The Path of the Prodigal

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that I can avoid some personal pain by learning from the mistakes of others. The premise of 7 Prodigals is that we are all prodigals, having wandered away from our Creator, enamored by junk. One need only listen to the testimony of any returning prodigal to know that pain and consequences accompany each prodigal’s journey. Perhaps we would be wise to listen to those who have left before us. Even better, maybe we should consider what led the first prodigals to leave home.

Adam and Eve were the first prodigals. If I want to avoid some measure of the personal pain and consequences that accompany walking away from my Creator, perhaps I should seek to understand what led Adam and Eve to leave.

God created Adam and Eve. Then placed them in the perfect environment with him. They enjoyed an innocence and an intimacy with God far beyond anything we have known. Yet, relational authenticity and choice go hand-in-hand. God wanted to be chosen. Choice requires an option. So, he placed the tree of the knowledge of good & evil in the Garden. This tree represented moral autonomy, determining good and evil apart from God’s input. God made it clear that they could choose him and eat from any other tree of the garden, but to choose moral autonomy would betray their relationship with him.

The serpent questioned God’s word, suggesting to Eve that God’s word was open to her judgement. Eve responded to the serpent with her own revision of God’s word, subtracting from it to lessen God’s generosity, adding to it to embellish and magnify a sense of harshness, and softening it to remove the threat of consequences for disobedience. Her enemy was emboldened by her revisions and flat-out contradicted God. He inferred that God was jealous and controlling and that Eve could attain divinity. Adam, knowing God’s word, listened passively, failed to intervene, and did nothing.

The conversation ended, and Eve was left to ponder. She considered the outward beauty of the forbidden fruit, anticipated it bursting with flavor, and remembered the divine promise of the deceiver. The lure of moral autonomy evolved into thinking that in addition to determining her own sense of good and evil apart from God she could also find greater pleasure apart from God.

Then, while all of heaven most certainly gasped and the whole earth must have shuddered, in the most understated verse in Scripture, “she took of its fruit and ate” (Gen. 3:6). From a human perspective, it was undramatic. Nothing seemed to happen. So, Adam, knowing God’s word, but seeing no consequences to Eve, also ate the forbidden fruit, as if God were bluffing.

Yet, everything changed. They looked at each other, and for the first time, they saw the horror of human corruption. Their innocence and intimacy were replaced with guilt and shame. They covered themselves and sought to distance themselves from the One who loved them. We call it “the Fall,” because they fell from the pinnacle of innocence and intimacy with God to the pit of shame and guilt estranged from God. The first prodigals left home.

When I consider my own life, the stories of countless friends, years of listening to client histories, and every believer’s bio I’ve ever read or heard, I think the descent of Adam and Eve is a universal pathway.

It starts when something or someone leads us to question God’s word. If you’re looking for a trailhead, consider one’s language. Very few people will acknowledge God as God and then reject what he says. When we are seeking to be faithful, we will most often use the name of Jesus or a specific personal reference to God, i.e. “What would Jesus do?”. Yet, when questioning, judging, or criticizing God, we most often refer to the “Bible,” “Scripture,” or “that preacher” rather than outright challenging Jesus or Yahweh. The serpent first signaled his intention to discredit God by using the impersonal name “Elohim” in his conversation with Eve rather than the more personal name “Yahweh Elohim,” consistently used in this section of Genesis (Gen 2:4 – 4:26) which is focused on the relationship between God and man. When a believer begins to view questioning Scripture as something less than questioning God, he has stepped onto the steep descending path of the prodigal. 

The path of the prodigal is a slippery slope. While we may not be arrogant enough to consider ourselves equals with God, we have each fallen into the trap of elevating our own human reason, experience, or emotions above our level of respect for Scripture. We question God’s word, and subsequently his goodness, when it collides with what we think, feel, or want.

We start revising God’s word, consciously and subconsciously, to confirm or justify our thinking.

We discount God’s magnificent promises, viewing them with the ho-hum expectations of spoiled teenagers responding to the generosity of loving ultra-wealthy parents. We sing and talk about God and his love with the same enthusiasm expressed when discussing bread and milk. We take his love and generosity for granted. We slip into minimizing his love and magnifying his prohibitions. We mistake rejecting God as simply rejecting a small part of the Bible. For remember, we’re separating what God said from God. We have a consuming fear of missing out as popular forms of rejecting God gain traction among our friends and influencers. God is pushed from a place of ultimate significance in our minds to a religious construct or concept subject to our own contextual thoughts or desires. We bring him out to the forefront to worship, then store him in more remote areas of our mind for our day-to-day experiences.

We embrace countless ways to justify pornography, drunkenness, flirting, gossip, lying, rage, deception, arrogance, and every other sin without much drama or drumroll. The very normalness of our sin experience convinces us that it’s just fruit, harmless infringements, unworthy of being tagged relational or spiritual treason.

The path forks as we slide. We either

1.     choose the moral high ground, arguing over moral issues apart from the context of love, twisting God’s wishes into absurd caricatures, completely out of touch with humanity, compartmentalizing our religion, judging others with zealous conviction, and choosing the legalistic path of the older brother, who left the Father while staying home.

2.     Or we pursue our own definitions of morality and pleasure apart from God, mistaking the reality of falling for the sensation of flying, until our inevitable crash.

3.     Or we passively watch until we’re convinced that there are no real consequences to the choices of others, then allow our fear of missing out to lead us to leave God to follow fools.

Every reader is somewhere on the path.

Some have seen your own corruption, experienced the guilt and shame, and covered yourselves, perhaps already distancing yourself from the One who loves you most.

Some have yet to admit the real reason you hide the behaviors you have convinced yourself to accept.

Others openly defy God’s word, defending your decisions with either a well scripted justification, twisting God’s own values to somehow suggest they override his word, or a less organized spattering of human reason, experience, and emotions.

Still others point to the cross to suggest that your continued hike along the path of the prodigal is inconsequential since you’re already a member of the family.

Certainly, nothing is more beautiful, true, and valuable than God’s grace. God was identified in Genesis 2:4, well before Adam and Eve betrayed him, as a Covenant-Keeping, Redeeming, Incomparable Creator (Yahweh Elohim). That should be clear that he chose to give us a way back to him before we ever left home. Like the father in the parable, God will always accept his children. The path of the prodigal will not lead the believer to hell. What Jesus did for us on the cross eliminated the eternal estrangement from God of the believer who wanders down the path of the prodigal.

But that’s like telling a potential criminal that the crime he’s considering doesn’t carry the death penalty. That knowledge should not make a lifetime of bondage more attractive. Even for the believer, continued sin is bondage. Just ask the pastor habitually watching porn, or the church elder misrepresenting his credentials. All sin carries a cost. The path of the prodigal does not remove one’s kinship from God, but it always leads away from God. God does not move away from us. But sin moves our attention from him. It distracts us from his beauty, generosity, and goodness. The farther down the path we slide, the less we experience what he intends for us in this life. He wants what is best for us. Yet our attraction to sin distracts us from what he puts before us. It’s like wearing blinders. It’s not that God’s goodness is not before us, it’s that our sin keeps us from seeing it.

When the word of God is bent, twisted, revised, or contradicted, it’s not simply a book being challenged. It is God himself. The path of the prodigal is a slippery slope that convinces us to settle for so much less than what God wants for us. That compromise leaves us wanting, and often sliding or tumbling farther down the dry path of spiritual dehydration while trying to quench a thirst that only God fulfills.

How do we avoid the path of the prodigal? No one completely avoids the path of the prodigal. But by learning and trusting what God has said to us, embracing his goodness and grace with gratitude, loving God with all our hearts, minds, and strength, guarding our hearts with his word, and keeping our relationship with God close and personal, we’ll enjoy a lot more of the life God wants for us than we’ll spend in the bondage along the path.

I’ll close with Moses’ plea to his people to avoid the path of the prodigal:

“Take to heart all the words by which I am warning you today, that you may command them to your children, that they may be careful to do all the words of this law. For it is no empty word for you, but for your very life.” Deuteronomy 32:46-47a