from the moral sphere, and consequently from human life. Grace is represented in the first and second parables, grace and faith in the third (cf. Eph_2:8).—Godet.
A Definite Revelation of God’s Thoughts towards Us.—Jesus here drops the interrogative form which introduces the two preceding parables. He no longer appeals to his hearers to say what a shepherd, and what a woman, in the circumstances supposed, would probably do. He now reveals in definite terms the thoughts of God towards our sinful race.
Luk_15:11-12. Dissatisfaction.
I. Dissatisfaction implied in the demand of the son:
1. The cause of dissatisfaction, impatience of restraint.
2. The expression of dissatisfaction.
3. The guilt of dissatisfaction.
II. The effect shown, in the act of the father.
1. This act gives no sanction to the son’s demand as right.
2. This act allows freedom to a sinner to follow his own choice.
3. This act confers powers which might be used for spiritual profit.—Ritchie.
Luk_15:11-13. The Soul and its Sin.
I. Whence the soul’s sin springs—out of a desire for bad freedom.
II. Where sin places the soul.
III. That to which sin dooms—waste, shipwreck.
Luk_15:12. The Arrogant Claim.
I. The younger son comes to his father to demand his portion.
II. He lays claim to his portion as a debt, which he thinks his father owes him.
“The younger.”—It is scarcely by accident that the younger son is chosen to play the part of the prodigal. For it is for the young—to those who are innocent and unsuspicious, to those whose hearts are light, and who have had but little experience of the world’s ways—that the world’s temptations have the greatest charm, who are most likely to long for freedom, and least capable of avoiding the dangers it brings.
“Give me.”—Over against the Prodigal’s demand, “Give me my portion of goods,” is the children’s cry, “Give us day by day our daily bread”; they therein declaring that they wait upon God, and would fain be nourished from day to day by His hand.—Trench.
Weary of Home, Anxious to See the World.—Two things urge the younger son to make this request:
1. He is wearied of his father’s house.
2. The world abroad attracts him. So is it with the sinner. He desires to escape from the restraints of holiness and to be at liberty to please himself.
Experience Alone Can Cure.—The father sees that the moment has come in which the son can only be cured by experience, and he gives him up to his own will. This is the point to which the heathen had arrived at the epoch of judgment described by St. Paul (Rom_1:24-28)—that of “being given up to their own lusts.” A time comes when God ceases to strive against the inclinations of a perverse heart and lets it have its own way.—Godet.
Luk_15:13.
I. Preparation for leaving his early home.—
1. The time of preparation.
2. The act of preparation.
II. Departure into a far country.—
1. The leaving his father’s house.
2. The journey into a far country.
III. Wasting his substance with riotous living.—
1. The substance wasted.
2. The substance wasted with riotous living.—Ritchie.
The Wanderer.
I. To sin is to depart from God.—The explanation of this action is:
1. Alienation of heart.
2. The allurements of evil.
3. The weakness of the nature.
4. The illusions of Satan.
II. All sinners that are carried away with the love of sin do actually leave God and depart.—
1. They do not know what is to be found in God.
2. They are at enmity with Him.
3. They are averse to His laws and government.
III. They go into a far country.—
1. This Prodigal set off immediately, as soon as he received his portion.
2. His father’s bountifulness did not render him dutiful.
3. The distance to which he wandered was not so much of place as of state.
4. All who are now the children of grace, and on the way to heaven, were once wanderers like him.—Jones.
“Not many days.”—For a little, therefore, he lingers in his father’s house after he has formed the resolution to depart and has liberty to do so. And so in the case of the sinner, apostasy of heart often precedes apostasy of life. It is by degrees, perhaps almost imperceptible at first, that he enters on the downward course. It begins in feeling before it manifests itself in action.
“A far country.”—An image of the sinner’s deep apostasy from God.
“Wasted.”—Lit. “scattered.” As lightly, swiftly, as “all had been gathered together” is all dissipated again.
The Riotous Spendthrift.
I. All sinners, when they have departed from God, are spendthrifts and great wasters.
1. All receive their portion of goods.
2. Unregenerate sinners consume these on their own lusts, the faculties of body and soul, and their earthly treasures.
II. They waste what they have received in riotous living.
1. They have cast off the government of God
2. They trample on His holy laws.
3. They put themselves under the government of the great adversary of God and man.—Jones.
Luk_15:14-16.
I. His want, through famine in the land.—
1. The mighty famine in the land.
2. His want in the famine.
II. His work with a citizen of that country.—
1. His joining himself to a citizen.
2. His work with the citizen.
III. His wish for the husks, to relieve his hunger.
1. The desire for husks.
2. The desire unfulfilled.—Ritchie.
Luk_15:14-15. Sources of Misery.—
1. Abundance exchanged for destitution.
2. Freedom for servitude. Two sources of misery: inward griefs, outward sorrows.
I. The heart itself consumed by loathing, remorse, loneliness, and despair.
II. Outward calamities, such as the famine here specified, against which the heart, deprived of the consolations of religion, strives in vain.
Luk_15:14. “A mighty famine.”—External circumstances hasten the consequences of sin, and are used by God to lead to repentance. Thus the father seeks his son by so ordering events that he shall feel his real condition. In like manner, in the history of the prophet Jonah, the great storm and danger upon the sea are used to lead him to repent of his disobedience.
The Grievous Famine.
I. All things under the sun quickly decay and disappear.
II. Alienation from God leads to poverty, misery, and suffering, and these are intended to drive sinners from the far country back to their Father.
III. This Prodigal’s destitution.
1. He was stripped of the means of self-gratification.
2. He is convinced of the emptiness and vanity of all things under the sun.
3. He wants something which he has not, but does not know what he wants.—Jones.
A Wasted Life.
The affecting lines of Byron well illustrate this experience of the prodigal:—
“My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers, the fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief,
Are mine alone.
The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile!”
Luk_15:15-16. The Willing Slave.
I. It is with the strongest reluctance that sinners leave this far country.
1. They believe nothing of what they hear of the country where they live.
2. They believe nothing of what they hear of the Redeemer’s kingdom.
3. The far country is suitable to their sinful inclinations.
4. They have a deep-rooted enmity against God and holiness.
II. Deep conviction of sin leads to fear, but many are still very unwilling to return to their Father’s house.
1. They enter the service of a hard master.
2. They are set to poor and mean employments.
3. Their only liberty is to choose in what fields they will work.
4. They try various means to satisfy their cravings, yet all in vain.—Jones.
Luk_15:15. “Citizen.”—Notwithstanding all the Prodigal’s folly and sin, he did not become a citizen of that far country. He felt himself, while there, an exile from home; and when his misery becomes intolerable he does not sink into apathy and despair, but his thoughts return to his father and his father’s house.
“Sent him into his fields.”—The world and every one of its citizens is a hard master, in whose services the most pitiable wages are given; yea, not even food to eat. Well for every prodigal who is constrained to realise this and does realise it.—Stier.
Luk_15:16. Degradation.—He who would not, as a son, be treated liberally by his father is compelled to be the servant and bondslave of a foreign master; he who would not be ruled by God is compelled to serve the devil; he who would not abide in his father’s royal palace is sent to the field among hinds; he who would not dwell among brethren and princes is obliged to be the servant and companion of brutes; he who would not feed on the bread of angels petitions in his hunger for the husks of the swine.—Corn, a Lapide.
“Would fain.”—Between carnal and spiritual pleasures there is usually this difference: the first, when we are without them, excite in us strong desires; but after their possession they cloy and dissatisfy. It is quite the contrary with spiritual pleasures. We have a distaste for them as long as we are without them; but possession produces the desire of them, and the more largely we partake of them the greater is our appetite and hunger.—S. Gregory.
The Swine Cared For the Swineherd Neglected.—The swine were valuable; they would fetch a good price in the time of famine. They were cared for, but the wretched swineherd was left to look after himself. This was his return for squandering his living upon pretended friends!
Luk_15:17-20. The Soul and its Repentance.
I. Repentance is kind and right-minded thought about one’s self.
II. Repentance is dissatisfaction and regret.
III. Repentance is confession of sin.
IV. Repentance is also humility.
V. Repentance is also resolution toward the Father.
VI. Repentance is the actual movement of the soul toward the Father.
1. Recognition of sin.
2. Sorrow for sin.
3. Forsaking of sin.
Luk_15:17.
I. His restoration to himself.—
1. He came to an understanding of what is true.
2. He came to a conscience of what is right.
3. He came to an affection for what is good.
4. He came to a will for what is holy.
II. His review of his condition.—
1. He expresses a bitter sense of present misery.
2. He expresses a deep conviction of his past folly.
3. He expresses a grateful remembrance of his father’s bounty.
4. He confesses a fervent desire for the joys of his early home.
The Solemn Pause.
I. Till now he was in a state of moral madness.
II. But the Prodigal is now come to himself—i.e., to his right senses.
1. He never before gave himself the trouble of thinking.
2. Now he begins to think seriously.
III. Two subjects fill his whole soul.
1. The happiness of those who enjoy such abundance in his father’s house.
2. His own starving condition in a distant land.—Jones.
“Came to himself.”—Words of deepest significance, saying, as they do, that to come to one’s self and to come to God are one and the same thing; that when we truly find ourselves we find Him, or, rather, having found Him, find also ourselves; for it is not man in union with God, who is raised above the true condition of humanity, but man separated from God, who has fallen out of and below that condition.—Trench.
One Not in His Right Mind.—For one who could so act—forsake such a father and desert such a home, to incur nothing but misery, insult, and the pangs of hunger—can only be spoken of as one not in his right mind.—Burgon.
A Change of Feeling.—He began by despising his father’s house and by longing to escape from it. Now he looks with disgust upon the country for which he had exchanged it, and desires to return home. He chooses what he had left; he leaves what he had chosen.
“How many!”—Behold the sad catastrophe of rash and thoughtless voluptuousness. It turns the man out into a strange country who might have lived happy in his father’s house; it makes a beggar of one that was rich; it changes the condition of a son into that of a slave; it compels him to feed filthy swine who disdained the dutiful service of a gracious father.—P. Chrysologus.
Luk_15:18-19.
I. An earnest resolution to arise.—
1. He resolves to exert a will for deliverance.
2. He resolves to put forth activity in the right direction.
3. He resolves to set out in a new course.
4. He resolves to go to an expected end.
II. A true repentance of sin.—
1. The confession of sin.
2. The aggravations of sin confessed.
3. The unworthiness to be called the son of such a father.
4. The request to be made as a hired servant.
The Preparatory Address.
I. The sinner must come and confess his sins unto God, or never find mercy.
II. How this confession must be made.
1. It must be a true confession.
2. It must be such as the occasion requires.
3. In it there must be both faith and repentance.
III. What encouragement has the sinner to confess his sins unto God?
1. God is a Father.
2. His delight is salvation.
3. He has made ample provision for the redemption of the sinful.
4. He invites all to take advantage of it.—Jones.
Luk_15:18. “I will arise.”—He will “arise,” for he has till now been grovelling in the dust. He will “go,” for he is a very long way off. To his “father,” for at present he dwells among swine.
The Pious Resolution.
I. “I will arise.”
1. This is a most dangerous country to abide in.
2. It contains nothing to supply my numerous wants.
II. “I will go to my father.”
1. All things naturally draw towards home.
2. The Holy Spirit begins His work by creating hunger and thirst after righteousness and resolution to return to God.
3. Where there is life there is progress.
4. The sinner has nowhere to go at last for help and comfort but to his God.—Jones.
“Against heaven.”—He alone really confesses his sins who has regarded them mainly as sins against God—against a higher, heavenly order of things; and this is the best sign that a sinner has come to himself. Cf. Psa_51:4 : “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.”
“Before thee.”—“In respect of thee”—i.e., by wasting his substance and by occasioning him great unhappiness and some disgrace.
Luk_15:19. “Make me as one of thy hired servants.”—An ancient writer says, in commenting on this verse, “O, Lord Jesu! Preserve us from such husks as the swine did eat, and instead thereof, give unto us the true Bread; for Thou art steward in Thy Father’s house. As labourers, vouchsafe to hire us also, although arriving late; for Thou dost hire men, even at the eleventh hour,—and givest to all alike the same reward of life eternal.”
“Make me as one.”—He wishes that there may be no distinction between him and the least of the day-labourers, and promises thereby that he will diligently serve and be obedient as a day-labourer. He wishes to be released, at any price, from his wretched condition, and with deeds to prove the sincerity of his confession of sin.—Van Oosterzee.
Luk_15:20-24. The Soul and its Reception.
I. The reception of a longing and watching love.
II. A quick reception.
III. A reception of utmost welcome.
IV. A reception of larger answer to prayer than one dare hope for.
V. A reception of perfect reinstatement.
Luk_15:20. The Turning-Point.
I. “And he arose.”
1. He rises up and comes forth from the regions of the dead.
2. He cannot stay in the far country.
II. “And he came to his father.”
1. The sinner left God: now he returns to God.
2. He had nowhere else to go.
3. He came quite home.
4. He came without delay.
III. There are great difficulties in the sinner’s way to return to his Father.
1. His sins.
2. His vileness.
3. His hardness of heart. Yet there is a new and living way by which he may go.—Jones.
I. The return of the son.—
1. The setting out on the homeward way.
2. The progress in the new course.
3. The return to his father.
II. The welcome of the father.—
1. The father’s observation of his son afar off.
2. The father’s compassion on his son coming to his home.
3. The father’s welcome to his son returning to him.—Ritchie.
“Ran.”—The coming of the father to meet his son here figuratively exhibits the sending of the Son of God.—Von Gerlach.
“Ran.”—The return of the sinner is expressed by the word going (Luk_15:18), but God’s coming to the sinner by running. God makes greater haste to the sinner than the sinner does to God; God makes much of our first inclination, and would not have it fall to the ground.
“Kissed him.”—No cold, formal greeting—deosculatus est. He kissed him repeatedly and fervently—devoured him with kisses.
“One parable cannot exhaust the whole truth; but in this parable we may say that the Saviour and Mediator is concealed in the kiss which the father gives the son” (Riggenbach).
The Prodigal was utterly destitute of merit, even in his repentance. For it was not until he had exhausted every resource, and death stared him in the face that he resolved to return home. Yet he was received with ardent welcome, and without upbraiding. Thus is it with the sinner. Although we return to God only, as it were, when we cannot help coming, He receives us with open arms; He takes the sin away and does not cast it up to us.
Associates Left Behind.—The Prodigal leaves behind him the companions and instruments of his lusts. This is a distinctive feature of true repentance. In the act of fleeing to his father he leaves his associates, and his habits, and his tastes, behind; and conversely, as long as he clings to these he will not—he cannot—return to his father.—Arnot.
The Compassionate Father.
I. His father saw him:
1. God takes notice of the very beginning of the new creation in the soul.
2. He sets the greatest value on the least grace, for He sees how great it will be at the last.
II. The father had compassion on him and ran to meet him.
1. Compassion on his most miserable condition, and his deep distress of mind.
2. Runs to meet him, because of the great delight in seeing him returning home, and because he wished to succour and comfort him.
III. He fell on his neck and kissed him; in like manner God pities His enemies, but delights in those who come home to Him, who are members of Christ, and are led by His Spirit.
IV. In regeneration God and man meet; they meet in peace and love; and they meet to part no more for ever.—Jones.
Imperfect Contrition, and God’s Response to it.—The father’s kiss conveys and implies the assurance of forgiveness. In the rehabilitation of this outcast youth there are two stages—
(1) the human, and
(2) the Divine. The Divine must have necessary preference over the human. The son would not seem to have reached any very high plane of moral life and feeling when the father met him. He was hunger-hunted, that was all. That penitence? It looks more like scheming self-interest. The action has scarcely any strain of moral sentiment and aspiration in it whatsoever. He was moving on a comparatively ignoble level, but the level led by unmistakeable gradients that their father’s eye could follow into the far-off future up to something nobler and better at last. The first movements of the man’s mind before it has been transformed by the magic effusion of the father’s love cannot escape some strain of the old sordidness. If it is the wrath to come rather than the wretchedness he is leaving behind that excites his first movements toward home, his repentance is still open to the impeachment of self-interest. The father, however, saw the dip, and trend, and direction, in this pathway of imperfect motive. The soul is not noble in its first steps of penitential movement towards home. It is made so by the touch of God’s reconciling love.—Selby.
Luk_15:21. The Penitential Confession.
I. The Prodigal Son returns to his father’s house in a very different state of mind from that in which he left it.
II. We see here a penitent, approaching mercy’s door, confessing his sins and praying for pardon.
1. He comes as a true penitent.
2. He seeks for no excuse, and does not even use his penitence as a plea.
III. His deep distress, which is both unavoidable and beneficial.
IV. He dwells upon the magnitude and aggravations of his sins.
V. He manifests deep humility.—Jones.
The Prepared Speech only Half Said.—Why did he not say all he had intended? Because he was prevented from saying more by the kisses of his father, and the other tokens of his father’s love.
I. The confession of sin made.—
1. The confession is filial in its spirit.
2. The confession is personal in its character.
II. The aggravations of sin acknowledged.—
1. It is sin committed against sovereign authority.
2. It is sin committed in the face of fatherly love.
III. The conviction of unworthiness expressed.—
1. The sense of unworthiness altered.
2. The appeal to paternal compassion implied.—Ritchie.
Repentance of Fear and Repentance of Love.—There is a profound difference between the confession uttered by the Prodigal Son (Luk_15:21), and that which the depth of his misery had extorted from him (Luk_15:18-19). The latter was a cry of despair. Now distress has passed away, and the confession has become the cry of repentant love. The words are the same—“I have sinned”—but the tone in which they are uttered is different. Luther recognised the difference very clearly; and the repentance of love as distinguished from the repentance of fear was the true principle of the Reformation.—Godet.
Luk_15:22-24. Free and Complete Forgiveness.—The forgiveness granted is both freely given and complete in its character. It is not preceded by any humiliating penance, or period of probation, or any successive stages of restoration to favour. In an instant he is reinstated in the place, and invested with the dignity, of a son.
The Prodigal is not put through a preparatory discipline, lodged in some sad and dreary moral quarantine, till some of the loathsomeness and defilement of sin be worn off him. His rags are exchanged for princely clothing; a feast is prepared to relieve his hunger and thirst.
Christ here Teaches Two Great Lessons:—
I. That God receives and forgives a sinner who comes back repentant.
II. That He delights in the act of thus forgiving repentant sinners.
Luk_15:22.
I. The robe of filial acceptance.—
1. The best robe—best for covering, endurance, and beauty.
2. The bringing forth of the best robe, the open exhibition and free offer of Jesus’ righteousness.
3. The putting on of the best robe.
II. The ring of filial distinction.—
1. This is a token of filial relation.
(2) This is a badge of filial privilege.
3. This is a pledge of filial inheritance.
III. The shoes for filial life.—
1. The shoes prepare for walking in the comfort of a Song of Solomon 2. The shoes prepare for walking in the freedom of a Song of Solomon 3. The shoes prepare for walking in the service of a son.—Ritchie.
“The best robe.”—Cf. Zec_3:4-5 : “And He answered and spake unto those that stood by, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him He said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.… And they clothed him with garments.” See also Isa_61:10; Rev_3:18.
“The best robe.”
I. When a sinner truly repents and turns to God, no mention is made of his past offences.
II. The father ordered his servants to clothe, adorn, and feed his starving Song of Solomon 1. The children of men are the objects of God’s care and kindness.
2. He employs some servants to convey His gifts and blessings to His children.
III. The father ordered the best robe to be brought for him:
1. A mark of His love.
2. A meet dress for the company he was now to move in.
IV. A ring for his hand:
(1) as symbol of the covenant of everlasting union; and
(2) as an ornament.
V. And shoes for his feet; he must now walk in a new way, which he never knew before.—Jones.
Luk_15:23-24.
I. The provision for joy in the penitent’s return.—
1. The bringing forth of Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the provision of joy.
2. The partaking of Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the substance of joy.
II. The grounds of joy over the penitent’s return.—
1. He was dead, and is alive again.
2. He was lost, and is found.—Ritchie.
Luk_15:23. The Richest Feast.
I. This feast is the great salvation by Christ crucified.
II. The children of grace feed and live on the provisions which their heavenly Father has treasured up for them in the fulness of Christ.
III. The benefits of actual feeding on the gospel feast are truly great and lasting:
(1) Believers thus come into closer union with Christ;
(2) into communion with Him;
(3) are transformed into His image;
(4) and grow in grace, and in meetness for heaven.—Jones.
Luk_15:24.
I. Angels rejoice over the coming back of a sinner to God.
II. Believers rejoice over the return of a brother to their Father’s house, because he is a brother; because they themselves know the happiness of the saving change; because this change brings honour to their Saviour.
III. God rejoices over the restoration of a son to filial life and love.
IV. The penitent rejoices in the welcome to his Father’s heart and home—the joy of rescue, of acceptance, of a new nature, of communion, of possession and hope.—Ritchie.
“Dead … lost.”—The word “dead” describes the misery into which the Prodigal had sunk; “lost” describes the father’s experience of deprivation during his son’s absence. These two aspects of sin correspond to the representations in the two preceding parables: the son had strayed away (like the lost sheep), the father had lost something (as the woman had lost the piece of silver).
The Great Rejoicing.
I. The cause of the joy:
1. The penitent son as one alive from the dead.
2. As one lost who had been found.
II. The nature of the joy: universal, high, and eternal.—Jones.
Luk_15:25-32. Vindication of the Family Joy.
I. The elder brother’s anger at the Prodigal’s reception.—
1. The occasion of his anger.
2. The expression of his anger.
II. The father’s vindication of the family joy.—
1. The father’s forbearance with an unfilial spirit.
2. The reasons he alleges for the joy.
III. The lessons of truth here conveyed.—
1. God’s love to fallen men.
2. Christ’s condemnation of the self-righteous, of their pride and contempt for others.
3. The Divine welcome to great sinners.—Ritchie.
A Picture of the Legalistic, Grudging Pharisee.
I. Jealous discontent.
II. Unfair complaints.
III. A gentle answer.
Taylor.
Luk_15:25. “Was in the field.”—The vividness and beauty of the story is heightened by the fact that the elder son, at the return of his brother, is not in the house, but has spent the day in hard, slavish service, and now first returns home at eventime, when the feast was already in progress.
More Perilous Faults.—The elder son is still a son, nor are his faults intrinsically more heinous—though more perilous, because more likely to lead to self-deception—than those of the younger. Self-righteousness is sin as well as unrighteousness, and may be even a worse sin (Mat_21:31-32); but God has provided for both sins a full sacrifice and a free forgiveness.—Farrar.
The Mirror Held Up to The Pharisees.—The Pharisees had said at Luk_15:7, at least in their hearts, “These ninety and nine just persons are ourselves, however!” And again, while hearing of the lost son, “This does not assuredly point to us!” Another mirror is now held up before them—“But here see yourselves!”—Stier.
Luk_15:27. “Safe and sound.”—How nice is the observance of all the lesser proprieties of the narrative! The father, in the midst of all his natural affection, is yet full of the moral significance of his son’s return—that he has come back another person from what he was when he went, or while he tarried in that far land; he sees into the deep of his joy that he is receiving him now indeed a son—once dead, but now alive; once lost to him, but now found alike by both. But the servant confines himself to the more external features of the case, to the fact that, after all he has gone through of excess and hardship, his father has yet received him safe and sound.—Trench.
Luk_15:28-32. The Father’s Condescension and Kindness.—Note
(1) the father’s condescension, and
(2) his kindness in dealing with the elder son. He does not send a servant, but goes himself. He entreats him to lay aside his displeasure and to come in to welcome home his brother and to partake of the feast. And notwithstanding his son’s boasting and rude attack, he continues composed and loving, and answers with meekness.—Foote.
Luk_15:28-30. An Unlovely Character.—Note
(1) the elder brother’s displeasure at the kind reception of his prodigal brother;
(2) his self-righteous pride;
(3) his ungracious complaint;
(4) his malicious exaggeration of his brother’s misdeeds, and his ignoring the change that had taken place in him; and
(5) his refusal to acknowledge him as his brother.
Luk_15:29-30. Two Complaints.—The elder son has two complaints to make:
1. He himself has been harshly treated.
2. His unworthy brother has been too kindly treated. The father replies to each of these charges in Luk_15:31-32.
Luk_15:29. “Do I serve thee.”—He thus shows that he was a slave. His father was regarded by him as a master—nay, as an unjust master—and he looks back upon his many years of ill-requited labours. Though in his father’s house, he has utterly lost the filial spirit, while his brother even when far away had retained some measure of it. He is, therefore, so to speak, the real and more entirely lost son.
No Confession of Shortcoming.—Observe that while the younger son confesses with no excuse, the elder son boasts with no confession. This at once proves his hollowness, for the confessions of the holiest are ever the most bitter.—Farrar.
“Never gavest me.”—He falls into the very sin which his brother committed when he said, “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.” He, too, is feeling that he does not truly possess what he possesses with his father, but that he must separate something off from his father’s stock before he can count it properly his own.—Trench.
Luk_15:30. “Thy son.”—Some such word as “precious”—“this thy precious son” would bring out the elder brother’s implied contempt still more clearly; while “this thy dear brother,” in Luk_15:32, would suggest the father’s affectionate reproof more adequately. Both words are implied in the tone of the two speeches.
Luk_15:31-32. The Privilege of Service.
I. Fidelity in service is a privilege, and not servitude.
II. A sinful life is a disaster, and not happiness to be envied. For the elder son contrasts his own hard and unremitting service with the careless and self-indulgent career of his younger brother. “He has enjoyed all the pleasures of sin, and now he enjoys all the happiness of salvation! I have never known anything but painful obedience to Thy commandments!”
Luk_15:31. “Son, thou art ever with me.”—Though the son does not say, “Father,” the father address him as “Son.” This sets forth God’s forbearing kindness toward the self-righteous and uncharitable.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv8, 11 Luk 15:8-10. “A certain woman having ten drachmae, if…
THE LOST MONEY
Luk 15:8-10. “A certain woman having ten drachmae, if she may lose one drachma, does she not light a candle and sweep the house and seek diligently until she may find it? And having found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, Rejoice with me, because I found the drachma which I lost. So I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” This drachma was a Grecian coin, worth fifteen cents. So the woman has a dollar and a half, equivalent in our time to about ten dollars. This woman, as uniformly in the Bible, symbolizes the Church, whose the and power is the Holy Ghost. This coin, of course, typifies the sinner, whose soul is of infinite value, yet utterly lost and covered up with the rubbish of human depravity, and overshadowed by the thorns and brambles of actual sin. See this woman with her broom, alertly moving into all parts of her house, searching every nook and corner, removing all the dust and trash; going out into the premises, and ransacking every place where there is the slightest probability that she may have dropped the money in her precipitate haste. This is precisely what the Church, filled with the Holy Ghost, would do in the case of every lost soul. While this piece of money was intrinsically as valuable as ever, so long as it was lost it was utterly destitute of commercial value; thus beautifully illustrating the soul of the sinner, destined to live through the flight of eternal ages, and of so infinite value that it cost the blood of Jesus, and yet utterly lost, worthless, and unavailable — i.e., destitute of commercial value in all the heavenly bazaars — so long as it is thus lost. amid the soot and rubbish of sin. How quickly would the world be captured for Christ if every Church member would do like this woman! And they would if they only had the Holy Ghost. Really, all of this searching is done by the blessed Holy Spirit, but largely through human instrumentality. O what a grand open door, to take our brooms and join this woman in the search for these infinitely valuable coins, which are lying all around us, covered up in the dust and trash which demons have piled on them! The angels around the Throne are ready to rejoice with us whenever we find a piece of this lost money. This is the treasure we are to lay up in heaven, where it will accumulate new luster. and shine in our crowns of rejoicing when gold, pearls, and diamonds shall have lost their glitter and ceased to sparkle.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On vv4, 8, 11, 12, 22, 24
Matthew
‘THAT WHICH WAS LOST’
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PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE
Mat 18:13. - Luk 15:4.
Like other teachers, Jesus seems to have had favourite points of view and utterances which came naturally to His lips. There are several instances in the gospels of His repeating the same sayings in entirely different connections and with different applications. One of these habitual points of view seems to have been the thought of men as wandering sheep, and of Himself as the Shepherd. The metaphor has become so familiar that we need a moment’s reflection to grasp the mingled tenderness, sadness, and majesty of it. He thought habitually of all humanity as a flock of lost sheep, and of Himself as high above them, unparticipant of their evil, and having one errand-to bring them back.
And not only does He frequently refer to this symbol, but we have the two editions, from which my texts are respectively taken, of the Parable of the Lost Sheep. I say two editions, because it seems to me a great deal more probable that Jesus should have repeated Himself than that either of the Evangelists should have ventured to take this gem and set it in an alien setting. The two versions differ slightly in some unimportant expressions, and Matthew’s is the more condensed of the two. But the most important variation is the one which is brought to light by the two fragments which I have ventured to isolate as texts. ‘If He find’ implies the possible failure of the Shepherd’s search; ‘till He find’ implies His unwearied persistence in the teeth of all failure. And, taken in conjunction, they suggest some very blessed and solemn considerations, which I pray for strength to lay upon your minds and hearts now.
I. But first let me say a word or two upon the more general thought brought out in both these clauses-of the Shepherd’s search.
Now, beautiful and heart-touching as that picture is, of the Shepherd away amongst the barren mountains searching minutely in every ravine and thicket, it wants a little explanation in order to be brought into correspondence with the fact which it expresses. For His search for His lost property is not in ignorance of where it is, and His finding of it is not His discovery of His sheep, but its discovery of its Shepherd. We have to remember wherein consists the loss before we can understand wherein consists the search.
Now, if we ask ourselves that question first, we get a flood of light on the whole matter. The great hundredth Psalm, according to its true rendering, says, ‘It is He that hath made us, and we are His; . . . we are . . . the sheep of His pasture.’ But God’s true possession of man is not simply the possession inherent in the act of creation. For there is only one way in which spirit can own spirit, or heart can possess heart, and that is through the voluntary yielding and love of the one to the other. So Jesus Christ, who, in all His seeking after us men, is the voice and hand of Almighty Love, does not count that He has found a man until the man has learned to love Him. For He loses us when we are alienated from Him, when we cease to trust Him, when we refuse to obey Him, when we will not yield to Him, but put Him far away from us. Therefore the search which, as being Christ’s is God’s in Christ, is for our love, our trust, our obedience; and in reality it consists of all the energies by which Jesus Christ, as God’s embodiment and representative, seeks to woo and win you and me back to Himself, that He may truly possess us.
If the Shepherd’s seeking is but a tender metaphor for the whole aggregate of the ways by which the love that is divine and human in Jesus Christ moves round about our closed hearts, as water may feel round some hermetically sealed vessel, seeking for an entrance, then surely the first and chiefest of them, which makes its appeal to each of us as directly as to any man that ever lived, is that great mystery that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, left the ninety-and-nine that were safe on the high pastures of the mountains of God, and came down among us, out into the wilderness, ‘to seek and to save that which was lost.’
And, brother, that method of winning-I was going to say, of earning-our love comes straight in its appeal to every single soul on the face of the earth. Do not say that thou wert not in Christ’s heart and mind when He willed to be born and willed to die. Thou, and thou, and thou, and every single unit of humanity were there clear before Him in their individuality; and He died for thee, and for me, and for every man. And, in one aspect, that is more than to say that He died for all men. There was a specific intention in regard to each of us in the mission of Jesus Christ; and when He went to the Cross the Shepherd was not giving His life for a confused flock of which He knew not the units, but for sheep the face of each of whom He knows, and each of whom He loves. There was His first seeking; there is His chief seeking. There is the seeking which ought to appeal to every soul of man, and which, ever since you were children, has been making its appeal to you. Has it done so in vain? Dear friend, let not your heart still be hard.
He seeks us by every record of that mighty love that died for us, even when it is being spoken as poorly, and with as many limitations and imperfections, as I am speaking it now. ‘As though God did beseech you by us, pray you in Christ’s stead.’ It is not arrogance, God forbid! it is simple truth when I say, Never mind about me; but my word, in so far as it is true and tender, is Christ’s word to you. And here, in our midst, that unseen Form is passing along these pews and speaking to these hearts, and the Shepherd is seeking His sheep.
He seeks each of us by the inner voices and emotions in our hearts and minds, by those strange whisperings which sometimes we hear, by the suddenly upstarting convictions of duty and truth which sometimes, without manifest occasion, flash across our hearts. These voices are Christ’s voice, for, in a far deeper sense than most men superficially believe, ‘He is the true Light that lighteth every man coming into the world.’
He is seeking us by our unrest, by our yearnings after we know not what, by our dim dissatisfaction which insists upon making itself felt in the midst of joys and delights, and which the world fails to satisfy as much as it fails to interpret. There is a cry in every heart, little as the bearer of the heart translates it into its true meaning-a cry after God, even the living God. And by all your unrests, your disappointments, your hopes unfulfilled, your hopes fulfilled and blasted in the fulfilment, your desires that perish unfruited; by all the mystic movements of the spirit that yearns for something beyond the material and the visible, Jesus Christ is seeking His sheep.
He seeks us by the discipline of life, for I believe that Christ is the active Providence of God, and that the hands that were pierced on the Cross do move the wheels of the history of the world, and mould the destinies of individual spirits.
The deepest meaning of all life is that we should be won to seek Him who in it all is seeking us, and led to venture our hopes, and fling the anchor of our faith beyond the bounds of the visible, that it may fasten in the Eternal, even in Christ Himself, ‘the same yesterday and to-day and for ever’ when earth and its training are done with. Brethren, it is a blessed thing to live, when we interpret life’s smallnesses aright as the voice of the Master, who, by them all-our sadness and our gladness, the unrest of our hearts and the yearnings and longings of our spirits, by the ministry of His word, by the record of His sufferings-is echoing the invitation of the Cross itself, ‘Come unto Me, all ye . . . and I will give you rest!’ So much for the Shepherd’s search.
II. And now, in the second place, a word as to the possible thwarting of the search.
‘If so be that He find.’ That is an awful if, when we think of what lies below it. The thing seems an absurdity when it is spoken, and yet it is a grim fact in many a life-viz. that Christ’s effort can fail and be thwarted. Not that His search is perfunctory or careless, but that we shroud ourselves in darkness through which that love can find no way. It is we, not He, that are at fault when He fails to find that which He seeks. There is nothing more certain than that God, and Christ the image of God, desire the rescue of every man, woman, and child of the human race. Let no teaching blur that sunlight fact. There is nothing more certain than that Jesus Christ has done, and is doing, all that He can do to secure that purpose. If He could make every man love Him, and so find every man, be sure that He would do it. But He cannot. For here is the central mystery of creation, which if we could solve there would be few knots that would resist our fingers, that a finite will like yours or mine can lift itself up against God, and that, having the capacity, it has the desire. He says, ‘Come!’ We say, ‘I will not.’ That door of the heart opens from within, and He never breaks it open. He stands at the door and knocks. And then the same solemn if comes-’If any man opens, I will come in’; if any man keeps it shut, and holds on to prevent its being opened, I will stop out.
Brethren, I seek to press upon you now the one plain truth, that if you are not saved men and women, there is no person in heaven or earth or hell that has any blame in the matter but yourself alone. God appeals to us, and says, ‘What more could have been done to My vineyard that I have not done unto it?’ His hands are clean, and the infinite love of Christ is free from all blame, and all the blame lies at our own doors.
I must not dwell upon the various reasons which lead so many men among us-as, alas! the utmost charity cannot but see that there are-to turn away from Christ’s appeals, and to be unwilling to ‘have this Man’ either ‘to reign over’ them or to save them. There are many such, I am sure, in my audience now; and I would fain, if I could, draw them to that Lord in whom alone they have life, and rest, and holiness, and heaven.
One great reason is because you do not believe that you need Him. There is an awful inadequacy in most men’s conceptions-and still more in their feelings-as to their sin. Oh dear friends, if you would only submit your consciences for one meditative half-hour to the light of God’s highest law, I think you would find out something more than many of you know, as to what you are and what your sin is. Many of us do not much believe that we are in any danger. I have seen a sheep comfortably cropping the short grass on a down over the sea, with one foot out in the air, and a precipice of five hundred feet below it, and at the bottom the crawling water. It did not know that there was any danger of going over. That is like some of us. If you believed what is true-that ‘sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death,’ and understood what ‘death’ meant, you would feel the mercy of the Shepherd seeking you. Some of us think we are in the flock when we are not. Some of us do not like submission. Some of us have no inclination for the sweet pastures that He provides, and would rather stay where we are, and have the fare that is going there.
We do not need to do anything to put Him away. I have no doubt that some of us, as soon as my voice ceases, will plunge again into worldly talk and thoughts before they are down the chapel steps, and so blot out, as well as they can, any vagrant and superficial impression that may have been made. Dear brethren, it is a very easy matter to turn away from the Shepherd’s voice. ‘I called, and ye refused. I stretched out My hands, and no man regarded.’ That is all! That is what you do, and that is enough.
III. So, lastly, the thwarted search prolonged.
‘Till He find’-that is a wonderful and a merciful word. It indicates the infinitude of Christ’s patient forgiveness and perseverance. We tire of searching. ‘Can a mother forget’ or abandon her seeking after a lost child? Yes! if it has gone on for so long as to show that further search is hopeless, she will go home and nurse her sorrow in her heart. Or, perhaps, like some poor mothers and wives, it will turn her brain, and one sign of her madness will be that, long years after grief should have been calm because hope was dead, she will still be looking for the little one so long lost. But Jesus Christ stands at the closed door, as a great modern picture shows, though it has been so long undisturbedly closed that the hinges are brown with rust, and weeds grow high against it. He stands there in the night, with the dew on His hair, unheeded or repelled, like some stranger in a hostile village seeking for a night’s shelter. He will not be put away; but, after all refusals, still with gracious finger, knocks upon the door, and speaks into the heart. Some of you have refused Him all your lives, and perhaps you have grey hairs upon you now. And He is speaking to you still. He ‘suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not soon angry; hopeth all things,’ even of the obstinate rejecters.
For that is another truth that this word ‘till’ preaches to us-viz. the possibility of bringing back those that have gone furthest away and have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say about incurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knows nothing about ‘incurable cases.’ If there is a worst man in the world-and perhaps there is-there is nothing but his own disinclination to prevent his being brought back, and made as pure as an angel.
But do not let us deal with generalities; let us bring the truths to ourselves. Dear brethren, I know nothing about the most of you. I should not know you again if I met you five minutes after we part now. I have never spoken to many of you, and probably never shall, except in this public way; but I know that you need Christ, and that Christ wants you. And I know that, however far you have gone, you have not gone so far but that His love feels out through the remoteness to grasp you, and would fain draw you to itself.
I dare say you have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of some ‘scaur’ on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying white and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of danger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it died. But what if it had heard the shepherd’s call, and had preferred to lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk about ‘silly sheep.’ Are there any of them so foolish as men and women listening to me now, who will not answer the Shepherd’s voice when they hear it, with, ‘Lord, here am I, come and help me out of this miry clay, and bring me back.’ He is saying to each of you, ‘Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?’ May He not have to say at last of any of us, ‘Ye would not come to Me, that ye might have life!’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. W. McGarvey 1914 · Public Domain On vv8, 11 J. W. McGarvey's The Fourfold Gospel [XCII C. Parable…
J. W. McGarvey's The Fourfold Gospel [XCII C. Parable of the Lost Coin].
XCII. SECOND GREAT GROUP OF PARABLES. (Probably in Peræa.) Subdivision C. PARABLE OF THE LOST COIN. cLUKE XV. 8-10.
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c8 Or what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a lamp [because oriental houses are commonly without windows, and therefore dark], and sweep the house, and seek diligently until she find it? 9 And when she hath found it, she calleth together her friends and neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost. [The drachma, or piece of silver, corresponded to the Latin denarius, and was worth about seventeen cents. The woman, having only ten of them, was evidently poor. Such small coin have been for centuries worn by oriental women as a sort of ornamental fringe around the forehead. The phrase "until she find it," which is practically repeated in both parables, is a sweet source of hope; but it is not to be pressed so as to contradict other Scripture.] 10 Even so, I say unto you, there is joy [ Eze_33:11] in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. [By thus reaffirming the heavenly joy, Jesus sought to shame the Pharisees out of their cold-blooded murmuring.]
[FFG 501]
J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv4, 8, 10, 18, 21 (Greek - ἀπόλλυμι)." (See Scofield "Joh 3:16").
lost
(Greek - ἀπόλλυμι)." (See Scofield "Joh 3:16").
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv8, 11, 14, 20, 25 The parable of the lost piece of silver:
The parable of the lost piece of silver:
v. 8. Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?
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v. 9. And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and neighbors together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.
v. 10. Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.
The scope, tendency, and lesson of this parable is identical with that of the previous one. A single piece of silver out of ten which a woman possesses may not seem a large sum to lose (it corresponded roughly in value to the denarius, worth not quite seventeen cents), but the owner evidently places a different estimate upon it. She lights a lamp, she sweeps the house, she seeks most diligently till she finds the lost coin. In the first parable the tender solicitude of the Redeemer was brought out; here the unremitting diligence and search for the lost is emphasized. And then comes the joy in the same form of expression, a joyful shout to acquaint the people with the fact of her success. Thus also there is joy, wonderful and inexpressible, in the presence of the angels of God over a single sinner that repents and is won for the kingdom of heaven. The worth of a single soul exceeds that of the whole world, Mat 16:26; Mar 8:37; Jas 5:20. Some commentators make the application in such a way as to say that the Holy Ghost’s work in the heart of the sinner is here pictured. Just as the woman searched the whole house with all diligence, so the Spirit of God, in the work of regeneration, is of a cleansing and illuminating kind. He is not turned away by the frightful aspect of the natural heart’s depravity; He is not deterred by a long and arduous search for a backsliding sinner. Note also: The lost piece of silver is a very fitting emblem of a sinner that is estranged from God and has become a slave of sinful habits. The longer a piece of money is lost, the less probability is there of its being found again; it will lose its glittering newness and be covered with dirt and grime: so the sinner sinks ever more deeply into the filth of sin, loses his character and standing among men, and deliberately defaces the image of his Maker from his heart. Let such a one beware lest his time of grace expire and the searching mercy of the Spirit be turned in other directions.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 28, 31 When he comes to the house
When he comes to the house
"When the owner of the sheep comes home" or "When you come home." Refer to the owner of the sheep as you did in the previous verse.
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even so
"in the same way" or "as the shepherd and his friends and neighbors would rejoice"
there will be joy in heaven
"everyone in heaven will rejoice"
ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent
Jesus uses sarcasm to say that the Pharisees were wrong to think that they did not need to repent. Your language may have a different way to express this idea. AT: "ninety-nine persons like you, who think they are righteous and do not need to repent" (See: Hyperbole and Generalization)
ninety-nine
"99" (See: Numbers)
translationWords
joy
joy
heaven
repent
righteous
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 30, 31 15:4 A flock of a hundred sheep was of…
15:4 A flock of a hundred sheep was of average size for a shepherd of modest means. God’s people are often identified as the Lord’s flock (Ps 23; Isa 53:6; Jer 13:17; Ezek 34; Zech 10:3). • leave the ninety-nine others: Other shepherds could watch the ninety-nine, so those left behind were not in danger. The shepherd would do anything to find the one that was lost.
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