"In the person of the younger brother, Jesus gives us a depiction of sin that anyone would recognize. The young man humiliates his family and lives a self-indulgent, dissolute life. He is totally out of control. He is alienated from the father, who represents God in the story... However, the focus is on the elder brother. He is fastidiously obedient to his father and, therefore, by analogy, to the commands of God, He is completely under control and quite self-disciplined... Underneath the brother's sharply different patterns of behavior is the same motivation and aim. Both are using the father in different ways to get the things on which their hearts are really fixed. It was the wealth, not the love of the father, that they believed would make them happy...
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 avoiding Jesus as Savior and Lord as much as the younger brothers who say they don't believe in God and define right and wrong for themselves...
If, like the elder brother, you seek to control God through your obedience, then all your morality is just a way to use God to make Him give you the things in life you really want...
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 just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life...
There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good...
Although the sons are both wrong and both loved, the story does not end on the same note for each. Why does Jesus construct the story so that one of them is saved, restored to a right relationship with the father, and one of them is not? It may be that Jesus is trying to say that while both forms of the self-salvation project are equally wrong, each one is not equally dangerous...The younger son's flight from the father was crashingly obvious. He left the father literally, physically and morally. Although the older son stayed at home, he was actually more distant and alienated from the father...because he was blind to his true condition."
~Excerpt from The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller
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