Tag Archives: two sons

LUKE’S GOSPEL…LOST THINGS – 41b

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“Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them. “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living….“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ “ ‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ ”

‭‭Luke‬ ‭15‬:‭11‬-‭13‬, ‭25‬-‭32‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Jesus continued…to the real point of His stories. 

“Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

‭‭Luke‬ ‭15‬:‭1‬-‭2‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Jesus’ hearers were quite comfortable with His stories until He changed gear. There was the ever-present undercurrent in the crowd. The critics were mingling…to watch, to accuse, and to gather evidence…not to listen, to learn, and to grow in knowledge and understanding. 

So, they murmured, and Jesus heard. 

Jesus never lost an opportunity to speak truth to power. Truth was His weapon of choice. Armed with truth, He came from heaven to confront the lies that were destroying His people…the delusions upon which they built their lives that led them off the path to lostness in a wilderness of chaos and confusion…and delusion. 

The Pharisees didn’t like truth. It rattled their cages. It messed with their comfortable convictions. It muddied their manicured theology…

…but Jesus loved truth. It hit the bull’s-eye every time. Truth was unchanging and infallible. He relied on truth to win every skirmish with His enemies and, eventually, to win the war. 

“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

‭‭Colossians‬ ‭2‬:‭13‬-‭15‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Jesus died in truth and for truth…He put every one of the plethora of lies and false claims of His arch enemy to death by revealing that He was the truth, the one and only Lord of the universe. Satan’s challenge failed. He could not eliminate Him. Jesus walked out of the tomb as an ever-living witness to the power of truth. Kill Him as they did, He is still and always will be Lord. 

What was the truth His story about a lost son was about to uncover? Jesus’ story ended with an unspoken question, the one He asked of Jonah. “Why are you angry because I am merciful?” and has no answer. 

The Pharisees’ whispered challenge was, “If you are really God, how can you associate with “sinners”? Don’t you know who they are?”

Jesus’ response was, “I’ll show you who the real sinners are…not the ones who know they are lost but the hypocrites who think that God is okay with them and they with Him!”

Hence the buildup of three stories. The first two unveiled heaven’s joy when lost things are found. The third story had the punchline…

“You hypocrites! You think that keeping the rules makes you okay. You are more “lost” than the rebel who forsook his home.”

Jesus’ story sets the record straight about God’s heart for lost people. They are lost because they left God’s path and tried another way. They thought that their independence was freedom. They found out that the wilderness was an uncomfortable and dangerous place, empty, barren, and nothing but a monotonous wasteland. Worse still, there were no signposts to show them the way home. They were lost in their lostness. 

For the rebel in the story, the party was over…money and fair weather friends were gone. There was no help from them. The lost son had only one way…go back home. He had to make a choice…starve and live with pigs, or eat humble pie and retrace his steps. 

The father watched and waited. He didn’t send his servants to capture or compel his son to return. He knew that, someday, his son would hit rock bottom. That’s real life. When resources are wasted, they don’t last. When the money is finished, friends vanish. Home, that once seemed a place of slavery and restriction, finally became a place of refuge, of provision, and freedom…not from boundaries but for safety. 

What mattered most to the father? The lost one was his son…his own flesh and blood. He didn’t give up on him. He didn’t write him off because of his behaviour. He waited to restore him when he returned. Such, said Jesus, is the heart of God. 

How unlike the elder brother! His heart was bitter, full of contempt…the self-appointed judge of his little brother’s behaviour. He compared himself with his brother and came out shining…so he thought. He forgot one thing…he and his brother were both sons of the father, no matter what they did…equally loved and equally valued. 

The Pharisees refused to acknowledge God’s love and mercy that embraces all people because they are His. God has no intention to squash, like annoying bugs, those who fail.  His call is the same for everyone…those who fail and those who judge those who fail…”Come home!” Both are guilty and both need mercy. 

The Pharisees didn’t get it. They killed Jesus for that!

To be continued…

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – LOST AND FOUND

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LOST AND FOUND

“Their grumbling triggered this story, ‘Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until you found it? When found, you can be sure you would put it across your shoulders, rejoicing, and when you got home call in all your friends and neighbours saying, ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost sheep!’  Count on it – there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than of ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue.'” Luke 15:4-32.

Jesus’ stories always had a target audience. Sometimes they were used to teach and other times to expose wrong thinking or bad attitudes – especially of His religious opponents. In Hebrew thought, parables were intended, not for information but for identification. Who am I in the story?

This story was one of three, called chain parables. There was a theme running through them, except that the third story had the punch-line. In the first two, Jesus spoke of lost property, a sheep, a coin, of value to the owners. In both stories, the search yielded success – the valuable property was found and the owner called on the neighbours to celebrate. We assume that the neighbours obliged by rejoicing with him or her because there was legitimate cause for rejoicing.

In the third story, something changes; not a sheep wandering away, or an inanimate object like a coin being misplaced, but a wayward son choosing to renounce his father, his family and his heritage and to celebrate his ‘freedom’ by squandering his inheritance with equally worthless hooligans. Of what value was he? In that state, a disgrace to his father and family.

And yet, when he shamefacedly made his way home, his father did not reject him as one would expect, but welcomed him home with open arms, and ordered a huge celebration for the ‘lost’ son who had been ‘found’. But unlike the neighbours in the previous two parables, the elder brother did not value him as a returning lost brother but rejected him as a worthless good-for-nothing. He focussed on his behaviour, not on his intrinsic worth as a son.

And here is the point of the story. It was glaringly obvious who the elder brother represented. The Pharisees had just been criticising Jesus for eating with rejects. They saw no worth in the people who did not ‘behave’ as they did, forgetting that their attitude of superiority was a stench in the nostrils of Jesus, far more offensive than the sins of the ‘sinners’ they despised.

Particularly offensive to Jesus was the contemptuous attitude of those who refused to rejoice over the return of lost sinners. From His perspective, it was nothing short of idolatry because they were elevating themselves above people and even above God. They were honouring themselves as the epitome of virtue and writing everyone else off as worthless.

There were two categories of people that Jesus warned about the fires of hell – the greedy and the hypocrite. Of no other groups did He tell stories to highlight God’s attitude to them. Unless they repented, they would be consigned to the garbage dump where worthless rubbish is burned.

The Pharisees thought sinners were worthless but they could not see that their own attitude stifled their potential and made their lives fruitless for God. The returning sinner was welcomed home and came back on track to fulfil his purpose in life. The interlude of his wandering away did not disqualify him from being a son. It only interrupted his fellowship with his father and his growth in becoming a mature son. It was not only an interruption but, in the long run, also a learning experience.

But for the hypocrite there was nothing of value in his attitude, only alienation from the father and the family. This series of stories should have alerted these religious prigs to the very thing in themselves that they judged in others. No wonder they could not rejoice over the return of lost sinners because they had no idea of just how ‘lost’ they were!

Born Free!

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BORN FREE!

“Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a divine promise. These things are being taken figuratively: The women represent two covenants. The one covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves. This is Hagar.” Galatians 4:21-24.

Who was Hagar? She was the Egyptian slave of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. Paul used the rather obscure argument about the mothers of Abraham’s two sons to explain why believers in Jesus are not slaves but sons.

God promised Abraham a son through whom He would make him into a great nation and bless the world through him. In order for Abraham and Sarah to know that their son would be a miracle child, God caused Sarah to be barren until the time came for her to conceive Isaac. Because of their impatience, Sarah urged Abraham to “help” God by resorting to the common custom of a husband producing a child through a slave woman. The baby born would become the child of the barren wife.

But this was not what God planned. Instead of Sarah adopting Ishmael, the child became a source of irritation between her and her slave. Ishmael was the son born of the flesh in more ways than one. He was the result of human scheming; he was the natural outcome of human intercourse; he was not conceived in response to a divine promise; rather, he was Abraham’s way of trying to force God’s hand; and his descendants have been enemies of the children of God down the centuries.

Isaac, on the other hand, would never have been born outside of divine intervention. Everything was against Sarah having a child. She was both old and barren. Only God could reawaken her dead systems and make them function again, and function efficiently to enable her to conceive, carry a baby to term and go through the rigors of childbirth unscathed and without the intervention of 21st century medical skills. Isaac was a God-child from beginning to end.

A good illustration, Paul! Anyone who thinks he can to satisfy God’s perfection by trying to be perfect, is on his own. But the problem is that he is up against his own perverse nature. Every time he is confronted with God’s requirements, his rebellious sin-nature rises up and resists. That’s what the law does. We are not neutral; we are hostile to God, enemies, hating the light because it exposes who we really are. Before we even attempt the impossible, we are gonged out. What does that make us? Slaves! Enslaved by our own nature and enslaved to sin.

On the other hand, Sarah’s baby came easily. When God said it would happen, it happened, on time and in His time. He made the promise and He kept His promise. Isaac was not a “borrowed” son but her son. Isaac belonged to Abraham and Sarah because God gave him to them. They did not deserve him; God did not give him to them as a reward for anything. God gave him to them because He had a plan and Isaac was part of His plan. Isaac was the beginning of God’s human family, Israel.

Salvation is like that. God gave it to us through Jesus. God has a plan. He wants a family of sons and daughters who are just like Him. Giving them rules to keep did not work but it was part of His plan. It showed His people how stubborn and rebellious their hearts were and that they could only become His true children by grace and through God changing their hearts.  Before He could send Jesus, they had to learn what sin was and that their only hope was through the sacrifice of a perfect Lamb. Jesus became God’s perfect son and His perfect Lamb.

We cannot have the law and faith in Jesus. The real problem is that people, even God’s people, find it difficult to believe that we actually have to do nothing except trust in Jesus to be acceptable to God. Like Abraham and Sarah, we think we have to do something to “help” Him so that He will be pleased with us. Until we get rid of that false notion and throw ourselves completely on His mercy, we will never enjoy the freedom of being God’s beloved sons and daughters, unconditionally loved and fully accepted as members of His family.

Acknowledgement

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.