The Tale of Two Sons

God finds His joy in the salvation of one lost sinner whom He runs to embrace.

We have a lot of views of God, that's normally not one of them. We're not used to seeing God so eager, so effusive, so loving, to the worst sinner. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. For more than 2,000 years, the stories of Jesus have fascinated everyone from children to scholars, and perhaps the most well-known is the parable of the prodigal son. Well, today John MacArthur is going to probe the depths of that story, one that is often misunderstood even by the most committed students of Scripture. Even if you know the parable, you may discover some encouraging shades of meaning you've never considered, as well as an aspect that may shock you. This lesson, The Tale of Two Sons, is part of a collection of some of John MacArthur's most popular sermons.

We've titled the series, Foundations Volume 2. And to continue that study now, here's John. JOHN MACARTHUR The text before us is 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. To get us into the story a little bit, I just want to remind you of some of Jonathan Edwards' resolutions, if I may. Resolution number one that Jonathan Edwards made was, I am resolved to do whatsoever I think most to the glory of God.

Number 27, resolve never willfully to omit anything unless the omission is for the glory of God and frequently to examine my omissions. I think we know Jonathan Edwards enough to know he was consumed with the glory of God. And Edwards also understood that God's joy is connected to His glory. God rejoices when He is glorified. He infinitely values His own glory and finds infinite joy in that glory.

Amazing thoughts. God's joy is greatest where His glory is greatest. And in human history, that is in the work of the salvation of sinners. God, writes Edwards, greatly glorified Himself in the work of creation and providence. All His works praise Him and His glory shines brightly from them all. But as some stars differ from others in glory, so the glory of God shines brighter in some of His works than in others. And amongst all these, the work of redemption is like the sun in His strength. The glory of the author is abundantly the most resplendent in this work of redemption. God's glory is greatest in redemption and therefore God's joy is greatest in redemption. Further Edwards said, Christ has done greater things than to create the world. What greater thing?

To obtain His bride and the joy of His marriage to her. God's single end in redemption is His own happiness and joy. And I might add, the more sinful the sinner has been, the more joyful God is in His salvation. To live your life to the glory of God and the joy of God, you must be involved in the work of redemption. That's what this story is really all about.

Let's look at it. 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? Chapter 15 verse 1, now all the tax gatherers and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. It was the outcasts, it was the scum, it was the riff-raff, 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 worst 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 operate 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 un-synagogued. 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 low-life 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.

Verse 2 says, And both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, or murmur, saying, This man receives sinners and eats 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 and every village and every neighborhood through the synagogue.

They really owned the synagogue layout and that's what dominated the life of Israel. 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.

They were the in-people. They were the pure and the holy, far too pure and too holy to be polluted by any association with sinners. And when they saw Jesus associating with sinners, they drew one single conclusion. He is satanic because He hangs around Satan's people. These people were the people who were self-appointed, religious, holy people who looked down on Jesus and this was a malicious attitude they had toward Him in which they assigned Him a place with Satan in the kingdom of darkness. They said He does what He does by the power of Satan.

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, verse 7, I tell you in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who 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. It 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, rejoice with me, verse 9, I found the coin, the application, verse 10, in the same way I tell you, there's joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. 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? Different culture, Middle Eastern village peasant life. We don't know about that.

Very different life. But for us to understand the story, we've got to begin to think the way they thought. And simply you just need 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 subconscious 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.

They worked hand in hand, but they both believed the same things. 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. Let's begin, a shameful request, verse 11. By the way, it's not a story about a son, it's a story about a certain man who had two sons, so three characters, a father and two sons. The younger of them said to his father, Father...that's very respectful, by the way...give me the share of the estate that falls to me.

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, tesisias, give me the property and the goods. He didn't want to take over his inheritance and to 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 this 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. 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.

A shameful request, however, leads to a shameful response. I want you to see what the father did. End of verse 12, and he divided his wealth between them. 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 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, those 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. That means the older son got his two-thirds, the younger son got the one-third that was coming to him and that launches a shameful rebellion. Verse 13, not many days later, this 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 in a state 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 anybody'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. The family would have 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. Total 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. I thought there were some things that weren't his fault, verse 14, when he had spent everything. A severe famine occurred in that country and he began to be a need.

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 when under siege, the Jewish people even ate the after birth. This is life at the bottom. And he becomes a beggar, verse 15. He went and attached, an interesting Greek word here, kalau, it means to glue. It's what beggars do. If you've been in third world countries, man, it's hard to get rid of beggars.

They stick their hands in your pockets, they pull on your clothes, particularly young ones. So he does this. He attaches, he finds some citizen in this far country which would be assumed 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 swine. 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. Verse 16, he's out there ostensibly to feed the pigs. Guess what? He's longing to fill his stomach with the pods the swine were 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 carib 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 carib pods with pigs in a Gentile place.

I mean, the shame is beyond comprehension. And even so, he is starving to death. Verse 17, he says, I'm going to die of 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.

This is desperation. 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. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, looking at a story that stunned Jesus' audience and has stunning implications for you today.

John's current study here on Grace To You is titled, Foundations Volume Two. Well, friend, if you're trying to think of verses that could clearly show an unbeliever the path to salvation, the parable of the prodigal son or the tale of two sons, as today's lesson is titled, probably wouldn't be the first passage to come to mind. And yet, John, there are a few places in the Bible that give a more vivid picture of true repentance and God's forgiveness. Yes, and it's sad to me that the story of the prodigal son ends up being some kind of story about parenting.

But it is not that. It's the story of salvation in the purest sense, and you're right. It is a dramatic and vivid picture of true repentance and the wonderful, free, full forgiveness of God to the one who comes to him in penitence. Going along with this message that we'll be giving you over three days, I want to mention a book called The Prodigal Son. It's a book on the same story based on the tale of two sons, which you're hearing these days. It's the story of the prodigal son. It's the profound illustration of the most horrible sinner that Jesus could invent.

That's what he did in the parable, and how complete the forgiveness of God was to that most horrible of all sinners. It's the most beautiful story of forgiving love. Almost everything in this story is a surprise. Everything is a shock, you could say. In fact, you could outline this story as one jolting shock after another. As Jesus tells the story, he shocks the listening, legalistic leaders of Israel.

It's full of shocks, and maybe the biggest one is at the very, very end. We're glad you're hearing it, and we'd love to have you get the book, The Prodigal Son, pull you into this marvelous story and be able to give it to someone else or use it in your Bible study. Available from grace to you. The book, The Prodigal Son, affordably priced.

Thanks, John and friend. This book is a marvelous look at the kindness God bestows on all who repent. To order a copy of John's book, The Prodigal Son, contact us today. Call us at 855-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org.

The Prodigal Son costs $12.50 and shipping is free. Order a copy for yourself and perhaps a few for your Bible study when you call 800-55-GRACE or shop online at gty.org. That's our website, gty.org, and remember, you'll find thousands of free Bible study resources there. If there's a passage in the New Testament that has always confused you, or if there's one you simply want to know more about, John has a sermon on it. You can also check out our blog. You'll find articles on compelling topics like the necessity of local church involvement and how to find contentment and many others. And if you have benefited from John's current radio series, let a friend know about it and encourage him or her to tune in to Grace to You on this station. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for starting your week with us and join us again tomorrow as John continues his compelling look at the Prodigal Son and its shocking implications for your life today. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.