God’s love is so unreasonable. I have been thinking about the parable of the prodigal son, found in Luke 15, for a couple of months now. This is one of those passages that many of us are so familiar with, and have heard preached so many times, that it is easy to read through it without gleaning any new insights.
Back in January, this story suddenly began to speak volumes to me again. Some of the truths are the same ones that have impacted my heart in the past – the unconditional love of the father, his unabashed joy at the return of his son, the sense that with God every transgression is forgivable when we come back to Him through sincere repentance. But a few new revelations have surfaced from this story. I won’t write about all of them here, but I will begin to talk about them this Sunday. One of them is found in a line that I have often simply read over: “The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them” (Luke 15:12).
This Father had the power to withhold the son’s inheritance if he wanted to. Obviously, since this is the younger son and not the elder, the father had already told him at some point that he was going to inherit a share of the estate. That wasn’t always the case. The norm was for everything to go to the oldest boy, and for that boy to have the power to share or not with his siblings. But, even though the father had at some point promised the younger son a share, certainly he would have been justified, given this brazen display of disrespect and plain foolishness, to withhold the inheritance. He wouldn’t even have to do it out of spite; it could be the best tool at his disposal for influencing the boy to change his mind about leaving the family.
How many of us would have tried to coerce, or manipulate the younger son into staying home and doing his chores? He could have been spared a lot of anguish if the father would have simply forced him to do the right thing. Why didn’t the father take that action? I believe it is because this father knew that you can force or manipulate behavior, but not relationship. It is the very same reason that God does not always intervene in the affairs of men on earth. It is why He has chosen to allow us to make both good and bad choices, even though those choices often cause pain on earth and in Heaven. God loves relationship, and relationship must be freely chosen.
Certainly love will confront, correct, discuss, encourage, and pray, but it is important for us to know where loving confrontation ends, and manipulation and coercion begin. The Father, in love, let this son have the space to make a mistake, which led to him having the space to choose to return forever; something to think about, and something to pray about. “Holy Spirit, we need your wisdom daily to walk that line.”
