There are two tests to which we have a right to submit every new religion. There are two questions which we have a right, and which it is our duty, to put to every one who claims to come to us as a teacher from God. And these two questions are: (1) "What have you to tell us concerning the nature of God?" and, (2) "What have you to tell us concerning the nature of man?" Now, of these tests it is clear which is the simplest and most easy to apply: obviously the second. We do know the nature of man, or think we do. Of the Divine nature we are necessarily and naturally in comparative ignorance. We do know something of human life, and of its circumstances; and, therefore, he who tells us that concerning man's nature which we know to be untrue has lost his claim upon our attention when he goes on to tell us something concerning God.
I. Consider, in the light of this test, as regards its theory of humanity, the religion of the Bible. There is a theory concerning man's nature and condition on which the whole of this book, and all it professes to teach us, is based. I bring this religion to the test of one admitted and notorious fact in the nature and condition of man, in order to see how it explains that fact, and how it proposes to deal with it. The fact is the admitted and notorious fact of the exceptional unhappiness of man. Our Lord, in this parable, confronts Himself with this fact, as every teacher of the Gospel, or good news, must do if he is to win the attention of men. The hero of this story, the prodigal son, is, as you see, a sufferer; but he is more than that, he is an exceptional sufferer. All the other creatures described in the parable the lower servants of the father have bread and to spare; he alone suffers hunger. And more than that, he is a strangely exceptional sufferer, for he who suffers is infinitely superior to those who are happy. All animals that we know of, save man, seem to be subject to this twofold law. Each animal has its instincts, its desires, its appetites, and in the climate or element in which it exists there are corresponding objects of gratification for those appetites and those desires. Man is pained from two different sources one is the pain of satiety, and the other the pain of remorse. Give the man all the portion of goods that can fall to him, or that in his wildest dreams of covetousness or ambition he can desire for himself; when he has enjoyed these to the very full, and just because he has enjoyed them, there begins to be felt a famine in his enjoyment, and there does come the weariness of satiety into his heart and soul.
II. The Bible theory of man is this, that he is not his true self, that he is a creature not in his proper and true element. It tells us that it has been the curse and the disorganisation of the nature of man, that in the exercise of the strange and mysterious spiritual power free will, he has wandered away from the Father's home, and claimed the selfish and solitary possession of the goods that the Father lavished upon him; it tells us that the origin of all human sin and sorrow has been this, that he has said, "Give me the portion of goods that faileth to me. The Bible tells us that misery is the result of this vain effort of man to do in this world of God without the God who made him; that all his misery, his weariness, is but the sublime discontent of the soul that was made to rest in its God, and cannot rest in anything less than God.
III. Our religion is a historical religion. It bases itself upon one life in the past, it is ever renewing and revealing itself in many lives ever since that life was lived on earth. It bases itself on one life, and that life was a perfect life, the life of one who, all through His existence, as far as we know it, was a life unstained by impurity, a life unvexed and unharassed by sensual or evil impulses, it was a life that was passed in entire and complete obedience to the will of the Father. The life that He lived, that perfect life of obedience for which all its sorrow only came from without, and only came from the fact that all around Him were not like Him, equally obedient that life, He tells us, He can supernaturally give to us, "I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly."
Archbishop Magee, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,Dec. 2nd, 1880.
We take the text as something to remind us that we have fallen far, but not hopelessly; that, great as is our present depression beneath the condition which our race was created, so great may yet be our rise; and that the very end and purpose of all Christ's work and suffering in this world, was to bring us back to our better selves; to restore us to the holiness, happiness, and peace, which man lost when man fell. Let us remember that the human race was itself when it was at its best. Man was himself before he fell. We were created in God's image, and our fall brought us into a state of sin and misery.
I. As for sin, you know there is a double burden there. Two things go to make the burden of our sinfulness: original sin, and the countless actual sins we have done. Our first parents had no inherited burden of guilt. They started fair. We do not. They had not to bear that load which all of us have to bear; that load which crushes down so many of our race, and which many a one has hardly a hope of escaping. Now, what we need as regards all this is to be brought back to our better self; brought back to where human nature was before it fell; and Christ, in His great atoning work, does that. He puts His redeemed ones so effectually in that condition, that they can never leave it again. Not the unstable and speedily lost purity of the days in Eden; but an enduring, an irrefragable holiness, never to be lost more.
II. The Fall brought us also into an estate of misery. And we remember from childhood the sad but too true tale of the items that make up human misery. Looking back, we discern a day when it was different. Once man walked in communion with God, and was free and happy in that communion. In his unfallen state, Adam would not have known what any one meant who had spoken to him of the wrath and curse of God; and least of all would he have been able to understand, till sad experience taught him, what is meant by the pangs of an accusing conscience what is meant by the burden of remorse. And now let us thankfully mark that the Redeemer takes away, even here, in part, and fully hereafter, each of these things that go to make the sum of the sorrow into which man came when he fell. The manifold ills and trials of life may still remain; but even in this world He lightens them, takes the worst sting from them; do but trust Him as we ought, and God will keep him in perfect peace "whose mind is stayed upon Himself," and even where these ills and cares are most heavily felt, the Holy Spirit makes them work together for the soul's true good.
A. K. H. B., Counsel and Comfort from a City Pulpit,p. 55.
The Hunger of the Soul.
The truth here expressed is this: that a life separated from God is a life of bitter hunger, or even of spiritual starvation.
I. Consider the true grounds of the fact stated; for as we discover how and for what reasons the life of sin must be a life of hunger, we shall see the more readily and clearly the force of those illustrations by which the fact is exhibited. The great principle that underlies the whole subject and all the facts pertaining to it is, that the soul is a creature that wants food, in order to its satisfaction, as truly as the body. No principle is more certain, and yet there is none so generally overlooked, or hidden from the sight of men. Our blessed Lord appears to have always the feeling that He has come down into a realm of hungry, famishing souls. You see this in the parable of the prodigal son, and that of the feast or supper. Hence, also, that very remarkable discourse in John vi., where He declares Himself as the living Bread that came down from heaven; that a man may eat thereof and not die. it is the grand endeavour of the Gospel to communicate God to men. They have undertaken to live without Him, and do not see that they are starving in the bitterness of their experiment. When Christ is received, He restores the consciousness of God, fills the soul with the Divine light, and sets it in that connection with God which is life eternal life.
II. Consider the necessary hunger of a state of sin, and the tokens by which it is indicated. A hungry herd of animals, waiting the time of their feeding, do not show their hunger more convincingly, by their impatient cries and eager looks and motions, than the human race do theirs, in the works, and ways, and tempers of their selfish life. I can only point out a few of these demonstrations. (1) The common endeavour to make the body receive double, so as to satisfy both itself and the soul too, with its pleasures. Hence the drunkenness, and high feasting, and crimes of excess. Men are hungry everywhere, and they compel the body to make a swine's heaven for the comfort of the godlike soul. (2) Again, we see the hunger of sin by the immense number of drudges there are in the world. It makes little difference generally whether men are poor or rich. Some terrible hunger is upon them, and it drives them madly forward, through burdens, and sacrifices, and toils that would be rank oppression put upon a slave. (3) Notice, again, how many contrive in one way and another, to get, if possible, some food of content for the soul that has a finer and more fit quality than the swine's food with which they so often overtask the body honour, power, admiration, flattery, society, literary accomplishments. The Spirit of God will sometimes show us, in an unwonted manner, the secret of these troubles, for He is the Interpreter of the soul's troubles. He comes to it whispering inwardly the awful secret of its pains "Without God and without hope in the world." He bids the swineherd look up from his sensual object and works, and remember his home and his Father; tells him of a great supper prepared, and that all things are now ready, and bids him come. Conscious of that deep poverty he is in; conscious of that immortal being whose deep wants have been so long denied; he hears a gentle voice of love saying, "I am that Bread of life... I am the living Bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this Bread, he shall live."
H. Bushnell, The New Life,p. 32.
References: Luke 15:17. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xvii., No. 1000; J. Thain Davidson, ForewarnedForearmed,p. 247; J. Jacob, Church of England Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 63; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines of Sermons,p. 66; J. Keble, Sermons from Lent to Passiontide,p. 436; H. W. Beecher, Sermons,3rd series, p. 473; W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons,vol. ii., p. 139; Ibid.,2nd series, p. 139. Luke 15:17-19. J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,p. 220; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 85.