Luke 15
No. 5.
IN this, the third of these wonderful parables, the Lord Jesus takes up the way in which your fears, doubts, and feelings are met by the grace so simply and blessedly brought out in the first two parables.
It is clear enough that the Lord did not intend to put these feelings into the foreground in either the first or the second parable, because a piece of money has no feelings, and a sheep could not be supposed to have such a variety of doubts and fears and anxious calculations as to its safety on the Shepherd’s shoulders as you have nursed, perhaps for many years, in your heart.
Now in this last touching picture of the fullness of divine grace, we get the cause of these feelings brought out by the One who understands perfectly every movement of our hearts, and in passing from “he began to be in want” to “they began to be merry” we pass from a misery and wretchedness of heart so deep and unsatisfied that it can only be expressed by “began to be in want,” to a fullness of joy so deep that after an eternity has been spent in it it will only have begun.
There is no need to enter in detail into the downward path of the wanderer. The steps are rapidly told that bring him to the beginning of an experience that is the natural result of his place. The heart cannot be happy without God. He made us for Himself, nor can we ever be happy away from Him. A saint of ancient times, whose path in sin had been such as the Lord describes here, wrote from his heart, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”
Thus we get the other side of the first parable, there the Shepherd could not rest without His sheep. How deep are these cords of love, these bands of a man! Here is a poor miserable heart, away from God, tasting the fruits of sin in misery and emptiness of soul, and the sense of this emptiness and need is the first sign of that work of the Holy Ghost which is not complete until the empty heart is brought to rejoice in the fullness of the Father’s love in the place where His love can rest.
But the first effort of the heart feeling the need, but far from desiring to get back to God, is to seek to satisfy this need in the far country. The lesson is soon learned that the world does not give, it takes longer to learn that the world cannot satisfy. Swine’s food will not minister to a heart that God meant to be satisfied with Christ. Lastly the wretched man comes to himself and learns his real state. There is bread in the father’s house. Who told him so? This is the second sign of the work of the Holy Ghost; the One who awakens the sense of need, reveals the place where the need may be met.
“I will arise and go to my father.” It is here that exercise of soul really begins, a distinct thing from the sense of misery and unrest of heart experienced by one who is away from God and knows it. As soon as he thinks of his father, and of going back to him, he finds out that it is not only a question of bread, but of sin. With his back to the father he can say, “I perish with hunger,” but the moment he turns his face to the father, it is, “I have sinned.”
Here it is that the blessed Lord brings out the root and source of all the doubts and fears that accompany these exercises of heart about sin. It lies in this, we have lost the knowledge of God. It comes out at once in our feelings and in our thoughts of the way in which He will act toward us.
The Lord brings this out very simply, but in such a wonderful way that I cannot look into this mirror, held up by Him, without exclaiming, “That’s me!”
This is how He does it. The son makes up his mind what he will say to his father when he gets back. He has two things in his mind, first, and as yet the deepest, is his need of bread, of which the very servants have such abundance, second, though he knows it ought to come first, is his sense that he has sinned. So he resolves to say, “Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee; and am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of thy hired servants.”
He rightly put his confession of sin first, but what do you think of the second part? Very humble and becoming, do you say? No doubt that is what the son thought too, when he set off, with this ready in his heart. But it shows two simple things: —
He did not know his father.
He did not know himself.
He thought that the father was one who would receive him on terms of his own making, that the father would come down to be the minister of his needs in return for service rendered, that he would pass over his sin and put him in the servant’s place to hold it on servants’ conditions — good behavior. That shows how much he knew of the father.
Then he thought that though he had certainly been too bad to be a son, yet he was at least good enough to be a servant. How wonderfully it brings out what our thoughts are naturally, even when the Spirit of God has wrought in us.
This is at the bottom of the doubts and fears as to our place of acceptance and eternal salvation, it is self. The son thought there was some goodness left in him, so do we as long as we want to make God’s grace to us depend on something in us.
Now mark what the son actually said after the father had bridged “the great way off,” had thrown his arms around him and kissed him.
Listen! — “Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”
Where is the rest? Gone, and gone forever. His conditions have disappeared. He has learned, in the deep silent love of that welcome, what the father’s heart is. In one moment he has learned that he is infinitely too vile to be a servant, and that the father’s love is infinitely too great to give him any place but a son’s. How poor, and mean, and contemptible now appear those words which seemed so humble and becoming before he met his father.
We have yet to see how the father, having set this poor heart at rest as to its reception, perfects his own work, until “they began to be merry.” Here Jesus shows the Father receiving the sinner as a son. What do you say to that?
S. H. H.