Luke 15
It is a wonderfully blessed thing to have one who could so well manifest God, not only in His words, but in His works and ways, as the Lord Jesus.
We may look at our sins, as a question to be judged of in the light of righteousness before God; and most important it is. But still, in one sense, God moves above all the evil, and asserts His right to show what He is. And blessed it is for us that God will be God in spite of sin. God is love; and if He will be God, He must be love in spite of all the reasonings and murmurings of the heart of man against Him. God will act upon (what I may call) the feelings of His heart and make them find their way into the hearts of men. And this is the reason there is such a freshness in certain passages of the word of God, however often we recur to them; because God especially reveals Himself in them. God never fails; the moment He speaks and reveals Himself, we have always the full blessedness of what He is. It is Himself who has come forth with power to our hearts—the blessed God. He will take no character from man. He has to deal with sin, and show what it is, and how He has put it away; but still above and through all He will manifest Himself. Now this is where our hearts get rest. We have the privilege to have done with ourselves in the house and bosom of God.
Man could not have borne the manifestation of God in the brightness of glory; so He hid it in grace in the person of the Son, of man. He clothed Himself in flesh; but the effect of the wicked and heartless reasonings of man's corrupt judgment was this—it forced Him to show Himself what He really was as God. When He presented Himself as Messiah, the Son of man, the fulfiller of the law and the like, this was not all the fullness of God. Man was always rejecting, and finding fault, and carping at certain things with which he could not agree; but, by thus pressing upon and urging Christ, man only forced Him to reveal Himself more fully, pressing out Him from what He really was.
In the chapters which exhibit this, the soul is arrested, and finds itself with unhesitating certainty in the presence of God Himself—in the presence of love. There we get rest and peace.
So in this chapter: He was forced to tell all the truth—that God would be God. If there was that which could make God “merry and glad,” as it is expressed in the parable (and such was the case in the welcome of the poor prodigal son), He would have His own joy in spite of the objections of men. This is what men object to. They do not deny that He is going to judge men (I do not, of course, speak of professed infidels); nor, as a general principle, do they object to God's being righteous, because their pride makes them think that they can meet Him on this ground. But the moment He comes to have all His own full joy, and to bring out that which is the joy of heaven, man begins to object. It must not be all of grace—not God dealing with publicans and sinners thus! And why not? Because what then becomes of man's righteousness? Grace makes nothing of man's righteousness; “there is no difference; for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Christ manifesting the light proved this; and man hated it. The thing that levels down the moral condition of man, and brings in grace to the sinner, is what man cannot bear. It is the setting up of what God is, and the putting down of man.
What man is always seeking to do is to make a difference between the righteousness of one man and another, so that character may be sustained before men. In John 8 we read that Jesus had one brought before Him who by the law was worthy of being stoned—undeniably guilty—that He might deny either mercy or righteousness. They thought to place Him in this inextricable difficulty. If He should let her off, He would break the law of Moses; but should He say, “let her be stoned,” He would do no more than Moses did. How did He act? He let law and righteousness have all their course; but “he that is without sin amongst you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Conscience begins to work (not rightly, it is true, for their character was what they cared about; still it would speak); and they get out of the presence of light, because the light made manifest what they were—it proved them sinners. From the eldest to the youngest all went out. He that had the reputation of the longest standing was glad to be the first to go away from that eye which penetrated and detected what was within; and they left Jesus with the sinner alone. He would not execute the law, for He came not to judge; “neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.” That which is produced here is light and love.
“Then drew near unto Him all the publicans and sinners to hear Him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them.” And after all it may seem strange to many, that, if God did come down here, He should take no notice of the righteousness of man, but be found in the company of publicans and sinners. Why this would upset all the moral righteous thoughts of men! And this is what God has to do, because they are wrongly based.
These parables then show with what sort of spirit grace is objected to. We have in them this great and blessed truth—God manifested.
“I will suppose,” it means, “a man in the worst and vilest condition you please—one reduced to the degradation of feeding with swine: but then there is something still beyond all this that I am going to bring out, something which your natural hearts Ought to recognize—the father's delight in receiving back a child. The father's heart would justify itself in its own feelings of kindness, let the condition of the child be what it may.”
After sorrow of heart among men—after the Lord Jesus had gone through the world and found no place where a really broken heart could rest (He could find proud morality, but no place where a poor wearied broken heart could find sympathy and rest, to open it and give it life), He goes on to show that what could not be found for man anywhere else could be found in God. This is so blessed! that, after all, the poor wearied heart, wearied with its ways, wearied with the world, can find rest in the blessedness of the bosom of the Father, and—what it could not do in any other place—tell itself out; now, that it has found God, it can; and this in truth of heart, too, as we read in Psa. 32— “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.” So long as I am afraid of being blamed, there is guile in the heart; but the moment that I know that all is forgiven, that nothing but love is drawn out by it.
I can tell out all to God. The only thing that produces “truth in the inward parts” is the grace that imputes nothing. This is the secret of God's power in setting hearts right with Himself— “there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared.” There is all the difference between finding a man flying from God by reason of his conscience, and his finding in God what in truth relieves and heals a conscience completely convicted. We cannot in our actual state, if under the law and acknowledging its righteousness, take it into our own hands. If I take the law to smite you, I must kill myself; it is too sharp to handle. The man who would stone the adulteress must put his own head under the weight of the blow. “O wretched man that I am!” If I am a man, I am undone.
We have three parables presented to us in this chapter. The source of that which is taught in them all is love.
1. The shepherd who sought the sheep that was lost.
2. The woman who sought the piece of money that was lost.
3. The father that received back again the prodigal son that was lost.
In the last it is not a question of seeking, but of the manner of receiving the son when he had come back. There is many a heart that longs to go back, but does not know how he will be received. The Lord Jesus says, that the grace and love of God are shown out, first in seeking, and then in the reception. In the first two parables, we have the seeking; iii the third, the reception by the Father. One great principle runs through them all; it is the joy of God to seek and to receive the sinner. He is acting upon His own character. No doubt it is joy to the sinner to be received, but it is the joy of God to receive him “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad,” —not merely meet that the child should be—glad to be in the house.
Beloved friends, this is a blessed truth! It is the tone that God has raised, and that every heart in heaven responds to. The chord God strikes Himself; heaven echoes it; and so must every heart down here that is tuned by grace. What discord, then, must self-righteousness produce! Jesus tells forth the joy and grace of God in thus acting, and puts this in contrast with the feelings of the elder brother—any self-righteous person—though the description be of the Jews.
(To be continued, D.V.)