Luke 13

Luke 13:1-16

Section 3. (Luke 13:1-35; Luke 14:1-35; Luke 15:1-32; Luke 16:1-31.)The Gospel as manifesting God to man. We are approaching now the very heart of the Gospel; in which God is manifested in righteousness and love to man: His whole character is made apparent. But for this, man also must be manifested, in order that the suitability and necessity of God’s grace may be seen. This is the theme of the first part here, therefore, that righteousness alone, man being what he is, can do nothing for him: judgment, and only judgment, is his portion. The second part (Luke 14:1-35) exhibits God and man in contrast to one another; men seeking their own things and without taste for the things of God; with the consequences of this for those that follow Christ. While, thirdly, in the fifteenth chapter, all the heart of God is seen as towards man when simply lost, rejoicing in his recovery. The sixteenth goes on to the practical life of the disciple, and to the recompense beyond.

1. The first part lays the basis of repentance, and shows how far man’s judgment of himself must go, if it is to answer to the judgment of God with regard to him. Here we have — (1) First, very precisely, Paul’s doctrine of “no difference,” with which he opens the way for the gospel in his epistle to the Romans. They tell the Lord about the Galileans whom Pilate had slain at the very altar, as they were drawing near to God. He probes the thought of their heart by the question: was this, then, a proof that they were greater sinners than others in the sight of God? and answers it Himself, that they were not, but that, except they repented, all would perish alike: there was not a possible one who could merit escape. He adds another example, where the character of what took place might make it seem more like the special judgment of God Himself, -eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them: were these, at any rate, “debtors” to the justice of God beyond all else of the dwellers in Jerusalem? and again He will not leave it to others to answer, but answers it Himself in the same way as before. The number 18, which Isaiah 3x6, speaks of evil manifested in its highest uprise; and note that the Lord says not a word with regard to them to lessen the thought of evil in them: that is not the point. On the contrary, make of it as much as possible, the lesson is only deeper. For the question is, not, were they sinners beyond others? but does the hand of God upon them prove them to be that? had they not been such, could they have pleaded exemption from divine judgment on that account? And to this He answers, No: judgment from God, and even to perdition; will come upon all, except they repent. It is the owning the ruin in which we are alike, which casts us, as sinners, upon unfailing mercy and brings out from under judgment: this, and this alone. (2) He strengthens this by showing that the delay of judgment does not at all mean escape from it, but only that God desires men to escape, and would leave them the possibility of it. The alternative still remains: “if not, thou shalt cut it down;” the fruit of repentance must be brought forth, or sooner or later (if in this life even never) judgment must take its course. Even this respite comes, not from comparative betterness, but through a Mediator. It is not that there is some little fruit, but let it alone till all means are exhausted that may produce fruit. It is the plea of mercy only that could avail for any; and the fruit of repentance must at last be found. (3) Here comes in the assurance of the resource that there is in God for all that so turn to Him, though it be “without strength” as well as “ungodly.” A woman bowed together so that she could not lift up herself, for eighteen years! Notice, once more, that sinister eighteen. Yet with Him there is no difficulty. “Woman; thou art loosed from thine infirmity,” He says; and then His hands make His words good. She was made straight immediately, and glorified God. But this produces indignation in the synagogue: for it is the sabbath; and a man must not use the power of God upon the sabbath day! What! the Lord says: is it to preserve the rest of God unbroken, to keep a daughter of Abraham in bondage to Satan? Notice the emphasis He lays upon this, that she is a daughter of Abraham. How unseemly for one who inherits Abraham’s faith to be kept bowed together; and this is, doubtless, how we are to take Christ’s plea for her, as in the case of Zacchaeus afterwards (Luke 19:9). This perfects the picture: work there is none, but God’s work, and the synagogue in vain would tie His hands. It was, in fact, but loud-voiced hypocrisy: for they had no difficulty in leading away their beasts to the water. They only prized man at less than the beast. (4) With this, for the time, His adversaries are silenced, and the people rejoice at all His glorious works. But the Lord repeats here two significant parables whose meaning we have already seen; but which gain a new significance from their new position. They are parables of the Kingdom not then begun; and carry us beyond Judaism into that which would indeed seem to show His adversaries silenced, and the people rejoicing in His power established. Alas, what it does show is the likeness of human nature in all dispensations, the revival of the synagogue in the professing Church of Christ, and the consequent degradation of the divine in human hands. For these parables show us the Kingdom of God itself administered by man, and the changed form which is the result of this. In the first it is seen like one of the kingdoms of the world, and the ministers of Satan finding shelter in it. In the second the professing Church itself is adulterating the bread from heaven, to adapt it to the tastes of the world; in the end the word being leavened. Such is man; and in no way, perhaps, could he be shown more hopeless in his evil. Hope can be in God alone. The weakness even of the saint is shown in these pictures: for the evil goes on without ability on his part to overcome it. For himself he may; but he has lost control of that which was committed to him, and cannot recover it. His very separation from the evil, which faithfulness to God enjoins, has to be in confession of the general ruin. Such then is man; and being such, all help, all hope, must be in God alone. “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” (Isaiah 2:22). This judgment, seen and accepted in the Cross, is peace, holiness and happiness. Self is set aside by that which has made peace for us; and Christ abides as the One in whom we have acceptance with God, and the store-house, freely ours, of every blessing. (5) But judgment yet abides for those that refuse His grace, and the door of salvation is even a narrow one, for the many who would gladly enter the Kingdom by some way more gratifying to their pride of heart, or freer to the careless foot of those who would have God as careless. Nor would that door be always open: the Master of the house would rise and shut it; and then there would be many left outside, even of those who could plead outward acquaintance with Him, but no practical inward knowledge, still the unsaved doers of unrighteousness. Then would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when they would see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of God, but be themselves shut out and Gentiles too from all quarters would come and sit down there; the last being first, the first last: men’s thoughts ever, naturally, the opposite of God’s. But God’s will stand. (6) The Pharisees come now to the Lord with an apparently friendly suggestion, but which, from His answer to it, evidently proceeded from Herod himself. “That fox” was but seeking in a round-about way to get rid of One whom he feared as well as hated. It is easily to be understood from what we have read of him elsewhere, that he did not want more blood on his hands of such a character as had already stained them. Yet the reports of the marvels done in what was his own kingdom troubled and haunted a heart in which, as is so commonly the case, superstition and unbelief held sway together. If he did not want to commit himself to threatening which he might have to make good, he was more than willing that it should be done by others. The Lord shows him that He knew well his design; and that He was perfectly beyond the power of all that he could do. The power of God which was showing itself supreme over man’s great enemy, and in tender assuagement of the misery which had evoked divine compassion in its behalf, could not submit to be thwarted or curbed by-aught that man could do.

It would go “today and tomorrow,” -the two days of testimony in the face of unbelief; .on the third day, He, the glorious Worker, would be perfected; and there is surely an enigmatic reference to resurrection. The mightiest miracle of all, not in power displayed only, but in its significance, would place Him for ever in manifest supremacy, with His work accomplished, all the power of the enemy but working out, spite of itself, the divine purpose. For He knew whither He was going, not to escape Herod, but to meet the enmity of man where it had ever displayed itself most, where most God had, through the generations past, drawn near to men. Jerusalem had a fanaticism of hatred for the prophets which would be jealous of any perishing elsewhere. Then with a sob of anguish for His murderers: -“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth those that are sent unto her!” -He turns where His heart draws Him, to testify in face of the inevitable result following -“how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen her brood under her wings! and ye would not.” So He and they must part, because they will: their house -no more God’s house -is left to them; and say unto you, Ye shall not see Me, until ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." 2. The fourteenth chapter shows man; such as we have seen him, in contrast with God, and the rejection of His grace by man in consequence of the resulting estrangement of his heart from Him. The conditions of discipleship are therefore the readiness to abandon even the nearest relatives for His sake, and to take up one’s cross to follow Him. The cost must be reckoned seriously in a world so adverse, and God’s salt must not be allowed to lack its savor. (1) Once more the sabbath question is brought up; and this time, by the Lord Himself. In it they would set God against Himself, and make His statutes prohibitory of the profit to men they were intended to secure. He takes this up therefore in the house of one of their rulers and a Pharisee. A man is there before Him who has the dropsy; and He asks the question which was not then for the first time asked, but which they had never answered, “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?” But they are silent. Then He makes divine power give the answer, surely an unbribed one: He takes and heals him, and lets him go. God has decided. The case He puts to them, He had put before; and He puts it to show that they themselves had virtually decided it also, and that to make even a doubt of it was mere hypocrisy on their part; they made none if it were ox or ass, or the worth of these. But good with God has constant prerogative: He never tied His own hands, that He should not bless, though man; if he could, would do so. They lacked sincerity; but how far were they from God, who dared to argue for Him so! (2) He turns to the guests to press on them the wisdom of humility. Even in the world the man that exalts himself is often abased: but with God this is the constant rule. Man’s way is that of self-exaltation: he cannot trust God nor see himself aright; he must be abased for blessing or abased in judgment. How the Speaker here in His own Person illustrates the contrast between God and man. How far He had come down! emptying Himself in a love that seeketh not her own; that divine fulness might be in Him for human need: a need which our pride forbids us to own; and would make the cross of Christ but foolishness. (3) Now He has a word also for the entertainer, bidding him seek his recompense at the resurrection of the just. For this, he must not invite those who can repay him, but the poor, the maimed, the blind. To covet what is spiritual, and invisible except to faith: that is not only permitted but enjoined upon us, though the recompense is but mercy, and the Giver One who never mistakes, and whose rule in exaltation and abasement, Christ has just now given. We are safe, therefore, in waiting for His approval; while the sense of His grace encourages the weakest to send his heart on there. (4) Now, when one of those at table hears these things, his heart is stirred to say that he is indeed blessed who shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God: to which the Lord replies by a parable, to the effect that men do not think so, but when God opens to them the provision of His house, the invited guests begin all to make excuse. Their possessions, the relations upon which they have entered, these in themselves not evil, are made excuses for turning the back upon that to which as Israelites they had been invited, and where indeed they claimed to have a place. The Kingdom long looked for had come nigh at last, the blessed. Servant of Jehovah had appeared, to make known to the guests that the appointed time was arrived, and all things were now ready. Nothing needed but to come and partake of the free bounty of God, -of a grace which required nothing but man’s acceptance of it. The leaders of the nation; their self-claimed representatives, were those who had treated thus the heavenly message. Grace itself was forced to turn from them to the poor of the flock, those in the streets and lanes of the city, “the poor and the lame and the maimed, and the blind.” Poor enough, and with plenty of defects, the very evils of their condition were such as took from them the excuses which had been made by the others. “The blind had no field to view, the lame could not go along behind his oxen, the maimed had no wife who could have hindered him from coming; only the feeling of poverty could have held them back; but this feeling also vanishes, since they must in a friendly way be led in by the Servant” (Van Oosterzee). Thus the condition of the guests, which stumbled the Pharisees, is accounted for. The publican and the harlot went into the Kingdom of God before these: for their knowledge of themselves as sinners, and their despair of self-recovery, made the Saviour of the lost to be fully suited to them. Repentance and faith were in their case friendly associates which took them by both hands to lead them to Jesus. But God’s provision found not in this way sufficient guests in Israel: “Lord, it is done as Thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.” Again; therefore, is the word issued, “Go out into the highways and hedges,” -to the mere unsheltered wanderers, such as were, spiritually, the Gentiles, -“and compel them to come in,” (love’s sweet compulsion,) “that my house may be filled. For I say unto you, that none of those men that were invited shall taste of my supper.” The last words, though speaking of the rejection on God’s side of those who were rejecting His grace in Israel, their place given to the Gentiles, yet in principle remains true as to all rejectors, they shall not taste of God’s supper. The invitation is now world-wide, and bears with it wherever it goes the responsibility attached. (5) There follow, the world being such as all this shows it to be, the conditions of discipleship. It is just when crowds are going with Him, and to these, that the Lord declares them. He had spoken in the same way before, but the repetition intensities His utterance, and shows its exceeding importance. He who comes to Him must hate (in comparison with Him) all nearest and dearest to him, and his own life, too. He must bear his cross, and come after Him, or he cannot be His disciple. Then He bids them count the cost of this, and draws two pictures: the first under the figure of building; the second, of a warfare. A “tower” is something that is conspicuous and eminent as a building; and needs, on that account, a special solidity. It may be for defence; it nay be for overlooking what is round it. Our Christian discipleship should have all these characters. It will be conspicuous, in a world like this, just as far as it is Christian. The world is not something of an inferior sort, but the total opposite of Christianity. The Christian is a light in the world, a light which shines in darkness, and cannot blend with it. It will be eminent: little need to say that, with the Lord’s conditions before our eyes. Even the world recognizes the moral height of devotedness and self-sacrifice; though it will make large reserve when it is estimating this in the case of a Christian. Then as to defence, the character of the disciple fully maintained shields him from how much temptation which the waverer invites and succumbs to; while the suffering to which he is exposed as such causes the “Spirit of glory and of God” to rest upon him (1 Peter 4:14), power that is equal to every demand upon it Finally, the disciple it is who as such acquires the ability to see, the single eye being in fact that of the disciple, to whom Christ is the touchstone of every thing. But this is a tower that costs much to build, from the point of view from which it is seen by one outside it. It will cost him all that the world holds precious; how much he will gain he is not yet in the place to see. He who attempts it lightly will surely find it beyond his power to accomplish; and he who does not undertake it in strength far greater than his own. The next picture of discipleship views it as a warfare. A king is going to an encounter with another king: for you must indeed be as a king to meet the forces that are against you in the world. Moreover these are not merely irregular, guerilla forces: they are organized under a king of their own; the dread “prince of this world,” with more than the power of this world in his hand, and more than you are likely to be able to meet, high as you may rate your competence. Here, surely, if you come to reckoning, all is against you: the case is more strongly against you, the result of failure worse than in the former one. You may be scoffed at if you begin to build and are not able to finish; but here it will be worse: provoke the animosity of the world against you, and it is an enemy that does not easily forgive. Thus the effect of reckoning may seem mere discouragement; and so it is meant to be, from all mere levity, and from all self-confidence: if you are setting out in either of these moods, you may as well give up at once. If, on the other hand, you are in serious earnest, the Lord’s words are meant only to cast you upon resources better than your own; and all-sufficient. But savorless salt, of what use is it? just as little is discipleship without reality. Israel had been; in God’s thought for her, such a purifying salt for the nations of the earth. It had become savorless; and God’s new evangel had not succeeded in imparting to it the quality which it had lost. It could only be cast out. And just such would be the case with those who should now have merely the label without the reality of discipleship. 3. We now come to the very heart of the Lord’s teaching in this Gospel, and turn from man and what he is, to realize the love of God towards him, in spite of, or rather, in view of what he is, -the heart of God told out in seeking and saving that which is lost. The three parables of this chapter unite in this: in each case what has been lost is found; in each the joy is with the finder; and in heaven; before the angels, speaks conclusively of Whose joy it is that is presented. The three parables again; in this connection, naturally suggest the Trinity, the Shepherd and the Father being in manifest agreement also with such a thought. The Woman does not seem so, until we realize that the Spirit is often presented in Scripture in the agents and instruments through which He works. The Woman then will stand directly for the Church, but still as the vehicle of the Spirit, and all parts of the chapter will be in place. Father, Son, and Spirit are all occupied with man; and he it is through whom the angels themselves become adoring witnesses of the “exceeding riches of His grace, in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.” (1) All the tax-gatherers and sinners were drawing near to Him to hear Him: this was the occasion of the parables and shows us the application of them as not to wandering saints, but to sinners truly that: the “lost,” a deeper word used by divine love here than the Pharisees themselves, as to men in this life, would have cared to utter. But these were murmuring, after their manner, at the Physician of sin-sick souls, for going after them. “This Man receiveth sinners,” they say, “and eateth with them.” It is then that in a parable He makes personal appeal to them. Was there any of them who if he lost but one sheep out of a hundred, would not leave all the rest and go and find it? Yet they wondered at the value of a human soul to Him! He was finding what He had lost: for they were His; He was Maker and owner of them indeed, become shepherd in His care for them; and He would not leave one such till He had got it back. We see in this a character of these parables as an appeal to the different classes before Him: not meant therefore, to convey merely general truth but to specialize and apply it. The “lost” is not here characteristic of men in general, but meant to apply itself to those who in self-despair would take it as their description. The Pharisees would disclaim it as intended for them -would have resented it if so applied: they would discern readily enough for whom it was intended; while the poor outcast sinners, self-convicted, would find to their unutterable joy, that they were just those whom He, compassionate Saviour, could not suffer to be lost. All that followed was for them: the putting upon His shoulders, the bringing home with joy; His care too great to trust them any more to themselves for getting home. Then the reception, the gathering together of the friends, the angels, to bid them all rejoice with Him! He does not close without a word for the other class here: for, if the lost sheep was the sinner that repenteth, who then were these “ninety and nine just persons who needed no repentance?” Ah, there had been no joy like this in heaven over them! there never could be as long as they retained this character. (2) The second parable is that of the woman, in Scripture the figure of the Church, the instrument of the Spirit. The lamp of the Word is in her hand, and she needs it in the darkness of the night, while Christ is absent. The “house” is the circle of natural ties and relationships; for it is not just a question of public preaching, but of that testimony upon which the success of the preacher after all so much depends, and for which the whole Church, and not any class or section of it, is responsible. Good it is to realize that every soul of man, covered with the dust of sin as he may be, and hidden in the darkness of the world, belongs of right to the King’s treasury, and has the King’s image stamped on him, though with sore disfigurement. Claim him we may, wherever we may find him, for God to whom he belongs. This general evangelism, we may learn from the parable here, is what is the mind of the Spirit for the Church indwelt of Him. Here too there must be friends and neighbors summoned to rejoice, -angelic onlookers who are in sympathy with Him who is always the glorious Seeker, and who sets in motion all the springs of love and pity that flow anywhere in unison with His own. (3) The third parable shows us the dead alive again; the subjective side, therefore, of this recovery of the lost, which the first two were incompetent to express. The sheep is simply brought back; the piece of money is unchanged when restored; but the lost son returns to his father, and in heart, though under the pressure of famine at the first. The parabolic veil also is thinner, and permits the affections of the heart to manifest themselves with freedom. The two classes seen in the first parable, lost sight of in the second, reappear and come fully out in contrast here, the mirror being held up before the Pharisee as never before, in the elder son. Sons they both are. This, which has led some astray as to the application; is intelligible in view of Israel’s relationship to God, as in Deuteronomy 14:1 : “Sons ye are of Jehovah your God.” This, of course, must not be understood as if involving the Spirit of adoption; which they had not, nor what would be implied by such language in the New Testament. It involved of necessity neither new birth nor salvation. An adoption they had; and the Lord says to the Syro-phenician woman, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs.” Again in the parable which He spoke to the Jews after His solemn entry into Jerusalem, He speaks of Pharisees and publicans both as “sons,” exactly as here. Those to whom He was now addressing Himself claimed this most unhesitatingly in their own behalf, and in a sense in which He could not allow it: “We be not born of fornication,” they said indignantly: “we have one Father, even God” (John 8:41.) This relationship, though it might be only external, furnishes the basis of appeal in the story before us. External only it was, at first, with the younger son; and to the end of it with the elder. The prodigal naturally is the younger son: the elders of Israel were with the Pharisees. This younger son soon shows where his heart is. The “substance” that he gets and squanders is, of course, his portion in natural things, that which God has in fact divided among men to use as accountable to Him who gave it, or perhaps to abuse in utter forgetfulness of Him. The far-off country which he seeks classes him at once among the many whose backs are habitually turned on God. Here for awhile he enjoys himself after the fashion of those to whom transgression has its own delight, in the lusts which yet consume and never satisfy. An end must come, therefore, in which not only his own resources are at an end, but a famine comes upon all the sources of supply. He is in a land, too, where no man gives, but he joins himself to a citizen of that country, and is sent into the fields to feed swine. Sad picture of Satan’s service, in ministering to men given up to their own lusts entirely, longing even to be as they are; thank God, (this is His mercy merely and the door of hope) thank God, in vain. Now he comes to himself, and in his misery the thought of his father’s house breaks in upon him. Alas, it is not yet his father; nor does he think aright of it either, if we realize of what it is the parable speaks. Bread there is there, to be sure, enough and to spare -abundance of bread in that Bethlehem, where our Christ was born, and whence He came to us: bread enough, but not for hired servants. No hired servant, as such, could eat the passover in Israel (Exodus 12:45.) God has all children in His house, and service but for the free hearts who know the constraint of love in serving Him. The prodigal is not yet in place to know this, and fain would be one of those hirelings himself. All else is gone for him; but he will go back and confess the sin which he committed, which has deprived him of the son’s place (never really known), and after the fashion of man’s humility, which recognizes not the worthlessness of such labor nor the grace of God, he will say, “Make me as one of thy hired servants.” With all this, he is yet on his way to his father. The father’s love anticipates and effectuates the son’s endeavor. “When he was yet a long way off, his father saw him, and had compassion; and ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him.” Not a word of the confession intended has been uttered; not a question is put: “I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord; and so Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.” There is no reproof for the past, no stipulation as to the future, no condition in this free forgiveness. How it would spoil the revelation of the Father’s heart which is to do the yet needed work in the soul of the returning prodigal, make the son a son, and deliver from all thought of that far country, save abhorrence of that which had carried him thither! Now, in another spirit than that which dictated it, he can pour out his confession. “Make me a hired servant,” he cannot say for shame. And the right acknowledgement of his unworthiness is cut short by the father’s peremptory joy which bids, “Bring forth a robe, -the best, -and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and sandals on his feet.” What he could not have pretended to as claim if he had never wandered is now his in the father’s delight to have him back: Christ, the sinner’s robe of wondrous righteousness, what can equal it in the apparel of the angels as they shine in heaven? Then the ring unites the working hand to God for ever; and the feet are shod for all the way, whatever it may be. “And bring the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and make merry: for this my son was dead and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” Death is the food of this new life, for which in fact, that it might be, life had to be given. Such is the ransom price by which the prodigal has to be redeemed from the bondage of sin. And henceforth death is not merely conquered, but becomes the minister to a life in which the shadow of death is passed for ever. The fatted calf -or young ox, not immature but in the first fresh vigor, -the type of the laborer for God, is here the peace-offering, that aspect of the Lord’s work which the Gospel of Luke expresses. The prodigal is welcomed into the joy of reconciliation and communion with God; but it is the Father’s joy, let us still remember, which is all through prominent: “This my son was dead and is alive again; was lost and is found.” Every way in contrast with this picture, we have now that of the elder son; and it would be impossible, surely, for any one to mistake for whom it is intended. He has not wandered, is no prodigal, has no need of repentance, has never transgressed his father’s commandment, is still in the field when his brother comes home; and then finding how he has been received, breaks out in indignation. Then another side of his character comes out: he himself brings it out. Music and dancing in his father’s house: these are strange things to him. Joy over him there never had been such. He had had no privileges, not even a kid to make merry -not, mark, with his father, but with his friends.

Could the cold, cheerless life of a formal religionist be more clearly expressed? He too is in heart away from his father, has no sympathy with the yearning of God’s love over a sinner, cannot eat and make merry over the return of such, though his father comes out and entreats him, will not go in. What is the end of a breach like this? That the Lord leaves to be decided by each one in his audience for himself. But God keeps -can they expect otherwise? -to His own thoughts: “It was meet that we should make merry and rejoice: for this thy brother was dead and is alive again: he was lost and is found.” There is one thing here, however, which spite of all the rest has been supposed to give countenance to the view that the elder son is the true picture of the child of God, or at least the consistent one. It is, that the father says, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” But to explain this we have only to go back to the beginning of the parable and to remember that the substance which the father had divided between them, and which the younger son had squandered in self-indulgence, could not be any figure of spiritual blessings, but, as already said, of earthly things. If, then; the prodigal had returned, that with all its spiritual gain did not reinstate him in the possession of what he had lost; it did not in itself restore the lost health, the forfeited possessions, the various good gifts of God which had passed away from him. On the other hand, the spiritual blessings which salvation brings do not become the possession of any by the careful or upright use of earthly things. And the witness of his own heart (in the case of the elder son) was that, spite of his own punctilious righteousness, the Father’s house had made no music over him. 4. This leads on; however, to the next parable, in which, not the outside multitudes but disciples are taught how they may use even earthly things (even the mammon of unrighteousness) in such a way as that, when this fails, the “friends” they have made by it, may receive them into the eternal tabernacles. But here, notice, there is no parade of the righteousness of the one who acts after this manner. No, it is the very opposite: we have an unjust steward accused of wasting his master’s goods, a thing which recalls to us the younger son of the parable before given; rather than the elder. And here is where we all begin naturally, although the Lord has something else to say of this before He closes. But to begin with, all are stewards of God in the matter of those things with which we have been entrusted and not one of us can stand before God on the ground of righteousness in our stewardship. Death -and this is brought out in fullest emphasis by the law of Moses -is the turning of man out of the place for which he was originally created, as having failed in it: and who is not turned out? Self-righteousness is thus impossible if we will listen to the teaching of nature itself, and above all of that law under which the Pharisee so securely sheltered himself. The “publican,” or tax-gatherer, become a disciple, had owned his sinnership before God, while the Pharisee had refused to recognize it: and thus in the only way possible for man; the repenting sinner had become comparatively righteous. The parable here is not however of the reception of a penitent, but of stewardship: of one under sentence of dismissal for unrighteousness, and of what he can still do in view of the future. He does not hope for reversal of his sentence, but seeks how best he may sub-serve his interest when this has taken effect. If death be this dismissal, as it most evidently is, then in the application this refers to what comes after death; and so the Lord Himself applies it. The steward is a child of this age, and his wisdom is that of his generation. It is not commended for its righteousness, but for its adaptation to the end in view; and in this respect the children of this age are wiser than the children of light. They pursue their end with more clear-sighted consistency, while the children of light are often how strangely inconsistent. The unrighteous steward is unrighteous to the last, and no plea to the contrary is ever made for him; but his wisdom as to the future is set before us for our imitation; the unrighteousness of it being distinctly reprobated and set aside in the words that follow the parable: “for, if ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon; who will commit to your trust the true riches?” His master’s goods are still in the steward’s hands; and these are all the means that he has, as his words plainly show. Yet his authority over them seems only now to extend so far as concerns the rendering that final account that has been required of him. He is no doubt under jealous oversight now, as to any further waste," such as has been charged against him; but, of course, if he is to render an account, he has authority to call in the accounts. Here he can do no harm. So he calls in his lord’s debtors to see how every one stands, and remits to each a portion of his debt, a thing which Edersheim remarks, was within his rights, though his motive in it was unrighteous. In mercy, and in his master’s interests even; he might have done so; he did it in his own.* But the wisdom with which he made capital out of what was not in his hands is clear enough. The moral for disciples is, “Make yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that, when it fails, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.”
Certainly it is not meant that we can buy ourselves thus admission into heaven, or that God’s grace is shown in permitting us to buy cheap. He gives, but does not sell; unless it be “without money and without price.” And even as to rewards, love can reward only what is done from love. Yet love itself may desire, and must, the approval of Him towards whom it is felt, and so may covet the rewards of love; while grace permits us out of what is not our own to make “friends” that shall in this way welcome us in the habitations of eternity. Thus to use what is so commonly as to be characteristically the “mammon of unrighteousness” is not unrighteous, but faithfulness in that which is Another’s; and although it be in “that which is least,” as such earthly things must be, yet even as that it may test and manifest the character with regard to what is the “true riches.” A man’s piety cannot be measured by his charities; but on the other hand it cannot exist without them, for “faith without works is dead.” And he who seeks to satisfy himself with that which is not his own; but of which he is merely steward, will find the things that are his own proportionately unsatisfying. Even an Abraham, with his face toward Egypt, will find a famine in the land which God has promised and brought him into. Thus the Lord deals with the side of righteousness; and He rules with a firm and steady hand. Grace does not relax the lines of government; and the throne of grace is a true and absolute throne. A servant may not be a son, but every son is a servant; and “no servant can serve two masters.” God and Mammon are incompatible as that. 5. But that cuts deep; for the Pharisees are among His audience; and they, the zealous maintainers of law, are at the same time money-lovers. They deride Him therefore: for had not the law promised all temporal good to the man that kept it? From this it was easy for one that had never felt the hopelessness of man’s condition upon that footing, to make the fruit of a man’s own covetousness the token of his acceptance with God. They thus, as the Lord told them, justified themselves before men; but justification is not man’s work, but God’s: what human law allows one to judge his own case? when; alas, also, the world is in complete opposition to God, and what is esteemed most highly by it is with Him an abomination. There was another thing. The dispensation of law was passing away. The law and the prophets were until John; and then the Kingdom of God was preached. Now every one was forcing his way into that, through the opposition of those like themselves who neither believed John; nor the One to whom he testified. The passing of the dispensation did not mean that the law had failed. It could not fail: heaven and earth might pass rather than one tittle of it fail. It did not fail, when that to which it pointed came; nor when that was remedied. which Moses for the hardness of their hearts had permitted, and the new dispensation perfected what the law was unable to enforce. He gives them an example, which the former Gospels have insisted on more fully. Pharisaism had taken advantage of the permission of divorce to give sanction to a license against which the whole spirit of the law bore witness. Now all this was to be remedied. He that should put away his wife and marry another would now commit adultery; and he likewise who should marry a divorced woman. The exception given in Matthew with regard to this, and which is found neither in Mark nor Luke, is not really an exception: for the divorce only affirms the breach of the law of marriage which sin had already made in the case excepted. Thus the law had not failed, but was only perfected in the Kingdom of God. The Lord goes back now to illustrate the fundamental mistake that they were making by the contrast of two men; perfect opposites of one another in life and after death, but in either case with the reversal after death of the condition in life. He pictures a rich man; so rich as that if the Pharisaic idea were right, he should have been in fullest favor with God. He is clothed in purple and fine linen; and passes each day in uninterrupted enjoyment. There is a poor man at his gate, so poor as to be in beggary and starvation. He longs for the crumbs (the broken pieces) from the rich man’s table; and the dogs -unclean animals for the Jew -come and lick his sores. No evil is recorded of the rich man further than this, that he enjoyed himself to the full. Even neglect of Lazarus is not urged against him. Perhaps Lazarus may have got the broken pieces. That he remained a beggar is true: but is it supposed that a rich man is to feed and care for every beggar at his door-step? Nor do we read of anything to the credit of this Lazarus. Providence seems to have decided against him, and the law to have condemned him: for where are the good things the law has promised to those that keep it? The beggar dies, and there is a marvellous change. Without any means by which to make friends for himself to receive him into the everlasting tabernacles, he is carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. A beggar, with everything against him as that, according to the law, gets a place that the best Jew in the world might envy him for. What has caused this? Not law, we may be sure. Not any need of making up for that pitiable life on earth by the after condition.

The testimony of the law settles this fully, and would settle it as well for any child of man. Nay, his name, Lazarus, Eleazar, “the Mighty One the Helper” gives us the only key to the explanation here. Spite of all else against him, God the Mighty One, acting apart from law, and so in grace, has lifted him from that degradation in which he was to the place in which now we find him. He who has chosen Jerusalem, Jacob, Abraham, any other name in this line that you please to name, has chosen to do this -to display Himself in it: and who shall say Him nay? The rich man also dies, and is buried. Again a marvellous, but now dreadful change! In hades -it is not hell, gehenna -he lifts up his eyes being in torment, and sees Abraham from afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. “And he called and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue: for I am tormented in this flame.” The language is, of course, as figurative here as on the other side is Abraham’s bosom. All representations of what is beyond the present life seem to partake of the same figurative character, which is, however, all the more adapted to appeal strongly to the imagination. The final judgment is not yet come; the once rich man has, as we presently see, brothers upon earth who may be warned to escape that place of torment. Resurrection; therefore, has not come any more than judgment, but the wrath of God is already realized in suffering which can be most suitably conveyed to us in terms like this. The hope of relief, -of such slight relief as is requested here, is presently declared to be in vain; an impassable gulf (or chasm) unalterably fixed between the lost and saved, no crossing or mingling to be, even for a moment; no hope of condition changing after death, such as many entertain today, for a moment to be thought. But the reason for the rich man’s coming into that awful doom is what is evidently intended to be pressed upon us. The Lord has already declared to his disciples that whosoever loseth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal; and that, if a man come to Him, and hate not his own life, he cannot be His disciple. This, it is plain, the rich man had not done. This only it is that is affirmed against him: “Child, remember, that thou in thy life-time receivedst thy good things” -not “good things” simply, but “thy good things.” He had chosen life on the wrong side of death, and lost it. This loss is not merely that: for God cannot be simply passive with regard to sin, and the tormenting flame is the wrath of God upon it. Death is not extinction; nor, therefore, is the second death. All that we find in this picture is the very opposite of this: it is intense realization. And if the pang of remorse is the soul’s judgment of itself, (such judgment as the lost may be capable of,) the judgment of God is other than this, and more. Oh, then; for a voice to warn men! So thinks the poor sinner here. Companionship is no alleviation of this hopeless anguish. “I pray thee then; father,” he says, “that thou wouldst send him to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; so that he may testify to them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” Even this hope fails: “They have Moses and the prophets,” Abraham answers; “let them hear them.” But he urges further: “Nay, father Abraham; but if one go to them from the dead, they will repent.” But he said to him, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rise from the dead.” No fear that Moses should not receive due honor from the lips of Christ. These Pharisees with their strenuous seeking of a sign from heaven: these are they that dishonor Moses. “Take up, and read,” disdainful Pharisee, and thou shalt see how Moses accuses thee of unbelief of all the signs that he has given, and which are fulfilled in Him that speaks to thee. Yet our hearts ache so often for something more, even with Scripture completed in our hands, and a greater than Moses speaking to us from it. Yet “all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink;” and out of all the host that did so, two men of those that came out of Egypt entered the land to which God was bringing them! So with the men that wanted a sign now, did they dream that when He whom they had devoted to death should come back from the dead, they would be found giving large money to the keepers of His tomb, to have it believed a lie that He was risen? So still, with their eyes tight shut, men cry for light.