In the first act of the drama,—the departure of the younger son, the case of angels and men, presents by far the most exact counterpart to the case of the two brothers. Man is the youngest child of God’s intelligent family. Elder and younger remained together in the house awhile. You may observe sometimes in human families that the children who have reached the years of understanding at the birth of the youngest rejoice over the infant with a fondness second only to that of the mother. Thus the elder brother angels of our Father’s house,—the morning stars of creation, sang together over the advent of man. But the younger son did not remain in the house: having become alienated in heart from the Father, he was uneasy in his presence, and sought relief by going out of sight.
In the description of the younger son’s conduct, we find a picture both of the first fall and of the actual apostasy of each separate sinner. “The younger said to his father, Father give me the portion,” &c. Only his words are preserved in the record; but we know that thoughts unseen in his soul were the seeds whence these words sprang. He desired to please himself, and therefore grew unhappy under the restraints of home. Bent on enjoying the pleasures of sin, he determined to avoid the presence of his father: alienated in heart, he becomes vicious in life.
The same two elements go to constitute the character and condition of the sinful before he is reconciled to God. There is a lower and a higher link in the chain that binds the slave. There is a body of this death, and a soul: there is a spiritual wickedness in high places, and a bodily wickedness in low places. The one is guilt, the other sin: the heart is at enmity, and the life is disobedient.
The younger son did not humbly sue for a gift from his father’s bounty: he claimed a share of the property as of right. The terms are significant; “Give me the portion of goods that falleth (τὸ ἐπιβάλλον μέρος) to me.” The phrase faithfully depicts the atheism of an unbelieving human heart; the fool hath said in his heart, “No God.” He has become brutish: as swine gather the acorns from the ground, heedless of the oak from which they fell; alienated men snatch God’s gifts for the gratification of their appetites, and forget the giving God. This seeing eye, and this hearing ear, and these cunning hands, the irreverent son counts his own, and determines to employ them in ministering to his own pleasure.
The father might justly have refused to comply with his son’s demand: although a certain part of the property might by law “fall” to the younger son at the death of the father, there was no law or custom that gave the youth a right to any of it during his father’s life. In this case, however, the father saw meet to let the young man have his own way; he threw the reins loose upon the neck of the prodigal. Although the father of his flesh could not see the end from the beginning, the Father of his spirit, in permitting his departure, already planned the glad return.
“Not many days after:” weary of paternal restraint, he made off as soon as possible. He gathered all; for he needed all as a price in his hand to pay for his pleasure. He went into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. Even a large substance may in this manner soon be consumed; money and health waste away quickly when they are employed as fuel to feed the flame of lust. An interesting parallel to this portion of the parable occurs in Luke xii. 45. A servant to whom much had been intrusted thought his master was at a great distance, and would remain a long time away; then and therefore he began “to beat the men-servants and maidens, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken.” It is when a man is, or imagines himself to be, far from God that he dares to indulge freely his vicious propensities: and conversely, those who are secretly bent upon a life of sin, put God far from their thoughts, in order that they may not be interrupted in their pleasures.
The crisis came. The “season” of pleasure did not last long; and the man who had “sowed to the flesh” was compelled to fill his bosom with an early harvest of misery. The hunger, nakedness, and shame that accumulated on the head of this wayward youth aptly represent the bitter fruits which sin, even in this life, bears as an earnest of the full wages in the second death, which it promises to pay its servants.
His sufferings did not in the first instance turn him from his sin: human sorrow is not all or always godly sorrow. Although the prodigal was in want, he did not return to his father. Convictions and terrors in the conscience seldom bring the wanderer at once to the door of mercy: he generally tries in succession several other methods in order to obtain relief. As the prodigal attempted to keep body and soul together by the most desperate and loathsome expedients, rather than throw himself on his father’s compassion; so an alienated human soul, conscious of having wantonly offended a good God, and therefore hating deeply the Holy One, will bear and do the will of the wicked one to the utmost extremity of misery rather than come home a beggar, and be indebted for all to a father’s love. The picture, although drawn by the Master’s own hand, is necessarily drawn in the colours of external nature, and therefore it comes far short of the original, which is a spiritual wickedness. The cherished son of an affluent and honourable house in Israel has become the swineherd of a stranger in a famine-stricken land: the transition is as great as could be displayed on the limited stage of the present world; but when he who was made in God’s image and treated as God’s child is bound by the chain of his own passions, and indentured as a slave in the devil’s service, the fall is greater, as heaven is higher than the earth, and the world of spirit deeper than the world of flesh. “No man gave unto him:” when a son deserts the Father of lights, from whom every good gift comes down, his soul cannot be satisfied from other sources: the world’s breasts are dry, or yield only poison to the eager drawing of the famished child.
There is a blank in the history here. The later stages of the prodigal’s misery are not exhibited in the light: fully exposed, they might have been shocking rather than impressive. Every height has its opposite and corresponding depth: as eye has not seen nor ear heard in all its fulness the blessedness that God hath prepared for them that love him; so neither can our faculties measure the miseries of sin, in their foretastes here and their fulness hereafter. How the prodigal fared under that veil, as his misery day by day increased to its climax, we know not; but at length he suddenly emerges another man. “He came to himself:” the wild foul stream that had sunk into the earth and flowed for a space under ground, bursts to the surface again, agitated still indeed, but now comparatively pure. We learn for the first time that the man has been mad, by learning that his reason is restored. It is a characteristic of the insane that they never know or confess their insanity until it has passed away: it is when he has come to himself that he first discovers he has been beside himself. The two beings to whom a man living in sin is most a stranger are himself and God; when the right mind returns, he becomes acquainted with both again. The first act of the prodigal, when light dawned on his darkness, was to converse with himself, and the second to return to his father.
A man can scarcely find a more profitable companion than himself. These two should be well acquainted, and deal frankly with each other; in the case of the prodigal how disastrous was the estrangement, how blessed the reconciliation between them! The young man, during the period of his exile, was as much a stranger to himself as to his father. His return to himself became the crisis of his fate; from the interview sprang the burning thought, “I will arise and go to my father,” and the resolute deed, “he arose and went.”