The Prodigal God

A few month's ago, one of the publisher reps was making a call and a book caught my eye. I knew it wasn't a book that Eisenbrauns would carry, but I casually mentioned that it looked interesting. Low and behold, the next time he came around he brought me an advanced reading copy (ARC in industry parlance). The book is titled The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller and I will be offering extracts from the book for the next week or so. Because it is an ARC, the page numbers might not match the published version when it appears on October 30.

Keller's basic thesis is that we have misnamed the parable of the prodigal son and caused the word prodigal to morph into meaning “wayward.” In actuality, prodigal means recklessly extravagant, which defines God's relationship with us; scripture calls the parable “the parable of the two sons,” since there is an elder and younger brother. With that as background, I present you with the first excerpt:

Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners doesn't have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we'd like to think.—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, pages 15-16

<idle musing>
Ouch! Many of us (me included) started out as younger brothers whom Jesus went looking for. Once he found us, he cleaned us up. Problem is, we think we cleaned ourselves up and we look down on the very people we used to be—and still would be but for God's mercy and grace being manifested to us and transforming us.
</idle musing>

Sin, redefined

“Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don't obey God to get God himself—in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him. So religious and moral people can be their own spiritual Saviors and Lords as much as the younger brothers who say they don't believe in God and define right and wrong for themselves.

“Here, then, is Jesus' radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God>, page 43

How blind can we be? Apparently, very, as Keller goes on to show:

“The younger son's flight from the father was crashingly obvious. He left the father literally, physically and morally. Though the older son stayed home, he was actually more distant and alienated from the father than his brother, because he was blind to his true condition. He would have been horribly offended by the suggestion that he was rebelling against the father's authority and love, but he was, deeply.

“Because the elder brother is more blind to what is going on, being an elder brother Pharisee is a more spiritually desperate condition.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, page 47

The elder brother

“The elder brother in the parable illustrates the way of moral conformity. The Pharisees of Jesus' day believed that, while they were a people chosen by God, they could only maintain their place in his blessing and receive final salvation through strict obedience to the Bible. There are innumerable varieties of this paradigm, but they all believe in putting the will of God and the standards of the community ahead of individual fulfillment. In this view, we only win through to happiness and a world made right by achieving moral rectitude. We may fall at times, of course, but then we will be judged by how abject and intense our regret is. In this view, even in our failures we must always measure up.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, pages 29-30

<idle musing>
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Too much like what passes for Christianity in many places. But, wait, it gets better, he continues the story...
</idle musing>

“Jesus the story-teller deliberately leaves the elder brother in his alienated state. The bad son enters the father's feast but the good son will not. The lover of prostitutes is saved, but the man of moral rectitude is still lost...The elder brother is not losing the father's love in spite of his goodness, but because of it. It is not his sins that create the barrier between him and his father, it's the pride he has in his moral record; it's not his wrongdoing but his righteousness that is keeping him from sharing in the feast of the father.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God>, pages 34-35

More elder brother activity

“Elder-brother obedience only leads to a slavish, begrudging compliance to the letter of the law. It is one thing to be honest and avoid lies for your sake, but it is another to do so for God's sake, for truth's sake, and for the love of the people around us. A person motivated by love rather than fear will not only obey the letter of the law, but will eagerly seek out new ways to carry out business with transparency and integrity.

“Honesty born of fear does nothing to root out the fundamental cause of evil in the world—the radical self-centeredness of the human heart. If anything, fear-based morality strengthens it, since ultimately elder brothers are being moral only for their own benefit. They may be kind to other and helpful to the poor, but at a deeper level they are doing it either so God will bless them, in the religious version of elder brotherness, or so they can think of themselves as virtuous, charitable persons, in the secular version of it...

Elder brothers may do good to others, but not out of delight in the deeds themselves or for the love of people or the pleasure of God. They are not really feeding the hungry and clothing the poor, they are feeding and clothing themselves. The heart's fundamental self-centeredness is not only intact but also nurtured by fear-based moralism and this can and does erupt in shocking ways. That is why so many churches are plagued with gossip and fighting. Or why so many moral people live apparently chaste lives and then suddenly fall int othe maost scandalous sins. Underneath the seeming unselfishness is great self-centeredness.

Religious and moral duties are a great burden, often a crushing one. Emotional frustration and inner boredom with life is repressed and denied. Elder brothers are under great pressure to appear, even to themselves, happy and content. This is the reason that sometimes highly moral elder brothers will blow up their lives and, to the shock of all who know them, throw off the chains of their obligations and begin living like younger brothers.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, pages 60-61, 63

<idle musing>
Interesting take on it, isn't it? Maybe that is why we have seen so many high-profile people crash and burn of late. The pressure to perform must be enormous.
</idle musing>

Finally

“If we say “I believe in Jesus” but it doesn't effect[sic] the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understood or believed in Jesus after all.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, page 126

<idle musing>
That is the last quote from The Prodigal God. I hope you have learned a good bit about grace from the brief quotes I have been giving.

I finished the book back in September, but had been unable to get these sections that I had marked typed up until now. Reviewing them has been good; I re-learned some things that I thought I had already learned, but apparently hadn't.

The grace of God is more vast and deeper than we realize. What we have in Christ is far greater than we can begin to understand. We stand at the edge of the beach, seeing the ocean stretched before us and think we understand it. But we haven't even touched the water, let alone begun to plumb its depths...
</idle musing>

Transforming Love

“Pharisees are being good but out of a fearful need to control God. They don't really trust him or love him. To them God is an exacting boss, not a loving father. Christians have seen something that has transformed their hearts toward God so they can finally love and rest in the father...

Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved by the very things we thought would free us. So he emptied himself of his glory and became a servant (Philippians 2). He laid aside the infinities and immensities of his being and, at the cost of his life paid the debt for our sins, purchasing us the only place our hearts can rest, in his Father's house.

Knowing he did this will transform us from the inside out...Why wouldn't you want to offer yourself to someone like this? Selfless love destroys the mistrust in our hearts toward God that makes us either younger orelder brothers.”—Timothy Keller,The Prodigal God, pages 86-88

<idle musing>
From the inside out! That is the only kind of transformation that counts! All other is simply surface and makes us nothing more than white-washed tombs.
</idle musing>

I give, that I may receive?

“We see that the elder brother ”became angry.” All of his words are dripping with resentment. The first sign you have an elder brother spirit is that when your life doesn't go as you want, you aren't just sorrowful but deeply angry and bitter. Elder brothers believe that if they live a good life they should get a good life, that God owes them a smooth road if they try to live up to standards.

"What happens, then, if you are an elder brother and things go wrong in your life? If you feel you have been living up to your moral standards, you will be furious with God. You don't deserve this, you will think, after how hard you've worked to be a decent person!...Elder brothers' inability to handle suffering arises from the fact that their moral observance is results-oriented. The good life is lived not for delight in good deeds themselves, but as calculated ways to control their environment.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, pages 50-51

<idle musing>
The Romans defined religion as do ut der—I give that I may be given to. Sounds like some prosperity teaching doesn't it? Not terribly Christian, though...A friend of ours says, “You deserve to burn in hell. Anything else is a blessing, so get over feeling sorry for yourself and be thankful.”

That I can agree with! My work, my good deeds, are garbage (Philippians 3:8 Gr. σκύβαλα, Spicq translates it “It's all crap”!!), used menstrual cloths (Isaiah 64:6), in God's eyes.

Those two verses put it into good perspective. Can you imagine bringing used Kotex™ or a pile of manure to God as an offering? Yet that is what we are doing when we trust in anything we do to make ourselves more acceptable to God.
</idle musing>

The cure

“It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord—lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness—that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink. If you follow through, it will change everything—how you relate to God, self, others, the world, your work, your sins, your virtue. It's called the new birth because its so radical.

“This, however, only brings us to the brink of Jesus' message, not to its heart. This tells us what we must turn from, not what, or who[m], we must turn to.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God>, pages 78-79

<idle musing>
To the edge of the message. But so often that's where we stop...
</idle musing>

Grace is dangerous

“You knew you had to obey God because if you didn't he wouldn't answer your prayers or take you to heaven. But if you remove this fear and talk so much about free grace and unmerited acceptance—what incentive will you have to live a good life? It seems like this gospel way of living won't produce people who are as faithful and diligent to obey God's will without question.

“But if, when you have lost all fear of punishment you also lose incentive to live an obedient life, then what was your motivation in the first place It could only have been fear. What other incentive is there? Awed, grateful love.”—Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, page 122

<idle musing>
Wow! That last paragraph hit hard. What was/is my motivation? Is it love of God, or fear of the consequences. It is so easy to lapse into the elder brother mentality; no wonder we need grace on a moment-by-moment basis! Otherwise we lapse back into performance based religion instead of grace-based Christianity.
</idle musing>