prodigal son

Jacob – the Prodigal Son

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Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. Luke 15:13 ESV

Of all the parables that Jesus told, the one we call, “The Prodigal Son’” is likely everyone’s favorite. We love this story because at some point in our lives we have been (or maybe still are) that prodigal son. And though this wonderful story seems unique to Jesus, I was surprised recently when I began to see parallels with another young man, in the Bible whose name was Jacob. We usually think of Jacob, wrestling all night with an angel, or of His tricking his father into blessing him, by pretending to be his older brother Esau. But I have rarely thought of how, just like the prodigal, Jacob ran away from his family at a very tender age. Though, Jacob got to feed sheep while the prodigal was feeding pigs, Jacob still ended up doing hard and thankless work. Instead of the good life that Jacob had hoped for when he lied to gain his father’s blessing, Jacob ended up a thousand miles away herding sheep.

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Why does any of this matter? Because, while the prodigal’s problems seem to be solved quickly in Jesus’s parable, our real-life prodigal problems take a lot longer to fix. Children run away and decades latter we are still praying for their return. Maybe we are the ones who have been running from God’s calling, and half a lifetime has passed us by. Jacob’s story of redemption spanned twenty-years and eight long chapters in the book of Genesis. From the very beginning though, God was watching over Jacob, long before Jacob was looking for God. While Esau, loved pleasing their father by bringing in fresh game from his hunting, Jabob stayed closer to home, working on pleasing his mother. When Esau came in from a hunting trip exhausted, Jacob showed no mercy and bargained for a better place in the family by selling his own twin brother a bowl of stew. Jacob was devious, willing to lie and unconcerned about the welfare of his brother, yet, the Bible says that God loved Jacob and didn’t give up on him. In that same way, If you have wept tears, and given up on praying for a prodigal in your family, know that God is still at work. God has ways of breaking through stubbornness, our pride and sin, not with harsh punishment, but by grace. Stay tuned for a surprising meeting in the desert, where Jacob first begins to hear the voice of God!

Steadfast Love and the Prodigal Son

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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness! Lamentations 3:22-23 ESV

  • God’s love never ceases: It has never changed in the past and will never change in the future. God doesn’t love us more when we succeed or do a good deed, and He doesn’t love us less when we fail, or fall into sin. We come home to God by believing He is loving and willing to accept us. God’s love is like the father’s love in the parable of the prodigal son. Just like that Father, God is still willing to accept us and include us into His family, when we leave our own way of doing things and come home to him.
  • God’s mercies never come to an end: When God forgives us, He adopts us into His family. He isn’t just being kind to us on a one-time basis. He will not wake up tomorrow and say, “Okay that’s it. The visit is over. Pack your bags and move out!” When God receives us into His family He says, “This my son, was dead, but now he is alive!” You see, even when the prodigal was spiritually dead to his father, he was still considered a son. Now he has come home, that dead relationship became a living one. Our living relationship to God begins by our believing in our Father’s mercy because of the cross of Jesus. The blood of Jesus has paid the penalty of our sins forever and we don’t have to be afraid that God will ever change His mind.
  • Great is Your Faithfulness: We learn to be faithful to others, by seeing how faithful God has been to us. The prodigal came home thinking that he was going to work for his dad and live in the servant’s quarters. But his father had a different plan. He was given a welcome home party and then invited to come live back home. In that same way, we don’t work for God all week while living in the servant’s quarters and then go visit our dad once a week at His place on Sunday. Just like the father in the parable, God’s plan is for us to wake up every morning in His house, come down to breakfast at His table and spend our day, every day with Him! What an amazing, loving and faithful God we serve!

A Prodigal Grace

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And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.  Luke 15:20 ESV

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After the war, my dad ran a beauty shop for most of his adult life. In those days, shops were open from Tuesday through Saturday. Of course that did not mean he only worked five days. Oh no! Monday was the day when dad would clean the chairs, hairdryers, floor and the bathroom. Then, just when you might think that we were done, dad came home and took out an old fashioned accounting ledger, and balanced his books for the week. Now my dad was pretty special, but in those days one thing he did made me very uncomfortable. That one thing was his Italian manner of kissing me on both cheeks on occasion. Maybe when the prodigal son first came home he felt a little like me. He was stumbling home in rags after having wasted all that his father had given to him and the real embarrassment was not his father’s love, but his lack of any idea of how to love him in return. In my own case, when I frustrated my dad with teenage behavior, was ungrateful and rarely acknowledged that he was ever right, he just kept on loving me. That is not to say dad ever liked, accepted or encouraged my mistakes, but no matter how often I rejected his values or hurt his feelings, he kept on loving and caring about me.

That love of my dad, was great, but it was only a pale shadow of the love and grace of Jesus Christ. The baffling thing about that kind of grace is that when God sits down to His ledger book, there is no accounting practice that can explain why He should want to balance our debt of sin against the price of our redemption. But like the prodigal’s father, God runs and embraces us while we are still on the way home to Him, and then kisses us on both cheeks. The first kiss, was planted as Jesus suffered in agony on the cross for the sins we committed. The second kiss was given outside the empty tomb on Sunday morning, when He comforted Mary while she wept, and then appeared saying, “Don’t be afraid!” to the eleven disciples while they hid behind locked doors. How can we answer such prodigal grace? His answer is an invitation us to come home to Him, receive the cleansing of His blood, be filled with His Spirit and yield to the embrace of His amazing love!