A Tale of Two Sons
Notes
Transcript
Introduction:
Introduction:
The text before us, like so many texts, a very familiar text and yet there are so many unfamiliar elements to it, and that's the genius of our Lord as a teacher.
Anybody who knows this story knows the story that we call the story of the Prodigal Son.
You might be interested to know that it has been considered by some people, no less than Charles Dickens, the greatest short story ever written.
Also, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the greatest short story ever written.
Now that makes you think about...what am I missing?
Is there something there that I haven't seen? And there really is.
Background, a little bit, verse 35 of chapter 14, Jesus says at the end, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
This is a call on the part of our Lord to those who are willing to listen to His message, His message of Kingdom salvation.
And just who was listening?
Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him.
It was the outcasts, it was the scum, it was the riffraff, and it was the lowlifes who listened believingly, penitently and savingly.
And really these are two categories that are used sort of in a general way to describe the worse of the worst.
Tax collectors were the lowest people socially, religiously in the life of Israel. Why?
Because Rome occupied Israel and Rome sold tax franchises.
Greedy Jews who didn't care at all about their own people, who had no religious passions whatsoever and could somehow benefit from pagan idolatrous, Gentile occupation bought those tax franchises and strong-armed people out of their money, taking what Rome required and everything else they could get.
It became a way to occupy a criminal operation.
They were sort of the Israeli mafia.
They were surrounded by thugs, people who could extract the money out of people to fill their coffers.
They were unsynagogued. They were disassociated from society.
They were put out of families.
They were considered to be outside the purposes of God. They were the traitors of all traitors, hated by the people.
And then there's the term "sinners" which just collects the thugs that went along with the tax collectors, as well as all the lowlife criminals and prostitutes that occupied the base level of immoral activity in Israel.
These are the kind of people of whom the rabbis said, "Let not anyone associate with such people, not even to bring them near to the Law of God."
But they were the ones who came to Jesus. They were the ones who heard and listened.
And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.
These are the self-appointed elite. These are the religious leaders of Israel.
They had plied their legalistic religion through the local synagogues and so they really had the ears of the people.
They were in every town, in every village and every neighborhood through the synagogue.
They were self-righteous.
They believed that you earned your way into God's Kingdom by being moral on the outside, fulfilling all the ceremonies that were required of you.
And when they saw Jesus associating with sinners, they drew one single conclusion...He is satanic because He hangs around Satan's people.
This sets up the scene. Jesus is doing the work of God which is the redemption of sinners. That's what glorifies God.
That's what gives God joy. They see it as the work of Satan. That's how far from God they were.
You can't get more far from God than that, that's 180.
His response to their self-righteous anti-evangelism was to unmask them as very far from God, very distant from God, knowing nothing of His glory and nothing of His joy.
He explains what He's doing in three stories.
The first one, verses 3 through 7, is a story about a man who finds a lost sheep.
It's in a rhetorical question, I won't read it.
But the end of the story is verse 7, the man goes, he finds the sheep, he rejoices with his friends because the sheep has value.
I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
Heaven rejoices over one sinner's repentance.
They didn't get it. This was the work of God that brought Him joy.
He tells a second story about a woman who lost a coin, again that has value.
She finds the coin, she calls her lady friends together.
And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.
Ø The application:
Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.
The point is, you are so far from God you don't get it.
God's joy is found in the salvation of one sinner.
That generates joy in heaven.
God is not waiting for ten thousand sinners to start the party.
He's not waiting for a thousand or a hundred or ten.
The celebration in heaven goes on over one sinner who repents.
This is the point of the whole chapter, the joy of God.
Now we come to the story I want you to look at with me, verse 11.
But I need to tell you just a couple of things.
This is a different culture.
This is Middle Eastern village peasant life, okay?
But for us to understand the story, we've got to begin to think the way they thought.
And simply, you just need to know one thing and that is this, they were dominated by a shame/honor paradigm.
Everything related back to what was honorable and what was shameful.
And they had a very, very clear, almost sub-conscious understanding of shame and honor. This is huge to them.
You did what brought you honor; you never did what brought you shame. And by the way, if that was true in Middle Eastern peasant life, it was particularly true among the Pharisees and the scribes.
The scribes, by the way, were the textual experts that informed the religion of the Pharisees.
And shame and honor were big stuff, they're always big stuff to hypocrites.
And you have to understand this, the story Jesus tells is a bizarre unbelievable, incomprehensible, wild, wacky, ridiculous story of non-stop shame that nobody could understand.
Everything Jesus talks about in this story is counter to their intuitive thinking.
It is against the grain of their society. They do not function this way. They do not think this way.
The level of outrage just continues to escalate.
This is a head-shaker and an eye-roller. The Pharisees must have been going...Whoa!!
This was just way over the top because everything was so shameful. Shocking stuff from start to finish.
I. A Shameful Request (vs. 11-12a)
I. A Shameful Request (vs. 11-12a)
By the way, it's not a story about a son, it's a story about a certain man who had two sons. So, there's three characters, a father and two sons.
And he said, A certain man had two sons:
And 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.
And at this point, they would step back.
"What? That's unthinkable. The younger son is asking the father for his share of an inheritance? He's out of rank."
There's a pecking order. If he's younger, somebody's older.
This is not only out of rank, this is disrespectful, this is selfish.
You get the estate when the father dies.
This is like saying, "Father, I wish you were dead. You're in the way. I want what's mine and I want it now and I'm tired of waiting."
He sees the father as an impediment, as a restraint, as an unwelcome point of accountability.
He doesn't want the father around. He doesn't want accountability. He wants freedom, independence.
He wants his money and he wants it now.
This is totally disrespectful.
This is, of course, a violation of the commandment to honor your parents.
He wants nothing to do with an ongoing relationship to the family.
I want you to notice something very important.
He says, "Give me the share of the estate," τῆς οὐσίας, give me the property and the goods.
He didn't want to take over his inheritance and begin to develop it and use it for the good of the family in the future, he wanted the cash.
I want the goods. I want the property. I want it now. I want no future with his family.
I'm not asking you to let me manage what is rightfully mine and would be mine at your death, and just give it to me early and let me take over the management.
He wants nothing to do with the father, nothing to do with his brother, nothing to do with the family ever again.
Ø And there is no precedent in Jewish society for this.
This is an absolute outrage. This is a shameful request.
And the village, as well as the Pharisees listening, if there were village people in the story, they would expect one thing...the father would raise his right hand and slap that young man right across the chops.
And then he would punish him as severely as it could happen, a beating publicly because the father must protect his honor at all costs.
II. A Shameful Response (vs. 12b)
II. A Shameful Response (vs. 12b)
The shameful request, however, leads to a shameful response.
I want you to see what the father did.
And 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.
What??? What?
The father is supposed to protect his honor. He does exactly what this willful, rebellious, hateful son asks.
This is absurd. You're supposed to wait till he's dead and then the younger gets one third, the older gets two thirds...but not until.
You might assume that a father would do this for a good purpose, but to fund the rebellion of a hateful, disrespectful son?
The father should do everything to protect his own honor.
He's been publicly embarrassed by this son and he needs to take the high ground and preserve his honor.
But he does the very opposite. He acts in a shameful, disrespectful way toward himself.
This is a dishonorable, ridiculous father.
First of all, no boy would ask that.
Secondly, no father would do that. The whole thing is an outrage.
Somebody might say, "Well the father must really love the boy."
Yeah, but it's a silly kind of love from a human viewpoint. It's a foolish kind of love.
This is not tough love. This is a ridiculous kind of thing, giving him his freedom, letting go of this boy when you know he's the kind of boy he is.
You'd want to do everything you could to pull him in tightly.
By the way, just as a footnote here.
The older son had the job in the family of protecting the father's honor and protecting the younger siblings from doing foolish things.
But the older son never appears here, never shows up in the story.
Some of those people, the Pharisees would be saying, "Well where was the older brother here? His duty is to preserve the father's honor if the father doesn't protect himself Where is he?
His duty is to protect the younger brother from doing foolish things. Where is he?"
So, there's a sense in which even the older brother appears shameful in the story.
But the estate is split, and that means the older son got his two thirds, the younger son got the one third that was coming to him.
III. A Shameful Rebellion (vs. 13-16)
III. A Shameful Rebellion (vs. 13-16)
Ø And that launches a shameful rebellion.
And 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.
his is to indicate how fast this young man acts.
He is driven by lust and passion and evil desire and there's no delay possible, he wants to move as fast as he can.
And what he does, it says, "The younger son gathered everything together."
In the Greek that simply means he turned it into cash.
Now how do you take an estate that's been accumulating for really generations, family building, a very large estate, this is a very large estate because there are servants, there are hired men, there are hired musicians, there's a fatted calf, all the stuff that shows up in the story indicates a very wealthy man.
How do you liquidate that rapidly?
Well you can do that but you're going to have to sell it at a...what?...at a discount.
So, he trivializes the value of this thing, he wants to turn it into cash.
Now, in Jewish culture even if you bought it, you couldn't take it till the father died.
So, somebody was willing to buy a future.
The reason they would buy a future is because they would get it at a discounted price.
So, he gets the cash, turns the property over to some buyer who will take that property when the father dies.
This is stupid, sacrificing your future on the altar of the immediate.
He goes on a journey into a distant country.
That was the whole point, get as far away from home as you can, far away from accountability as you can, far away from restraint as you can, far away from anyone’s scrutiny as you can.
Get out there where you can live exactly the way you want to live and nobody that cares about you is going to know.
By the way, there would be a funeral.
That's why later in the story the father says, verse 24, "This son of mine was dead." He was dead to the family.
A shameful rebellion, he squandered his estate with loose living.
So, driven by lust and sin and evil desire, he just wastes it, absolutely wastes it.
This is where prodigal comes from, it's a term that means wasteful.
He scatters his future and has nothing to show for it.
Loose living is dissipated, debauched, irresponsible living.
Later on in the story, his older brother verse 30 points out that he wasted a lot of it on prostitutes.
All that was his fault.
There were some things that weren't his fault, verse 14.
And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.
Not his fault, but that's how life is. And what happens in a famine?
You can read some fascinating things about famines in ancient history, people eat garbage, they eat sandals, they eat stray animals.
During famine times in Israel went under siege, the Jewish people even ate the afterbirth.
This is life at the bottom. And he becomes a beggar.
And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.
The word “hired” here, interesting Greek word here, κολλάω, it means to glue.
That's what beggars do.
So, he does this, he finds some citizen in this far country which would assume to be a Gentile country and he glues himself to this citizen and the guy can't get rid of him.
So finally, he sent him into the field to feed pigs.
It wasn't really a legitimate hiring, I guess he thought it was, but it wasn't, it was just a way to get rid of this relentless beggar.
Now you can understand the outrage.
The shame of approaching the father this way, the shame of the father in funding the rebellion, the shame of selling the estate cheap, the shame of turning it into cash, funding your gross immoral living, the shame of becoming a beggar attached to a Gentile and now to be sent to feed pigs.
And, you know, they're just rolling their eyes saying, "Nobody is going to do that, no good Jewish boy is going to do that. Are you kidding?"
And it gets worse.
And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.
He's out there ostensibly to feed the pigs. Guess what?
He's longing to fill his stomach with the pods the swine are eating because nobody was giving anything to him.
He went out there maybe thinking he had a job, nobody gave him anything and now to survive, he has to fight the pigs for the carob pods that the pigs eat.
I mean, this is just bizarre.
I mean, you go from wealth to trying to stick your face in between snouts and eat carob pods with pigs in a Gentile place?
I mean, the shame is beyond comprehension.
And even so, he is starving to death.
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 with hunger!
He can't do it. He can't beat the pigs to the pods.
What is this? What is Jesus talking about here? Well this is desperation.
This is the sinner, poor, destitute, hungry, hopeless, debauched, dissipated, dying.
And the lesson?
Sin is rebellion against God and God will give you the freedom to choose your sin.
You can choose it, He'll give you freedom to take your sin as far in any direction as you choose to take it.
Here is the rebellion of one who had no relationship to the one who gave him life, no relationship to the one who held all the riches he ever could have needed all his life.
No relationship to the one who could give him a future as well as a present.
That's how it is with sin, it is disdain for God's person, God's rule, God's authority, God's will, God's goodness, God's resources.
Sin is a desire to run from God to avoid all responsibility, or accountability to God.
It is to deny God any place in your life.
It is to dishonor God, to take all the loving gifts that are available and squander them as far away from God as you can get.
It is to waste your life in self-indulgent dissipation, unrestrained lust, shunning all God's goodness.
The picture is extreme, no question.
Not everybody is this bad.
But the question is, how is the father going to deal with somebody who is this bad?
Jesus really has invented the ultimate sinner.
This is as bad as you can get...disrespect to parent, disrespect to community, dissipation of your own body, immorality to the max, violating all your cultural conformities, going to a despised place and attaching to despised people.
This is the pits.
This is not skid row, the skid is over. This is the bottom.
This is the ultimate sinner and not every sinner is that bad, but it's pretty important to find out how this father's going to deal with one who is.
And the shame is not over.
IV. A Shameful Repentance (vs. 17-20a)
IV. A Shameful Repentance (vs. 17-20a)
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 with hunger!
By the way, that's always the start of repentance, when you begin to assess your true condition.
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 with hunger!
I'm dying here of hunger.
Just a little note here that Jesus speaks with an economy of words that's always staggering to me.
He says, literally, "More than enough."
Wow!
Let me tell you about a hired man.
The social structure, of course you had the land owners, the people with the money, and then you had the tenant farmers who rented little pieces of it and worked the land and you had the little shop owners who had maybe their own little business here and there, little craftsmen who did certain things.
Then you had servants.
Servants was a category of people who basically were part of the family. They were hired, you housed them, you fed them, and they did service and they really were part of the family.
Then you had what are here called μίσθιος, hired men.
They were day laborers, they hung around, they just hung around hoping somebody would hire them.
Like the parable where Jesus, you know, talks about the man who had a harvest and he went into town looking for people at 6 a.m., and 9 a.m., and twelve and then three, trying to find people who could come and work for the day.
Back in Leviticus it says when you hire a day laborer you have to pay him at the end of the day, can't keep his wages over night because, he says, he sets his heart on that.
He's got to feed his family; he works one day at a time.
These are the low people on a pole.
And some of them did very menial...most of them the menial unskilled work, although some were craftsmen of some kind.
But there's something about the father here that's really interesting.
He says, "How many of my father's hired men have more than enough?"
You know what that tells you about this man? Because hired men barely eked out an existence.
They were just a little bit above the destitute and he is saying, "My father gives the low people on the economic ladder more than they need”.
What does that tell you about the father? That he is merciful, that he is generous, that he is good.
And this is where he begins to realize the goodness of his father...he's good, he gives more than enough, and I am dying here with hunger.
And he begins to trust in his father's goodness and trust in the mercy and compassion and love of his father which he scorned once but which he recalls was characteristic of his father.
I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, 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.
Wow, this is embarrassing. He's not only got to go to his father and face his father and the way he's treated his father in the past, he's going to face his older brother, he's got to face the village.
The father has been shamed, but so has the son and he's going to get the scorn and the ridicule and the mockery and the disdain of the village because it was required to give him that.
That was part of the cultural punishment for this kind of misbehavior, to uphold the honor of the father and the village.
Not only that, he's looking at years of hard labor.
How do you earn back a third of a massive estate as a hired man?
At low wages this will take years and years and years and years and only after it's all been earned back, restitution complete, will there be hope of reconciliation.
He knows his sins are great, verse 18, "I have sinned...literally in the Greek...into heaven."
It's another way of saying what the Old Testament says, "My sins are as high as heaven."
There's no holding back here, he knows what he has become.
He asks for no privileges in his mind, no rights, he's forfeited them all. He can make no claim.
He doesn't ask to be in the father's house. He doesn't ask to be a family member. He doesn't ask to be a servant in the father's house, not at all.
All he wants is the father to be merciful enough to him to let him work as a day laborer, paying minimum wage for as many years as it takes to earn back everything he lost and the hope that there could be a reconciliation.
He sees now that when he's exhausted his options away from his father, all he got was death.
And he will pay any price for the life his father possesses.
He'll take the punishment, he'll take the humiliation, and he’ll take the hard labor.
What a picture.
Here is a sinner in true repentance.
He's come to desperation, who realizes that this is the path of death.
He wants reconciliation, he's willing to confess that his sins are as high as the heavens.
He knows he has no rights and no privileges and can lay no claim to anything.
He wants reconciliation at any cost, even a life of hard labor.
Boy, that's the real kind of repentance.
At this point the Pharisees and the scribes are saying to themselves, "Well, that's exactly what that boy should do."
This is the first thing that had any sense to it. That's what he should do.
And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
He got up, came toward his father, walked back in his filthy swine-smelling, stinking clothes, trudged back toward the village.
Now what can we expect the father to do when he gets there?
Well the Pharisees would know exactly what the father would do.
Finally this father has an opportunity to sustain his honor and to do what he should, what is right and just and honorable
And what the father should do is stay up in his estate and when somebody says your son has come to town, the father says, "I'll see him in four days.
Let him sit in his stinking clothes and take the scorn and the mockery of the village heaped upon him as discipline."
And then after four days, I will see him.
The father would expect him to come in, bow down, kiss the father's feet and take punishment from the father, maybe even a lashing and then get ready to work for decades.
And if he could sustain it for decades and decades and decades, then maybe reconciliation, but reconciliation comes only because of restitution...so said the rabbis.
There is no reconciliation without restitution.
But if you think there's been shameful behavior now, here is the most shameful behavior yet.
V. A Shameful Reconciliation (vs. 20b-21)
V. A Shameful Reconciliation (vs. 20b-21)
And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.
So much here...still a long way off, which must mean the father is looking.
I suppose we could assume that this was a regular thing for him, to look for that son.
Saw him...the father was the seeker.
Felt compassion...and those Pharisees are saying how weak is this man?
Can't he ever respond in a righteous honorable way?
And then he did the unthinkable...he ran.
Middle Eastern noblemen don't run.
It's not just something you don't do because physically you can't do it.
There's an entire body of literature, Jewish literature written about the fact that you don't run if you're a man.
They wore robes down to the ground and that was so that their legs were not seen.
It was a shame to let your legs be seen, that is, of course, the case still for some folks when you get to a certain age, keep those things covered up is probably a good idea.
But the bottom line in that culture was, if you ran you had to pull it up and to show your legs was shameful.
In fact, literature says that even a priest when he's offering sacrifice cannot lift his robe off the ground to keep it out of the blood.
There was one rabbi who condemned a man for lifting his robe above his knees while walking through thorns to keep from getting it caught.
You just didn't run.
You didn't run, first of all, because it wasn't dignified.
You didn't run because you move in a graceful stately manner.
And you didn't run because it would be a shame if anybody saw your lower body.
And if you pulled them up high enough and ran hard enough, they could see more than your legs.
This word "ran" in the Greek is the word for sprinting in a race.
This man came out of his house and sprints down the middle of town toward this son and the people in town in a Middle Eastern village would have been appalled, this indecent shameful thing.
The rabbis said a man shouldn't even jump for fear somebody might see your lower leg.
In fact, robes were called middabute(???) which means that which gives me honor.
So, what is he doing?
He's running through town bringing shame on himself, taking the abuse.
This is selfless.
This is self-emptying condescension.
Why is he doing this?
Because he wants...listen to this...to get to the son before the son gets to the village because as soon as that son enters that village, he's going to be mocked and scorned and heaped upon with shame and ridicule.
And the father runs through town, takes the shame to embrace the boy before he receives the shame.
This is downright crazy behavior for a Jewish Middle Eastern nobleman.
He embraced him, hugs the pig-scented rebel and kissed him...in the Greek, kissed him repeatedly, customary to kiss him all over the head, just kissed him all over the head, full reconciliation.
No shame for the boy, the father has taken the shame.
The father came out of his palatial home, came down, came to the village, sprinted through...took all the scorn and the shame...threw his arms around the boy, kissed him all over the head and everybody knew...he's received him fully as a son.
What is this? I'll tell you what it is in one word....grace....and they didn't get it.
Its grace and they didn't get grace.
What did he leave out?
What did he leave out of his speech?
Go back to verse 19, what's his last line in verse 19? "Make me one of your hired men."
But he doesn't say that.
He planned to say it, but he doesn't say it because he doesn't need to say it because he doesn't have to earn back his father's love.
He doesn't have to earn the reconciliation, he gets grace.
He leaves out the hired man part that would have been an insult to his father's compassion, an insult to his father's love, an insult to grace.
He just repents, he entrusts himself to the mercy of his father and that's all a sinner ever needs to do.
And this, of course, is what outraged the Pharisees all the time, Jesus gracing sinners...
Jesus embracing sinners, kissing them all over the head and reconciling with them.
We see A Shameful Request.
A Shameful Response.
A Shameful Rebellion.
A Shameful Repentance.
A Shameful Reconciliation.
VI. A Shameful Rejoicing (vs. 22-24)
VI. A Shameful Rejoicing (vs. 22-24)
But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:
And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:
For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
I love what the Father does here, in the original is has the word “ταχύς” which means, “without delay.”
The father here calls on the servants to bring the best robe without delay.
Because this is a picture of salvation and salvation is an instant thing.
No long processes of being reconciled.
It is an instantaneous thing.
Go, without delay, get the best robe, right now all the privileges restored.
A wealthy family like this would have had one robe, by the way, the father’s robe and it was used for the maximum kind of occasions of great grandeur and importance.
Get the robe, get the best robe.
Put a ring on his finger.
Put shoes on his feet.
All signs of full and complete restoration.
This young man receives reconciliation, restoration, forgiveness, sonship and all he does is trust his father and repent of his sins.
He has no plans for restitution, no works.
This is grace.
The gift of loving, merciful, compassionate father.
So, what to we learn about the father?
The father really is God in Christ, coming down from heaven to the dust of our towns to seek and to save the lost sinner who comes to Him.
God initiates, He is the seeker.
He sees the sinner before the sinner sees Him.
He finds the sinner before the sinner finds Him.
And He runs the gauntlet and takes the shame.
His love is lavish.
His pure grace is limitless.
Yo see the point, God finds joy in the salvation of one lost whom He runs to embrace, to kiss and to restore.
We have a lot of views of God, that is normally not one of them.
We see A Shameful Request.
A Shameful Response.
A Shameful Rebellion.
A Shameful Repentance.
A Shameful Reconciliation.
A Shameful Rejoicing
VII. A Shameful Reaction (vs. 25-31)
VII. A Shameful Reaction (vs. 25-31)
Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.
And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.
And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.
And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.
You see what happened, the Pharisees just showed up…they are the older brother.
The Pharisees were absolutely appalled at the love that Christ bestowed on sinners, and this brother was angry at the love shown to his rebellious brother.
The Father also invited him to the celebration, you see that?
Anyone who desires to comes to the cross of Christ, will find Him to be the perfect savior.
But he refused to go in, he decided to be with the 99 who do not need to repent.
He reminds the Father of all that he has done.
And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:
But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.
The hypocrites always have to remind themselves of the good that they think they have done.
I have been hanging around this house doing all of this work and as soon as your rebellious son returns who wasted his inheritance on prostitutes, you throw and party and kill the fatted calf; which you never did for me.
The Pharisees would have thought, “Finally, some sensibility in this story. Finally a guy with some righteous indignation.”
The Pharisees could certainly relate to this guy.
Look how he answers him in verse 29, “Lo,” that is like saying “Look.”
You do not answer your father that way, you call him “Father.”
And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.
Wow!
“Son” is “τέκνον” , “my child.”
The father is still gracing rebellion.
And all of this is to tell us that even the worst sinner falls within the purview of God’s Grace.
How does the story end?
Well, I would like to say, “that upon hearing the words of the Father and desiring reconciliation, confessed his hypocrisy and asked the father for forgiveness and was embraced and kissed and was taken into the banquet and was seated at the father’s table.
I would like to tell you that is how it ends.
But I cannot write the ending, the ending has already been written.
Here is the ending, “Upon hearing this, the older son being outraged at his father picked up a piece of wood and beat his father to death.”
That is the ending.
It would only be a few months before the Pharisee, who again is pictured by the older son, would kill Christ by nailing Him to wood.
And would congratulate themselves that what they had done was an act of honor that protected their people, their nation, and their religion from one who came to shame it.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive The Tale of Two Sons
That’s how the story ended. And the final irony is that the father who should have beaten the son is beaten to death by the wicked son in the greatest act of evil ever.
They thought that they were religious and they did not understand understand love, mercy, and grace.
Yet God is a gracious Father in Christ uses the murder as a means by which He purchases our salvation.