Audio Transcript

Today we read Luke 15:11–32 together in our Bible reading, the parable of the prodigal son, or the parable of the prodigal sons (plural). It’s a famous story about a father — a blameless father — and his two sons, who are anything but blameless, each of them entrapped by his own sin in very different ways. For parents of prodigal sons and daughters, the story resonates deeply in offering hope, like it does for Heather, a mom in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Pastor John, hello. I am the mother of a prodigal son in his early twenties. I read Luke 15 over and over. I have studied it a hundred times. I was wondering, if you were to talk to the parent of a prodigal son or daughter, how would you give hope to them from this text? I want my life to reflect the life of the father in this story as I wait on the porch.”

It really is an amazingly encouraging parable for parents of prodigals. It has so many layers of encouragement in it. I don’t think we or anybody has ever gotten to the bottom of it and its amazing portrait of the gracious heart of God. We could talk for hours about the implications of this parable, but we don’t have hours. So, let me perhaps mention seven encouragements from this parable.

1. God pursues sinners.

First, this is one of the three parables in Luke 15, which are told by Jesus in response to being criticized in verses 1–2 because of eating with tax collectors and sinners. When the Pharisees and scribes grumble, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2), Jesus responds by telling the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, the parable of the lost son (or sons — we’ll see).

So, all three parables are meant to illustrate the fact that when Jesus is eating with sinners, this is what God is doing. He’s embodying the pursuit of God that’s described in the parables as he pursues the lost. That’s what’s happening when Jesus comes into the world and eats with sinners. God is not in any way compromising with sin. Christ is not becoming a sinner by eating. He’s doing John 3:17: God sent his Son into the world not “to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” And so, the father in the parable of the prodigal son is a picture of God acting in Christ to save prodigals. That’s just the basic picture that we should be encouraged by. We need to see God that way. Think of him that way. He’s pursuing sinners.

2. God is glad to have prodigals home.

Second, in all three parables, there’s this jubilant celebration over a single sinner who repents. “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). And in the parable of the prodigal son, the father says, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him. . . . Let us eat and celebrate (Luke 15:22–23). So, God’s heart in this parable, in all three parables, is glad to have prodigals come home. He’s not begrudging; he’s glad.

3. God, not guilt, is in view.

Third, in all three of these parables, there’s no focus on the guilt of the woman who lost the coin, or the shepherd who lost the sheep, or the father who lost a son. Now, I’m not saying that to make any comment about the quality of my or your parenting, which all of us know could have been better on every count. People sometimes ask me, “What would you do differently?” And I say, “Everything. I’d try to do everything better.”

“When Jesus eats with sinners, he embodies the Father who pursues the lost.”

I’m simply saying, when I observe this, that that’s not the issue here. Jesus is simply not calling any attention to that, which is crystal clear in the parable of the prodigal son, because the father is a picture of God, who is the absolutely perfect Father, and yet he’s got this lost son. I mean, go figure — how can you be a perfect father and have a lost son? We are encouraged to fix our gaze in these parables not on ourselves, not on our shortcomings, but on the kind of God we are dealing with in these parables.

4. God can bring sanity through misery.

Fourth, the prodigal son experiences a change of heart at the lowest point of his miserable life. He’s ready to share food with the pigs. At the boy’s lowest point, he came to himself (Luke 15:17). And the encouraging thing is that just when it looked absolutely hopeless — How could you return from something so low? — he experienced his awakening.

5. God’s heart runs toward his children.

Fifth, perhaps the most tender and beautiful and powerful moment in the parable, which Jesus surely intended for this effect because he told the parable this way, is the moment when the father sees the boy a long way off and runs to greet him — not walks; he runs to greet him. “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). So, he saw, he felt, he ran, he embraced, he kissed. So, oh, let us — I want to say it to myself — let us keep that picture in our minds, not only as a picture of God’s heart, but to make our own hearts tender that way and eager that way.

6. God can raise the dead.

Sixth, the father describes the change in the boy’s life as a change from death to life. “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:24). This is encouraging because the father did not minimize the dreadfulness of the boy’s condition. The boy was dead. From a merely human standpoint, he was hopeless. So, don’t ever look upon the hardness, the indifference, even the bitterness or the cynicism of a prodigal and think, “That can’t change. This is never going to change.” Don’t think that way. It can. He was dead and he lives.

7. God invites both sons home.

And then, finally, seventh: Remember that this father in the parable of the prodigal son had two prodigals, not just one. When Jesus was eating with the tax collectors and sinners, there were two groups of lost people he had to deal with. One was the tax collectors and sinners, and the other was the scribes and Pharisees.

The tax collectors and sinners are represented in the parable by the prodigal son, and the scribes and Pharisees are represented by the older son who was angry. He was angry that the father was celebrating the return of the younger son. Life — he was angry at new life. This older brother, like the Pharisees, saw his relationship with the father in terms of earning privileges rather than enjoying a relationship. So, how would the father respond to this kind of wayward son, the second prodigal son? How would he respond?

Sometimes people say — and I heard this when I was in Germany, writing a dissertation on loving your enemies — “There’s no way that Jesus ever tried to woo the Pharisees. He only had negative things to say about the Pharisees. He never invited them to believe.” And I pointed out in my dissertation that that’s what’s going on here. Look at verse 28. The older son was angry, and he refused to go in and be a part of the celebration of life and salvation. And his father, just like with the younger son, came out and entreated — not commanded, not was angry — he entreated him. He had come out to meet the dissolute younger son. He came out and wooed and pleaded with the legalistic older son.

So, here’s my conclusion, for myself, for all of us: Let’s take heart for at least these seven reasons, and remember Jesus’s encouragement in chapter 18, just a few chapters later, that we should “always . . . pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1).

Many people know C.S. Lewis as the author and creator of Narnia. A slightly smaller group know him as a remarkably effective Christian apologist. An even smaller group appreciate him as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. Fewer recognize him as a prophet of civilizational doom. But he was.

In a number of essays, in his lectures on The Abolition of Man, and then in his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis clearly, patiently, and methodically identifies and warns his readers about an existential threat to Western civilization, and indeed to humanity as a whole.

This threat is a pernicious error that enables tyrannical power and totalitarianism. It’s a fatal superstition that slowly erodes and destroys a civilization. It’s a disease that can end our species and damn our souls. Lewis calls it “the poison of subjectivism.”

Doctrine of Objective Value

Until modern times, nearly all men believed that truth and goodness were objective realities and that human beings can apprehend them. Through reason, we examine and study and wonder at reality. When our thoughts correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of truth. When our emotional reactions correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of goodness.

Lewis refers to this as the doctrine of objective value, or, in shorter form, “the Tao.” The doctrine of objective value, Lewis writes, is

the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). (Abolition of Man, 18–19)

Poison of Subjectivism

The poison of subjectivism upends this ancient and humane way of viewing the world. Reason itself is debunked — or we might say today that reason is deconstructed. Instead of the human capacity to participate in the eternal Logos, reason is simply an epiphenomenon that accompanies certain chemical and electrical events in the cortex, which is itself the product of blind evolutionary processes. Put more simply, reason is simply an accidental and illusory brain secretion.

“Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions.”

Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions onto an indifferent cosmos. Truth and goodness are merely words we apply to our own subjective psychological states, states that we have been socially conditioned to have. And if we have been socially conditioned in one way, we might be socially conditioned in another.

Education Old and New

Lewis thus refers to the apostles of subjectivism as “conditioners” rather than teachers. Under the old vision of reality, the task of education was to “train in the pupil those responses which are themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists” (22). Teachers accomplished this through initiation; they invited students into the same experience of reality in which they lived.

The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want. Having seized the reins of social conditioning, they will condition for their own purposes (wherever those happen to come from) and with little or no regard for the constraints of custom, tradition, truth, or goodness. Lewis concisely describes the difference in the old and new education:

The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. (24)

How Subjectivism Conditions

Lewis shrewdly demonstrates the subtlety of conditioning in his fiction. In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien forces Winston to confess that 2+2=5 under the threat of having his face eaten by rats. In Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock is conditioned with both carrots and sticks, lures and threats. He is enticed chiefly by social pressure, as his conditioners work on his desire to be “on the inside,” his “lust for the Inner Ring.” Accordingly, they work on his fear of being left out, cast out, and ostracized. Social pressure, more so than direct threats of physical violence, are the tools of Lewis’s conditioners.

In this, Lewis was remarkably prescient. Who among us can’t recognize the impression-shaping propaganda in social-media algorithms, in Twitter bans, in the cancellation of YouTube channels? What we hear and say daily, what we scroll past and click through, what we see and come to assume — all of these are meant to condition us by detaching us from the Straight, the True, the Good, even the Normal. Such conditioning is meant to aid the sinful human tendency to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Richard Hooker, the English Reformer and a hero of Lewis, once wrote of the destructive effect of ungodly customs.

Perverted and wicked customs — perhaps beginning with a few and spreading to the multitude, and then continuing for a long time — may be so strong that they smother the light of our natural understanding, because men refuse to make an effort to consider whether their customs are good or evil. (Divine Law and Human Nature, 43)

The poison of subjectivism removes the ordinary checks to such error and evil by denying that good and evil objectively exist at all. And yet, because we live in God’s world and not the world of our fevered imaginations, we can’t escape the pressure of the objective moral order, pressing upon us both from our conscience and from the Scriptures.

Our Cultural Insanity

The result, as Lewis again so ably highlights, is a kind of absurd tragi-comedy. It would be funny if it were not so sad. In Lewis’s memorable words, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” (27).

As prophetic as Lewis was in his warnings, not even he seemed to have imagined the insanity that subjectivism would lead to. While he clearly saw that such poison would infect our sexuality, the most twisted form that he portrayed was the grotesque femininity of Fairy Hardcastle. But compared to the demented debauchery of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, Miss Hardcastle seems almost quaint.

What’s more, Lewis thought that the practical need for results in the hard sciences would limit the infection of subjectivism when it comes to research. But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing technological and scientific advances employed in the service of subjectivism. Some of the latest “advances” in medicine are used not to heal, but to maim; not to restore the body to its proper function, but to mutilate the body and render it impotent or barren. In a literal fulfillment of Lewis’s warning, “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Readiness Is All

What then can be done to stave off civilizational doom, the end of our species, and the damnation of souls? Books could be written (and have been written) in answer to that question. But a simple answer runs like this: we can cultivate communities that, by the grace of God, love God and the objective order that he has made, and are ready to act in a world poisoned by subjectivism.

“We can cultivate communities that, by the grace of God, love God and the objective order that he has made.”

Such communities include churches where the good news of Jesus is faithfully proclaimed in word and deed, where refugees from the world are welcomed in the name of Jesus, and where apostles of the world are refuted by the word of God. These communities include families that glory in God’s goodness in manhood and womanhood, that seek to live fruitfully on God’s mission in the world, and that raise children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

These communities include schools that love the truth and do the good, that explain reality without explaining it away, that seek to form students into mature Christians who live with resilient joy in the midst of this broken world.

Such is the need, and the hour is late. But the readiness is all, and our God is still in heavens, and he does all that he pleases.

I’ve recently had some conversations with younger Christian friends who have been reeling from experiences and observations of confounding evil. And as a man more than double the age of the friends I have in mind, I can vouch that comprehending what appears to be senseless evil doesn’t get easier the longer you live.

Perhaps that sounds discouraging, especially since I remember as a younger Christian hoping that I’d have greater wisdom in my golden years. After all, isn’t sagacity part of “the splendor of . . . gray hair” (Proverbs 20:29)?

I hope this is true of me to some extent. But as I grow older, I’m discovering that the greater part of wisdom isn’t accumulating a greater knowledge of good and evil so much as learning how to deal more faithfully with my deficit of such knowledge. So, if I have any wisdom worth imparting to Christians struggling with incomprehensible evil, it lies in cultivating the spiritual discipline of handing back the fruit.

Problem of Evil

Theologians and philosophers call it “the problem of evil” — how horrific evil and suffering can exist in a world created and providentially governed by an almighty, all-good, all-knowing God. But calling evil a “problem” hardly begins to describe our existential experiences of it in this fallen world.

An apparently buoyant friend unexpectedly takes his life. Every member of a missionary family on home assignment is killed in a car accident. A beloved young child dies of cancer. A trusted pastor’s adultery is suddenly exposed. A spouse who vowed lifelong faithfulness demands a divorce. Sexual abuse leaves a young girl soiled with shame and psychological damage for decades. Palestinian terrorists rape and murder more than 1,500 unsuspecting noncombatant Israeli citizens. The Israeli military then wipes out more than 15,000 noncombatant Palestinians. An oceanic earthquake near Sumatra, Indonesia, produces tsunamis that sweep away over two hundred thousand souls. Such traumatic suffering, tragedies, and sins almost never make sense to us. And the closer we are to the destruction, the more chaotic and senseless it often appears.

In such experiences and observations, we glimpse the real nature of evil. And it’s almost always worse than we could have imagined. The evil events themselves, and God’s good providence in choosing not to prevent them (especially when we know he has chosen to prevent others), exceed the bounds of our rational capacities, leaving us with anguished, perplexing questions only God can answer. And most of the time, he doesn’t — not specifically. God rarely reveals his specific purposes for allowing specific tragedies and their resulting wreckage.

We find that we simply aren’t able to bear the weight of the knowledge of good and evil. It exceeds our strength to comprehend on both sides: we cannot comprehend the full breadth and length and height and depth of the goodness of what is good (though we rarely perceive this a “problem”) or of the evilness of what is evil. And mercifully, God does not ask us to bear it. He asks us to trust him with it. He asks us to hand him back the fruit.

Whence This Unbearable Weight?

Some mysteries are great mercies for finite creatures not to know. Great, great mercies.

The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil contained a secret — one that God said should remain a mystery. God warned the man and woman that it would be better for them not to eat it. It would be the death of them if they did. He wanted them to trust him with the mystery of this knowledge and his administration of it (Genesis 2:17).

However, the ancient serpent told them this fruit would not kill them but would open their eyes to the heights and depths and lengths and breadths of God’s knowledge, making them wise like God (Genesis 3:4–5). Our ancestral parents believed him, and so they ate. Then the eyes of both were indeed opened to good and evil in ways they had not yet known — ways they were not at all equipped to deal with. And we, their descendants, have been languishing under this knowledge ever since.

Mercy Forfeited

As a result of that first sin, God subjected the world to futility (Romans 8:20), and the evil one was granted governing power (1 John 5:19). Sin infected us profoundly. Not only were our eyes opened to more knowledge than we have the capacity to comprehend, but we also became very susceptible to evil deception.

Our indwelling sin nature has also distorted our ability to comprehend and appreciate good. That’s one reason we need “strength to comprehend . . . the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18–19). And it’s why we must pursue through intentional prayer “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). It’s why we need “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation” to enlighten “the eyes of [our] hearts . . . that [we] may know what is the hope to which he has called [us]” (Ephesians 1:17–18). The goodness of God would stretch far beyond our imagination even if we were sinless, but it does so all the more in our fallenness (1 Corinthians 2:9).

We forfeited a great mercy when we believed we could be wise like God — when we opened the Pandora’s box of the mystery of the knowledge of good and evil.

Case Study in Inexplicable Evil

Mystery refers to what exists beyond the edges of our perception (things we can’t see) or comprehension (things we can’t grasp). Some things are mysteries because we are unaware of them until God chooses to reveal them to us. Other mysteries we might be aware of, but they exceed our ability to comprehend, at least in this age.

This is one of the great revelations contained in the book of Job. God inspired this great piece of ancient literature to illustrate how we experience these mysteries and how the restoring of our souls begins as we hand God back the fruit. The purposes behind Job’s tragedies were mysterious to him and his friends because of what they could not see and could not know.

Job’s friends thought they had sufficient grasp on the knowledge of good and evil to diagnose Job’s suffering. They were wrong (Job 42:7). And in the end, God does not explain his providential purposes to Job, but challenges Job’s assumption that he could comprehend the wisdom of God. When Job understands this, he responds by putting his hand over his mouth and saying,

I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . . Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:3, 6)

Job handed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil back to God — things too wonderful for him to comprehend.

Mercy Regained

The point of Job’s story is not that God hates when his people cry out with anguished bewilderment over their incomprehensible suffering and tragedies. Indeed, God the Son, when he became flesh and dwelt among us, cried out in the depth of his agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Rather, God’s message in Job — a message woven throughout the Bible — is “trust me.” God has merciful reasons for whatever he does not grant his children to see or know. Our freedom — not from the pain evil causes us, but from the unbearable weight of our inability to comprehend it — comes not from God giving us the ability to comprehend evil, but from our giving back to God our demand for the wisdom he alone can bear.

That’s the crucial dimension of the gospel we glimpse in the book of Job. In fact, it’s one helpful way to understand what the gospel is about. God has designed the gospel and the Christian life to require us to hand back, and keep handing back, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Approaching the throne of grace, regaining the mercy that leads to life, requires us to surrender back to God the desire for God’s wisdom — wisdom that was never meant to be ours.

Hand Back the Fruit

When the realities of good and evil exceed our limited perceptions, overwhelm our limited comprehension, and threaten to override our psychological and emotional circuitry, there is a reason for this. We may be fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), but we are also fearfully finite. There are things too wonderful for us to know. The peace that surpasses our understanding (Philippians 4:7), which we need so much, is available to us if we are willing to trust in the Lord with all our heart and not lean on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).

In the face of devastating tragedy, we find that we simply aren’t suited to bear the weight of the knowledge of good and evil. And mercifully, God does not ask us to bear it. He asks us to trust him with it. He asks us to hand him back the fruit.