Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

This is the Daily Blade. Again, I'm Jay Reisner, lead pastor at Faith

Bible Church, filling in for Kyle and Jobi this week. And we're working our way through Luke

chapter 15. And at this point in the week, I've introduced three parables. And today, I want to

drill down on the three characters in the last story, the story of the lost

son, because understanding each of these characters gets us to the heart of why Jesus came up

with and delivered this story. So three people in Luke 15, verses 11 through 32, first, the younger

son. This character in Jesus parable obviously represents

the tax collectors and sinners. What Jesus does here is, knowing the self-righteous sensibilities

of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus generates for them an image of the supreme sinner.

Jesus is in effect saying, you think these people drawn to me are sinners. Well, let me tell you a story about a sinner. Just look at some of the

details that Jesus includes to amplify the shame of this younger son. Most obviously, he's a son

that doesn't honor his father. By asking for his inheritance early, he is essentially saying he would rather his father be dead. Just a blatant violation of the Fifth Commandment, immensely shameful. He liquidated his share of the estate quickly, the son did, meaning he probably got pennies on the dollar for the goods and the livestock and the land that his father had gifted him, which that total lack of stewardship would have been additionally shameful.

After liquidating, he heads to this distant country, which means he went to live amongst the Gentiles. He's breaking away from the

covenant community. He's leaving the land of promise. Shameful. Then he proceeds to squander his wealth,

shameful. And he did so with, the text says, loose living, doubly shameful. Verse 14 says, when he had spent everything.

Everything?

Yeah, everything.

That's shameful.

So he hires himself out to a Gentile, shameful.

And the Gentile farmer made him a day laborer feeding pigs.

Do I even have to say shameful?

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