The three species[71] of thorns that grew up and choked the word in this instance, are fair specimens of their class—fair samples from the heap. These and such as these slay their thousands still in the Christian Church. At this point, however, it is of very great importance to observe that all the transactions which are represented in the parable as having come between a sinner and the Saviour, are in themselves lawful; to overlook this would be to miss half the value of the lesson. In point of fact acts and habits of positive vice keep many back from the Gospel; but it is not with these cases that the parable deals—it is not to these persons that the Lord is here addressing his reproof. Everything in its own place and time; the lesson here is not, “A drunkard shall not inherit the kingdom,” but “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?” When the material of the temptation is lawful and honourable the temptation is less suspected, and the tempted is more easily thrown off his guard. The field and the oxen must be bought and used; the affections of the family must be cherished; but woe to us if we permit these seemly plants to grow so rank that the soul’s life shall be overlaid beneath their weight!
The mission of the servants successively to the streets and lanes of the city, and to the highways and hedges, with the urgent invitation to poor labourers and homeless beggars, the maimed, the halt, and the blind, is a vivid picture, given in prophecy, of what the Gospel of Christ does and will do in the world till the end of time. When many, and these the most wretched, are brought in redeemed and sanctified, the Lord is not satisfied; yet there is room, and the servants must go forth again to new, and if possible, more needy objects, with new, and if possible, more urgent appeals. “Whosoever will, let him come.” It is thus that the numbers are filled up in the kingdom of God; but let it be well observed that to be in a spiritually wretched state does not confer a favour or imply safety. These men were saved, not because they were spiritually very low, but although they were spiritually very low: they were saved, although the chief of sinners, because Christ invited them, and they came at his call. The more moral, and more privileged, who were first invited, would have been as welcome and as safe if they had come.
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THE LOST SHEEP, THE LOST COIN, AND
THE PRODIGAL SON.
Luke xv.
The three parables of this chapter, like the seven in Matt. xiii., constitute a connected series. As soon as we begin to look into their contents and relations, it becomes obvious that they have been arranged according to a logical scheme, and that the group so framed is not fragmentary but complete. We cannot indeed fully comprehend the reciprocal relations of all until we shall have examined in detail the actual contents of each; and yet, on the other hand, a preliminary survey of the scheme as a whole may facilitate the subsequent examination of its parts. A glance towards the group from a point sufficiently distant to command the whole in one view may aid us afterwards in making a minuter inspection of details; and, reciprocally, the nearer inspection of individual features may throw back light on what shall have been left obscure in the general outline.
The three parables, then, the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son, refer all to the same subject and describe the same fact; they contemplate that fact, however, from opposite sides, and produce, accordingly, different pictures. It is important to notice at this stage that the three parables of this group do not constitute a consecutive series of three members. In the logical scheme the stem parts into two branches, and the first of these is afterwards subdivided also into two: the lost sheep and the lost coin contemplate the subject from the same side, and in the main present the same representation.[72]
The repetition is profitable, for besides the intensity which reiteration imparts, the two parables, although generically the same, are specifically different. Together they represent one side of the fall and the redemption of man, while the other and opposite side is represented by the parable of the prodigal. But while the first two represent the same aspect of the great event, they represent it with specific varieties of feature. This will be more distinctly understood when we shall have examined the parables in detail.
In further indicating the relations which subsist between the two portions of the group, I shall, for the sake of shortness, speak only of the lost sheep and the prodigal, including under the first term also its twin parable of the lost money.