I was just looking at my poster of Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son Returns and I realized what that story and the poster are saying!

For a long time I saw it all as a situation where the son realized after a huge situation presented itself (reality finally came into focus for him) that his choices had been improper.

So, appropriately he sought his father’s forgiveness. Now, remember what his father did when he originally asked for his inheritance—he gave it to him. So was it ok for him to ask for his inheritance? No, but His father I’m sure knew that it could have bad results for his son, but he gave it to him. He seemed to feel that it was his gift to give as he pleased.

Now, what about his brother not accepting him at all? Situation after situation came up but he still would not accept him, and that hurt his brother a lot.

So what does that all mean? Well, at one time I believed that it meant that through the proper sequential actions on my part that the father would forgive me, but now I see it differently and this view agrees with the scriptures.

God, our Father, is extremely patient. Extremely. Plus He knows everything about us. Who we have been, who we are and who we will become and He still gave us grace. Forgiveness was His and His alone. So no matter what He knew, He still sent us Jesus:
Rom 5:8
8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
NIV
And no matter what we have done, no matter what, He still loves us:
Eph 2:8-10
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
NIV

So what if our brother doesn’t accept us? There certainly is no example in the Bible that that won’t hurt us, but the bottom line for the prodigal son was that the father accepted him, and our Father does to!

So, now that I have a different understanding, what does that parable mean to me? Well to me it means that we could go from where we are to worse and fail (again) but we’ll always be failures because we are human. So the only hope we have is in our Father, not what others think but what He thinks.