Aug 22
17
Are You Missing Out on the NOW Celebration?
About two thousand years ago a story about two brothers in a wealthy family was first circulated in the Aramaic language. In the 1600s the story was translated into the King James Version of the Bible and today is widely known as “The Prodigal Son.”
From there the story was hijacked by the religious to say and mean something entirely different than what was intended.
The term “prodigal” back in the 17th century had the connotation of spending an inheritance in loose or immoral living – today it has come to mean wildly extravagant.
In a nutshell, the younger brother wanted to leave home and asked his father to give him his inheritance and blew it all on booze and women and wound up losing his fortune and taking a job tending pigs and eating their food.
He finally realized that if he went back home and begged his father to let him be a slave he’d live a far better life than that into which he had fallen.
The kid’s father, an obvious metaphor for “God,” saw his son walking toward home when he was still a long way off and ran to meet him. The story written by Luke in Greek, roughly about 25 years after the death of Jesus, made it quite clear that the boy’s father not only restored his inheritance completely but threw a huge party in honor of his son’s return.
The older brother was unhappy about all the attention lavished on his brother and refused to attend the celebration which had live music, good food, fine wine and even a show put on by dancing girls.
Why was the elder brother unhappy? Because he had spent his entire life in an upstanding manner, diligently serving the family estate and his tick off was due to the fact that in all that time his father never threw a party for him and his friends, the old man explained that he could have had a party anytime he’d wanted, all he had to do was ask.
He further stated that he should quit moping around and join in the festivities because, for all intents and purposes his younger brother had been dead but was now alive, and he should join in celebrating that fact.
The older brother refused and missed out.
Since the word rendered by the KJV translators as “sin” basically means to miss God and His intentions; the “sinner” was the older brother not the younger, which just doesn’t make sense to the religious who are trapped in moral codes and doctrines and miss God and His intent which is total love, forgiveness and full restoration of child-of-God status that awaits anyone who returns home, NOW while living …not after death.
The same writer, Luke, in the precise language of the physician that he was, quoted many other things from the same SOURCE – “Don’t listen to those who tell you the kingdom of God is found by going over here or over there, the kingdom of God is within you.”
The promise of all promises was in this quote: “How much more of His own Spirit will your father give to those who keep demanding just like a little child to get more and more when they feel they need it?”
C’mon home to ABUNDANT LIFE NOW and join the ongoing celebration!
“God presides over life, not death” …more from Luke in the original language.
d/”b”
In Freedom,
Brad