Autobiography of God: Discover the Extravagant Love of God

Ogilvie

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THE PRODIGAL GOD

LUKE 15 : 11-24 : Parable of Extravagant Love

Rivet your attention on him. Don’t take your eyes off him. Observe his actions and reactions. Listen to him, feel his heart break, sense the depth of his relentless love. He is the central character of Jesus’ greatest parable.

The father. The spotlight is never off him. He is at center stage the moment the curtain goes up. He dominates every scene, even when he’s offstage. The two sons are but supporting characters, vivid contrasts to the father. Change the scenery and his gracious love still thunders through. He speaks both when delivering his eloquent lines and when he silently waits. Who is the father? Jesus hoped we’d ask. The father is God; and God is the real prodigal. This is the parable of the prodigal God!

Shocking? Perhaps. But read Jesus’ amazing drama again. Then check the definition of prodigal. It means extravagant, lavish, unrestrained and copious. That describes the father more than the sons. Their negative prodigality is set in bold relief to the creative prodigality of the father. And in the shadows: God.

Prodigal! Let the word stand. Take any of the alternative definitions, it still holds true. Tradition assigned it to the lost son. It belongs to the father. His love knew no limits, his forgiveness no boundaries, his joy no restraint—prodigal love for the lost. Jesus’ parable was in response to the Pharisees’ criticism of His involvement with sinners. It is the story line of the whole autobiography of God, lived and told by Immanuel, God with us.

What is God like? Look at the father. Behold what God was doing and would do through the Parablizer Himself. It would mean Golgotha, but it would never end there. Wasteful? Lavish, extravagant, excessive? Yes! Especially when you consider the disastrous defection and the ultra-violence of humankind. Why track him in the corridors of conscience in the far country? Why this in-spite-of love? What did we do to deserve that? Nothing. That’s the mystery and wonder of it all. But we need love, forgiveness and reconciliation more than breathing, food or sleep. That’s what He offers because that’s what He is. The prodigal God.

The parable will have its full, intended impact on us if we dare to live in the skin of one or both of the lost sons. Some of us may be in a far country of rebellion. Others of us may never have left the father, but the far country is in our minds and hearts. In either case, Jesus wants us to meet our Father Almighty.

The tender word Father soars above all other designations in the autobiography of God. More than a projection of the qualities of earthly fathers, it is a name that demands its own definition, by the Father Himself, through His Son. He taught His disciples to pray Our Father; punctuated His message about God with the sublime word; and articulated ultimate trust with His last breath on the cross, Father! The parable of the prodigal God was taught by One who was the Word of God, saying, This is what I am like. This is how much I love you.

The prodigality of the father in Jesus’ parable is focused in several startling ways. The drama has barely begun when we are aware of the first: benevolent approachableness.

A man had two sons (Luke 15:11). The sibling substance of that catches the attention of everyone who has lived in a family. But what must this father have been like that the younger of the sons could go to him and ask for his share of the inheritance? He would never have asked if he had been uncertain about the response. Father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me (v. 12). But he kept his real agenda hidden. Notice he did not say, So that I can get out of here and run my own life! Did the father know? Of course. Yet his magnanimous response was immediate. He was true to what must have been an oft-repeated affirmation to his sons, All that I have is yours!

Why would the younger son want to leave a father like that? There’s no hint of harshness. No rigid dictator, this father. He longed only for his sons to enjoy the fruit of his labors and careful accumulation dependent on him.

Linger for a moment on the meaning of our inheritance from our heavenly Father: the resources of life; intellect, emotion, will; healthy bodies; and a beautiful world filled with the delights of existence. Enjoy! But with one qualification: that we acknowledge that they are gifts and praise the Giver. There’s the problem. We want to claim them as our own, without Him, and live the lie that what we have and are is the result of our own clever creativity. A problem as old as Adam and Eve. The stupidity of independence. But then, most of us do not do very well with the realization that we could not breathe a breath, think a thought, or earn a dime without our Father’s momentary blessing. But we try! Like the younger son, we have to prove ourselves to ourselves. We all want to be the one thing we can never be: god over our own lives.

But there’s a deeper reason why the impetuous son wanted to get out on his own. What he could not emulate he had to eliminate. The son wanted to reproduce the quality he saw in the father. He wanted to be like him, but on his own terms. The assertiveness he felt in leaving his father was mistaken for happiness. His basic error was that he thought self-gratifying indulgence would make him happy. He had to prove that he was as good as, or better than, his father. The I’d-rather-do-it-myself syndrome had begun to eat at him. Soon it would nearly devour him.

There’s a word for that. It has lots of synonyms, but at root it’s sin. But the younger son committed sins. There was the one taproot sin of willful rebellion. Independence. The desire to be great on his own. Sow a thought and you reap an act. The seed of defection was sown long before the act of desertion.

The father let him go. This was the second evidence of prodigal love. The father loved the son too much to restrain him. He knew that love only possesses what it releases. We only have what we give away. Our hearts beat as one with the father in the parable. We feel the wrenching agony of the separation, the good-byes with so much unsaid. Did the son know that he broke his father’s heart?

Be careful how you answer. The question implies a deeper one. Do we know when we break God’s heart? We do just that every time we turn our backs on Him, resist His control, refuse His guidance, and renounce His goodness as the source of our lives. Some of us have packed up our share of the inheritance and have left the Father as if never to come back. Others of us leave in a thousand little ways that result in a life fractured from God.

The far country is the realm of rebellion. More than geography, it is a condition of the soul. It may be a total rejection of a faith that was once warm and dynamic. Or it may be relationships, priorities or involvements that focus our self-indulgence or aggrandizement. These are aspects of every one of us who has left the Father and dwells in the land of self-will. Those are the things we leave out when we are reminded that all that we have and are is His gift for faithfulness and obedience. What is your far country?

The younger son left for the far country in a decisive departure. He renounced his dependent sonship. Most of us drift into the same condition. Little things at first. Then our plans. Soon our money. Before long our deepest relationships. Finally our hearts. We are too pretentious to admit that to others—often even to ourselves. But we are no longer at home with God. Prayer becomes difficult and then exists hardly at all. God’s guidance for life’s decisions begins to seem irrelevant. We say, "After all, how can God be concerned with the personal lives of millions of people? He expects us to do some things for ourselves. Soon it’s everything! An uneasy embarrassment flushes through us when we meet people who talk about knowing God. Too emotional. We are intimidated by any intimacy with the Father. Things we permitted ourselves in either fantasy or action become part of the equivocation, Well, why not? Everybody’s doing it! But most of all, the Father is not very important to us. We live our lives. He’s up there," if at all. What’s down here becomes our far country.

The lost son of the parable is too often the easy characterization of the off-scouring of humanity—drunks, dope addicts, sexual deviants, criminals. These people are easy to identify as those who squander their inheritance of life. Many of us are not squanderers with problems, but just wanderers from our potential. Whether we are sleeping it off on a park bench or working it out in an executive suite, the plight is the same. Worship in a rescue mission for a bowl of soup is the same at base as worshiping in the right church for an image. Both reach a god far below God. There are many forms of destitution. A mother whose children have become her only reason for being is no better than a prostitute whose men without meaning are a way to a meal. There’s a sloth of inactivity and a sloth of over-activity; a brokenness of financial bankruptcy and a bankruptcy of financial success as an end in itself. The haves and have-nots share a lot in common beneath the surface: both can miss the reason they were born.

The hero in Winston Churchill’s The Far Country is guilty not of wanton dissipation of appetite, but of the rejection of his inbred, inherited ideals and dreams. He gradually lowers his values and his conviction of right and wrong in the practice of his profession. There are many ways of squandering our inheritance. We can dissipate our true worth as quickly as our wealth. In fact, many of us are tempted more by the former than the latter in our far country.

One Sunday evening after worship, two people arrested my concern. One was a street person whose life had hit zero below bottom. The other was a man who could not accept the gift of grace because he said he was living a full and satisfying life and had no needs! Both were lost sons in the far country.

And so are we when anything or anyone is used to fill our emptiness. There are no nostrums for the incurable homesickness for the Father, but we try. Success, position, recognition, accumulation. Like the lost son, we use good things inordinately for the wrong reason. The people and things he misused in the far country were not bad. It’s what he did with them and the substitutionary satisfaction they provided. His values were loosened, and a frantic lust for self-centered expression dominated his impulses.

What would we do in a strange city where anything was permissible because nothing mattered? Now add to that a strong intoxicant of seemingly limitless wealth to buy any person or pleasure you want. Remember: no rules, regulations, restrictions! What would you do?

I know a man who, when he travels in Europe and arrives in a city where he is absolutely sure no one knows him or cares, and with a fat wallet filled with unaccountable local currency, he gets an attack of gluttony, lust and carelessness. There are always plenty of people to help him. Until the money runs out!

The lost son was not on the town for a lost weekend fling. He thought he had left home for good. His inheritance was tender for a new way of life. One thing mattered: what he wanted, when he wanted it. After all, wasn’t the money his? Wasn’t he in charge of his own life now? Nobody could tell him what to do! No one dared, as long as he could pay for what he demanded.

We could leave that as an impersonal exposition of the parable if it were not for the fact that it’s painfully true of life, our life. What have we done with the gift of life? Most of us are living in a frantic search for meaning, purpose and significance. We stuff our lives with what we can taste and touch, save or sell. The question is not What will we do when the money runs out? but What can we squeeze into life and acquire before the undertaker arrives?

This far country will take all it can get. The only thing it has to offer is stark reality apart from the Father. The defecting son found that when his resources were depleted. A famine hit the land of his evasion. But the trouble gave him tread. The famine around him eventually forced him to realize the famine in his soul without his father. His descent into despair was rapid. Jesus describes that descent in vivid words that would make any Jew’s teeth rattle: the rebellious son lost all of his money; then he lost hope. Hunger finally drove him to become a hired servant of a citizen of the far country—a lowly misthios, a day laborer, the bottom of the three ranks of servants. A doulos was at the top—he was responsible for the men and maidservants, the paides and paidiskas. The son was hungry enough to be willing to surrender his dignity and freedom, and attach himself (the Greek means "pinned himself’) to his new master as a misthios. A pitiful end to his search for autocracy! He had left his father because he wanted to be free to be himself. Now, under a new master, he was to find out how shallow that self was. Look at him! A Hebrew feeding swine, which his ancient religion abhorred; so hungry he was willing to eat the carob pods the forbidden beasts refused. What ignominy!

It was then he came to himself. This means he saw himself as he was. It’s not easy to take an honest look at oneself. We all resist it as long as we can. To face the complicated complex of attitudes, reactions, thought patterns and personality traits that are the real me is frightening. Often it takes a tragedy, or the loss of a cherished relationship, or a disintegration of our carefully erected defense mechanisms. Coming to ourselves implies just that: seeing ourselves for what we are, what we could have been, and what we may become. It’s the strangely wrapped gift of the far country. A gift that enables us to see what we have done with the gift of life without moment-by-moment dependence on the Father. Then we can call it all by the right name: sin. Unblemished reality that frees the liberating realization: Why am I living this way? Or in the words of the son in the far-country, I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight!’ (Luke 15:18).

Note that the father of the parable did not step in to save his son from reality in the far country. There were no dispatched guardians standing by to soften the blows of the son coming to himself. The father allowed the shame and the degradation. Prodigal love again!

So often I hear people ask if God sends difficulties. He doesn’t have to. Life offers more than enough. We cry out, What’s the meaning of this, God?! He patiently waits until we can humbly ask, "What’s the meaning in this, God?"

It’s then that, like the son, we come to ourselves. Why do we insist on trying? A terrible loneliness sets in. It pervades our whole being. We want to go home. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you can go home again! The motive doesn’t matter. Hunger drove the son. A hunger no food can satisfy drives us. Our problems are only a focus of our deepest plight. What has happened around us drives us to realize what has happened in us. Life without the Father is no life at all!

Now the parable tells us what kind of prodigal love awaits us each time, every time, we return to the Father. He has been waiting, watching, longing for us. Behold your God! This is our God who sees His son a long way off and runs to meet Him. Jesus’ picture of the father running down the hill to greet his son implies more than meets first glance. It was considered very undignified for a senior man to run. Aristotle expressed the same shibboleth: Great men never run in public. But look as prodigal love gives wings to the father’s feet. He can’t run fast enough; his legs won’t respond quickly enough to express the expectant longing of his heart to welcome his son home.

Whatever else you believe about God, don’t miss this. He runs to us. Our least response unleashes His immense, unlimited responsiveness. Right now your God and mine is running to us to meet us and enfold us in His arms!

What a progression of lavish love! But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (Luke 15:20). The son had not yet given his well-rehearsed confession. The father did not reserve his love for a period of restitution. He did not keep him at arm’s length until he measured up.

This is the gospel in miniature: unmerited favor and love. Forgiveness is offered before we ask. We dare to ask to be forgiven because we are forgiven already. The invitation is for all the lost sons and daughters reading this, and for all the lost or wandering dimensions of our lives. The invitation is to come home. The simple decision to respond sets the prodigal Father running toward us.

Have you ever been embraced and kissed by God? I have. Often. When I deserved it least and needed it most, He held me with tender, strong arms. It’s happened not only after times of failure or resistance to His will but also times of realizing my inadequacy after seeking to handle life’s complexities and problems on my own.

Recently, I was in a bind of frustration trying to pull off a miracle on my own strength. I believed it was God’s will and something I should do for His glory. But God’s work done only with our strength never succeeds. I was cornered on every side by impossibilities. A dear friend was concerned about me and the project. She felt compelled to pray for the Lord’s wisdom for me. In her quiet, an answer came: Tell Lloyd to get rid of the shackles. When she told me, I was alarmed. What shackles? I searched my life for some area out of His will, some secret, unconfessed sin or attitude.

Then one night when I was all alone in prayer, the membrane of assertiveness broke and I was able to confess my sin of self-impelled determination that was blocking His power. A willingness to let go replaced the stubborn compulsion. I discovered the shackle-fear of failure. The Lord seemed to say, My son, I love you whether you succeed in this venture or not. Give it to Me. Only then can I give it back to you as a gift. Then I knew what to confess. All the Lord wants from us is complete dependence and daring faith. Then He can bless us.

Look at the extravagant blessing the father in Jesus’ parable gave the son to welcome him home. Prodigality! The embrace and the kiss of reconciliation were followed by lavish, symbolic assurances of love.

The father’s astonished servants must have run after him to meet the son, trying to keep pace with the old man’s burst of energy. They were there to take the sublime commands. Quickly, bring out the best robe and put it on him (Luke 15:22). The words best robe can mean either the father’s own robe, the robe kept for the honored guest, or the son’s former robe. Any, or all, are implied by the father’s love-drenched command. It was his way of expressing delight and unrestrained excitement. After all he had done, the son was still an honored guest not only in his father’s home, but also in his heart.

Then a ring was placed on the son’s calloused, dirty hand. The signet ring was symbolic of filial bonds no failure could break. It was the father’s way of saying, You have been, and always will be, my son and recipient of my love. Then he noticed his son’s bare feet: a telltale sign of the slavery to which his son had fallen. Put sandals on my son’s feet. He’s no slave. He’s my cherished and beloved flesh and blood!

What more need the father say or do? He’s already done so much more than was deserved or expected. But now the whole household and the countryside must share the father’s joy. Bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found (vv. 23-24). No wonder he wanted a celebration. He thought his son was lost forever. He’s alive! Spare nothing. I want the whole world to know my son is home and to celebrate with me.

That’s what happens with God and all the company of heaven when you and I come home by faith. The heavenly celebration is repeated each time we come back after a time of trying to live without Him in ventures or relationships of our lives. The realization that we have the capacity to bring our heavenly Father joy is the liberating nature of the Christian life. Can it be true? Yes! His Son knows and He told us in a parable we can’t forget. Jesus has caught our attention, indeed.

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THE FAR COUNTRY AT HOME

LUKE 15 : 25-32 : Parable of the Elder Brother

The plot intensifies. Most of Jesus’ listeners could not allow themselves to identify with any aspect of the lost son, but the account of the elder brother’s response left them little room for escape.

Now his older son was in the field (Luke 15:25). Not surprising. He is responsibility and industriousness personified. Life is a serious business. There’s work to be done, duties to be accomplished. All the time the younger son was off squandering his portion of the inheritance, the older son was keeping the farm. With good reason: When the wealth was divided, as the firstborn, he received a double portion, two-thirds of the property. Deuteronomy 21:17 made that very clear. The elder son was not working those fields out of love and faithfulness to his father. They belonged to him! That’s why he was working so hard. But like his brother, he, too, forgot that what he had was a trust from the father to be enjoyed with thankfulness.

The elder brother is a look in the mirror for most of us. We are forced to see more than we want to acknowledge. The lines of pride, judgmentalism and self-sufficiency have been cut, like the plowman’s furrows, in our brow. Our jaws are set with serious determination. Most frightening of all, there’s no joy in our eyes. Little wonder. There’s little experience of grace in our hearts.

Empathy and identification flow together as we watch the elder brother. He was so right, accurate and incisive. Why shouldn’t he be indignant when he returned from his hard work to find a party in full swing. What’s all the celebration about? Why weren’t those servants and friends out in the field working with him?

Indignation became rage when he learned the reason for the celebration. His brother was back! Why celebrate that? That squanderer, loose-liver, irresponsible spender deserved no party. The elder brother would have no part of that. He would not dignify the celebration with his presence. He turned on his heel in consternation, white-hot anger flowing through his veins.

And there’s the running, prodigal father again on center stage pursuing him as he had run toward the other lost son. Come to the party! Love’s entreaty. The father took it for granted that his older son would be ecstatic over his brother’s safe return. If not that, surely he would share the joy of his father’s heart. Your brother has come home!

So much of the elder brother’s attitude is focused in his response. Look! For so many years I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet you have never given me a young goat, so that I might celebrate with my friends; but when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him (Luke 15:29-30). In almost every word, he exposed his self-justifying relationship to the father.

But more than that, did he not expose what was hidden in his own mind’s far country? His indignant blast of anger includes accusations of sins not enumerated elsewhere in the parable. Prostitutes? Riotous living? Were these the elder brother’s own sins of fantasy? He read into the record his own imagination of what his brother had done. Projection. His vitriolic tirade tells us more about him than about his brother. We become what we hide. The surface has to be kept carefully polished so that no one will suspect.

The elder brother was self-righteous. His status with the father, he thought, was dependent on his service and obedience. He had never missed a move in his carefully plotted game plan. Completely missing his father’s gracious heart, he was determined to be impeccable and flawless. All so that he could maintain his status on the basis of his own adequacy. He wanted to be loved for his perfection.

That made him proud. If our goodness is our status, what’s left but to extol and worship our accomplishment? We soon build our

whole life around an arrogant self-satisfaction. At the core we are no different than the lost son. We really believe that what we have and can produce belong to us. Our rebellion is the same as the younger brother. What’s mine is mine! I worked for it, preserved it, multiplied it, perfected it.

That leads to bitter judgmentalism. The lost and broken are the way they are because they didn’t work as hard as we have. It’s their own fault. The older brother sounds so righteous, doesn’t he?

But the raw nerve in him was his need for his father’s approval and esteem. How could it be that a celebration would be given for a son who was so profligate? Had the world gone mad? Were there no standards? Had his father lost all his senses in sentimentality? What the elder brother was really saying was, What about me? Don’t you admire my faithfulness? Have I worked all these years for nothing? You’ve never given me an appreciation banquet!

The pain in the father’s voice expresses his dawning realization that his elder son did not share his heart of love. Competition and rivalry with his younger brother had been brewing for a long time. The old insecurity and fears of childhood returned in full force. Did the father love the younger son more than him? What the elder son could not accept was that his father loved them equally. If he had known that, he wouldn’t have had to work so hard for the approval he had all along.

Listen to the father. Watch his face as you listen to his words: "Son [teknon—a word of tender endearment], you have always been with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, for this brother of yours was dead and has begun to live, and was lost and has been found" (Luke 15:31-32).

There’s prodigal love at its fullest. The father had loved the elder son all along. All things were his. Feel the heartbreak of the father, more excruciating than when the younger son left home. He realized that his elder son had never really been at home.

The elder son’s work was not out of gratitude. He had not accepted the father’s daily flow of provision, sustenance and opportunity as evidence of love. Most of all, he did not share the father’s love for his brother.