Luke 15: Parable of the Lost Coin, the Lost Motivation
Who are the lost, and what are the lost?
This started out to be a commentary on the Parable of the Lost Coin in Luke 15. But it quickly went out of control. It’s now a casual meditation on a significant word we use in the church that maybe we should retool our thinking about, the “Lost.” Not the damned or hardened rejector of Christ’s claims, but using it as a slightly harsh but hopeful category.
This will be a controversial post because this subject involves the many opposing symbolic diads used in differing situational contexts. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be challenging. Something to attract our sense of spiritual exploration and discovery. This is not meant for casual Christian observers of the Bible, but those that what to really get to the heart of the matter. Call, for now, the “lost” all of us, these people who want to dive deep, to some extent. All that matters is that we, and what we are looking for, is found, and what is found is an exact thing, not a general thing.
Lost, saved, repentance, sin, found, believe, righteousness, sheep, coin, door, shepherd, flock, bless. What do they mean? You know, in the end, it does not matter much what they mean if that thing is not found, because symbols don’t determine meaning, they only reflect it and help it.
Parable of the Lost
You are searching for the ultimate vehicle. You go to the library and tell the clerk that you want to do research to find the best car. The clerk hands you a book. The book is full of car logos, drawings, and descriptions of cars. You see an RR logo. The book tells you that this is the emblem of a kind special kind of car of great quality made in England. You want to go and see this car, to connect it with the logo, but you need more information. You ask the clerk, “I want to see technical information on this car.” But you are told that this car does not really exist. That book is just an art book of conceptual designs. “Why did you give me a book on only symbols when I told you that I wanted to find the ultimate car?” The reply is, “what’s the difference. The idea is reality. You saw its idea in such beautiful artwork, for what need have you of the car itself?”
As crazy, outlandish and other-worldly and impossible as this seems, what if I told you this a parable of the “lost” among false religious shepherds? This is our idea of a Church. The clerk in an expert, having hands-on everything out there on the subject at hand, but, in his view of “truth,” truth is what we choose, or what we create. Its slogans, art, pretty expressions, good intentions, autonomous emotion, autonomous reason, personal anecdotes, platitudes, a new theory, mother’s love, anything but a reality we can see directly and not by a creative gesture.
There is no way this word “lost” is going to be totally non-offensive. It certainly does mean ina place near destruction. But it does not matter. The point is to recenter the people in the fold and those who have gone away from it around a particular biblical truth instead of a general one. Around spiritual reality, not slogans and statements. We have to change our idea about what makes a spiritually honest man, what is religion, what real faith is represented by in the universally demonstrated and objective truth from which he has strayed and in which he is given to be “found.”
So, I’m not asking first about the meaning of people being lost or not before establishing what they are “lost” from in the sense of biblical information. Not only lost in relation to a Christ the person but having lost the only kind of biblical knowledge that could be said to be inseparable from Christ.
You can disagree with me on how I handle “lost,” and I don’t care, and neither should you, but you can’t disagree on this: Something is lost and we need to find it, and it’s not Jesus, it’s his ultimate scriptural meaning. That is not another symbol, its the objective reality that the symbol represents to a righteous faith.
If Christ is a revelation and a person, what a lost person is lost from is a decision made for us: it’s both. Since we have a very hard time thinking of what is lost is a great biblical truth, but not that the Christ of that truth is lost to the wayward person, our main task is not reinventing the wheel, but nailing down conclusively this the what and why of this truth.
It’s painful, and its something we don’t broach because we know where the implications lead. If you make this “lost” as away from something that we are supposed to know and love which is not only a person but is inseparable from this person, then we are no longer subjecting our consciences to judgment by our relation to an idea, wherein all ideas, if taken for themselves, have a hard time judging anyone. But when we give that idea what all ideas exist for, standing for a body of information about it which commands its representation in an idea, then we are judged by something very exclusive and restrictive. We can take a mere glance into ourselves and see if it is there or not. It’s scary.
Lost to “Lost”
Being “lost” has been for hundreds of years of exegesis a priority word when one talks about what the New Testament describes as being estranged from or disobedient to God. It’s certainly one of those fundamental concepts that, if you get wrong, you get wrong part of the meaning of an essential sin and, therefore, righteousness.
Being “lost,” we have to remind ourselves, is a figure, a symbol. Symbols are superficial, cursory aspects, and they have meaning. Meaning is abstract, hidden, hard to grasp without its servant the symbol. I propose “lost” is a symbol for losing your way because you are no longer under the guidance of who or what is biblically supposed to be shepherding you, the truth, the demonstration of Christ from messianic prophecy. The first, the unsaved are lost to Christ the person. Its a definition we seem more than willing to glom on to, but not the second. I have stated the reason why. Now we have to establish that the fact that our symbolic emphasis has been long wrong.
I think it’s an important issue whether the lost are those in the church or those outside of it! Could it be that the lost are not those utterly lost, but those having Christ within hands reach, who believe in God, and say they revere the Bible but sense that they are missing something in himself and his church about Jesus’ message? I’m not talking about those who are never going to accept Jesus and don’t deserve even an appellation of someone with a wayward faith. But you have to be in the faith fold before you are lost from it, and we will go to the church in search of the lost.
Who and What
From what are they lost, and from who are they lost? God, especially in the form of Christ, is a “who” and is also a “what.” If God is as specific a person as a particular kind of revelation represents him, we can no longer say that being lost from this God is being lost in relation only to a person. It’s also with regard to a kind of “Word.” If so, you have to have found Christ in some correct sense before you can become lost to it. If you find the person of Jesus as savior, as your point of contact with God, you have a correct grasp of transcendence, but only by half. What about this particular Word, the rest of Him? Are you lost him then?
The usual way to speak of the “lost” as about a person’s spiritual state, often said to be that of some weakness as a result of some unbelief (αποολλυμι), is I think correct. But what kind of spiritual state? What type of disbelief exactly, not generally or round-aboutly? Why is it even necessary that such speciation is made?
If we are in casual conversation about someone “lost” that is about any other matter than a spiritual one, most of us would try to be polite and careful and use the word in a general sense. Not only because we probably don’t know what is the exact reason the person is lost but because we don’t want to place ourselves in the place of a specialist and diagnose him. With respect to cancer therapies, for example, your probably “lost” thinking that eating more fruit will cure you, but we’re not nutritionists. If respect to post-partum depression, your “lost” in thinking that you’re just in the dumps and you don’t need help, that you will just come out of it in time, but we’re not psychologists. But as Christians, we are not supposed to have a pedestrian familiarity with the nature of spiritual cause and motivation. We are supposed to have discernment, knowledge, wisdom, and be able to apply the Bible to the understanding of everything within its scope as a revelation of human nature.
We don’t have to be scholars to do it. Speaking about sin in a round-about way, and thinking that this shows nothing important about us, is a denial that we know a single thing about sin and shows a whole lot about us.
Thinking of or using “lost” it in the general sense is a confession that the Scriptures and we have no special insights, or we don’t know them. Why we leave the definition open is because a church of unbelievers that have no spiritual insights except those of the self-help variety are very uncomfortable if it is allowed that they are informed and specialists in their object of faith but in the Judgment may find that they were never so blessed even to be called “lost.” You do it for a people who never did find any revelation from which they can be said to be lost can call themselves “found” by only a symbol of it, and everyone can then be the “lost” instead.
I think what we find when we look at this word carefully is that it’s not about being unsaved, and it’s not about those totally outside of the faith. It’s about being confused, wayward, misdirected, and put in spiritual danger by a poorly taught faith.
If you have a Christ that the OT reveals but still can’t get a precise handle on what this Christ was all about, your trust is staticy, not dialed in and lost, the influence of your spiritual leaders usually having a lot to do with it, but the rest is you. But if you don’t have faith in Christ informed primarily by the OT prophets from the start, you don’t even have faith, and you’re not lost or even on the map. You were never one fo his sheep to begin with. This would make the lost a whole lot of people, not only a certain few.
Lost as the Saved
- Mat 5:13: “Lost” is a quality of the believer that is lost.
- Mat 18:11: Christ has come to seek and save that which was lost, referring to the “little ones which believe in me (vss. 6, 10, 14).” We miss that Jesus is talking about saving those that believe in him, not saving those that dont. How often do you hear a sermon on the “lost” as those that believe in Jesus?
Of course, these that believe in Jesus are not those that just say or feel “I believe in Jesus.” Jesus is also not talking about salvation to eternal life. He is talking about salvation from the dangers that lie for his faith outside of his sheepfold with respect to false teaching. The alternative is to say that these little children do not believe in him in the sense of salvific belief, but that is far more difficult. The little children are those that are obviously in his care, oriented around him by the simple revelation of himself fro the prophets, and whom he protects from the consequences of being lost.
The real “lost” here is of a people of a genuine faith that is in its infancy, a faith in Christ rightly grounded in his revelation. They become lost by the false teachers, such as the Pharisees, who left the sheep that are in their charge and refuse to protect them from the attacks of carnal thinking. The shepherds falsely claim ownership of them and cause them to have to fend for themselves, even when the Good Shepherd is around. I say again, the “Good Shepherd” is not a general shepherd, guiding and protecting the sheep with another general concept like “the Bible,” but precisely a kind of revelation of Him in the Bible. In 18:14, the sheep which were lost are the “little ones” that may perish should they not be found. It doesn’t, of course, mean perish spiritually in the sense of damnation but in the sense of not reaching their potential in Christ, which, to the believer, is nearly paramount to physical death (see 1 CO 5:5 and context).
- In Mark 9:50, like Mat 5:13, it is the saltiness of the believer’s faith that is lost. What is this saltiness? It’s the power of the Prophetic Word of Messiah to change minds.
- In Luke 15:24, the prodigal son is one of the “lost” sheep from the house (or faith family) of Israel.
A Lost Son
The son was lost and now is found, but he first was a son before he was lost. He was dead but now alive again. In both cases, he was first found and alive. Thus he was, in the spiritual sense, virtually lost and virtually dead, not literally. But how was he a son in a way that came to be a lost son?
These are the people of Israel’s sons of God. They are fully grounded in the prophets concerning Messiah. Faithful Israel waits for Messiah and is not led away by carnal attractions. But this lust by which leads them away, again, is not any kind of carnal attraction? If the son is a son by faith, and faith is in a number of scriptural truths, not just some general feeling about biblical statements, then the carnal attraction is a competing number of scriptural truths. The first question is by what scripture are they motivated to wait for the Messiah. That same kind of scripture, specifically, is denied which leads them to go after another religious, but carnal attraction. There can be no doubt that it is the messianic prophecies of Jesus orient the sons of God around the father, and it is the same kind of scripture that is left behind as those sons run toward other false, spiritual motivators.
The Lost who/which becomes saved
- Luke 19:9: The same sense as above.“Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.” There is no indication that Zacchaeus did not know scripture, did not know the prophets and knew nothing of the claims and demonstrations of Jesus as Messiah. “Lost” here is a believer, or a potential beleiver, in the sense of lacking a formal, open, public commitment to his beliefs. “Saved” is being shown saved in a public affirmation that Jeuss is the Messiah of the prophets.
- In John 6, Jesus tells his disciples to pick up the fragments of the barley loaves so that none is “lost.” The figure for bread, the Word of God, is the same for the believer. The pieces of bread are specific OT revelations of Christ from the prophets. All are scheduled for fulfillment. None are unimportant and meant to be handled by the evangelsit as lost ot discarded, just as the people whose faith rests in Christ.
The idea is that, again, one who is lost had to once have been found in some important sense. What then is found that is now lost? Again, “found” pertains to people as well as kind of scripture they believe, and remember, not scripture in the general sense.
As I said, this definition of “lost” and “found” speaks of either being a believer in Jesus who has lost his way or whose way becomes difficult or disoriented, or it refers to one who has the potential for belief but is thwarted. In either sense, it is precisely the same for the specialized Word that this person believes or who would believe, which is said to be obfuscated by the false shepherds.
Lost Sheep of Messiah
The lost sheep of the false shepherds is a figure with heavy Old Testament prophetic meaning, particularly in Zechariah. It identifies precisely what these lost sheep believe but why they are the “poor of the flock,” the “poor” being close to the meaning of “lost.” Now, if the Word and the Shepherd are not said handled in the general, generic sense, what is the specialized sense?
What better way to demonstrate this conception of “lost” and “found” in relation to Jesus and his particular prophetic revelation than to take it directly from OT prophecy?
Zechariah 11:4 (KJV) Thus saith the LORD my God; Feed the flock of the slaughter;
5 Whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty: and they that sell them say, Blessed [be] the LORD; for I am rich: and their own shepherds pity them not.
6 For I will no more pity the inhabitants of the land, saith the LORD: but, lo, I will deliver the men every one into his neighbour’s hand, and into the hand of his king: and they shall smite the land, and out of their hand I will not deliver [them].
7 And I will feed the flock of slaughter, [even] you, O poor of the flock. And I took unto me two staves; the one I called Beauty, and the other I called Bands; and I fed the flock.
8 Three shepherds also I cut off in one month; and my soul lothed them, and their soul also abhorred me.
9 Then said I, I will not feed you: that that dieth, let it die; and that that is to be cut off, let it be cut off; and let the rest eat every one the flesh of another.
10 And I took my staff, [even] Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might break my covenant which I had made with all the people.
11 And it was broken in that day: and so the poor of the flock that waited upon me knew that it [was] the word of the LORD.
The flock of the slaughter is those that believe the actions of the Messiah were prophesied. Before this, they are counted for the slaughter. Not for spiritual death, but for faith destruction by the actions of the false shepherds. These shepherds are only out for their self-benefit, not that prophetic revelation. They are not lost because they are not potential or unfulfilled believers. They are committed to this sin. The lost are not unbelievers but lost and poor under the guidance of false religion, a false religion antagonistic to what these poor believe.
Isaiah, who prophesies a lot of Jesus Messiah, refers to himself and his fellow countrymen as the sheep who have gone astray for refusing the Messiah of the scriptures. He is a prophet, of course, and no prophet speaks more of the Messiah than Isaiah. He does not speak of all Israel in the word “we” as those that have no such prophetic faith but only for those to which any blood atonement of the Messiah could apply. Because they can’t be forgiven, the iniquity of unbelievers is laid not upon Christ but only the sin of those that can be forgiven. But the main takeaway here is the subject context of the prophecy, which sets exactly what kind of scriptures from which these people are astray, and which kind they substituted which is their “own way.” Not some general conception of a Messiah, Jesus, or “the Bible” or “theology,” but messianic prophecy itself, from which all blessings flow:
Isaiah 53:6 (KJV) All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Again, those that are lost are not those who think, in pride, that they are already righteous and not lost, and are not in need of repentance. But the authoritative object of faith, the prophetic informational entity of messiah, for the lost and those that who think they are righteous and not even on God’s spiritual radar, is the same with respect to what of the Bible they are responsible. This is a sin of a kind of faith, or non-faith, against a certain Person and a certain kind of revelation, not any other. The real sin suggested is not a sin of some bodily motion or lack thereof, but one of spirit around the OT claims of Jesus. One kind of person knows it, is away from its singular influence, and is found by repenting or changing his mind about it in favor of Jesus, and the other, those that were never even lost from it, do not.
Here, again, the subject is false teachings from the shepherds that cause God’s people to become lost:
Jeremiah 50:6 (KJV) My people hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them to go astray, they have turned them away [on] the mountains: they have gone from mountain to hill, they have forgotten their restingplace.
Even the Psalmist likens himself to a lost sheep:
Psalms 119:176 (KJV) I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments.
The Word of God as something lost
With the idea of a general conception of sin removed from the “lost,” we are now able to consider that perhaps the big no-no that existed before, that the Word of God can somehow be said lost, is removed in an important way. The Word of God itself can never be lost, of course, but obscured, misdirected, mistaught, and twisted in respect to that kind of revelation within it of which I speak.
Here are some things that we can be sure of with respect to these “lost.”
- The lost are not typically unbelievers in Jesus Messiah from choice and knowledge, and not referred to as damned. Clearly identified are the deniers and unbelievers.
- If they are not, they believe in Jesus Messiah through the OT prophets, or they are thwarted potentially believers.
- They are “lost” partly because of the false leadership of the false teachers and guides, the shepherds. This idea of false teaching is a kind preaching the suggestion that Jesus is the fulfillment of the OT Messiah, but that these fulfillments and promises are not necessarily a main religious focus in faith. Those outside of the faith altogether, those not lost because they are never found, are those that believe in a Jesus that is only a religious figure whose mission is only to save them without their knowledge and faith in him from the faith from messianic prophecy. The real sheep are lost, confused, exposed to spiritual danger, found by the Good Shepherd, the prophetic fulfiller of prophecy, Jesus. He teaches them the revelation himself through the prophetic Scriptures as, like Isaiah, the only legitimate reason for faith, and brings them back into the real faith fold.
- “Saved” in relation to “lost,” is not justified to spiriutal salvation, as “lost” is not damned. “Saved” is the public apperance and confession of Jesus Messiah, or a confused and disoriented beleiver brought back into spiriutal alignment.
- But these “lost” are also considered sinners who need to repent.
- This Word or revelation of Jesus from the scriptures in the mind of these lost sheep is then also that which has become lost and requires it be found again, but not as it was found before. Lost in the sense of a kind of revelation and religious motivation that was beaten down, suppressed, and abused by ourselves and our culture.
Number five describes our Church. Anyone sitting in a pew who was motivated into it by the Christ of the OT, but who struggles with what he hears from the shepherd in the pulpit. Struggles with faith as a consequence. Struggles to reconcile his motivations with the person next to him, making him ineffective as a witness of Christ, are lost.
The believer is at least as beaten down in this sense as Jesus was in the sense of being spiritually righteous but rejected. Jesus, as the Word of God, beaten, and his followers or potential followers are the same. These followers are not those who are righteous in of themselves but righteous by faith, being driven only by the Word/him. As Jesus is the Word, and this Word is lifted up or lowered, so are his believers in the sense of what they believe: the Prophets.
The believer is as true as to what he believes as Jesus is true to what credentials him as Messiah, which are for both parties the same. If that is so, then to be lost is not applied to the guilty spiritual state and sin of a believer, but to be lost is for both said to be lost, hidden, misunderstood, suppressed, relegated, and abused oneself and the false shepherds and their word. This is why Jesus has an affinity and preference for the lowly, and likens them to himself, the “poor,” the “meek.” Because that lowliness is not one of a real status and value, but one of the spiritually mistreated by evil religionists of the Word, but who are supposed to be persons of the Word.
The Parabolic Approach
Therefore, let’s try this out and see if it can be consistently applied:
Any parable about what or who is lost, if what is lost can be quintessentially said to be a person in the church who is the same as the existential equivalent of the truth of the Messiah from the OT, is a parable for the conviction of false shepherds. But for conviction of them of their anti-scriptural motivations in what is supposed to be the faith of the Messiah of the prophets for the education of the faithful.
Interesting, how this parabolic “lost” turns into something once interpreted in a way that insulated the Church from a fundamental sin is that one sin that they never want to discuss: that of the lawless scriptural motivation for faith. The one sin that is the most deadly, most deceptive, and most ignored is the missing of the parabolic, scriptural subject of Jesus himself.
Parable of the Lost Coin
Now we can reread:
Luke 15:4 (KJV)What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
5And when he hath found [it], he layeth [it] on his shoulders, rejoicing.
6And when he cometh home, he calleth together [his] friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.
7I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
8Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find [it]?
9And when she hath found [it], she calleth [her] friends and [her] neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.
10Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.
Vss. 5-7: There is joy over the finding of the lost sheep by the Good Shepherd. The false shepherds are happy to lose sheep that are not fixed upon them and religion. To find these embodied truths is the cause of happiness for both the finder and the found. Sin and its cure are not physical, but primarily mental and spiritual. The sense of “find” and its cure is tied to that of diligently, wisely and honestly searching not just for the people of the messiah but the scriptures themselves and spiritually obeying that which is found: Jesus and his Revelation as the basis for faith.
V.8: Here, what is lost is not a person, but something else.
Why would Jesus put a lost person as a coin? Because what is lost is both a person and a thing of great value which is not a person: the Prophetic Word.
The woman, the Church, sweeps the house to find the lost coin. She lights a candle, which light is the prophetic truth that points to Jesus.1
Conclusion
I have tried to make a distinction between “lost” and “found” without the spiritual finality of “damned” and “redeemed.” We spend so much time on damnation and salvation and no time on precisely what it is of the Bible which informs us of our disposition before God. Whatever that is, and in whatever way you choose to interpret these verses, choose whatever you wish, but not whatever you wish as to what is ordained by God to motivate the lost and the saved.
In this Parable of the Lost Coin, all that is important here is removing the filth and clutter2 of fallen religion to find that lost piece. If any repentance comes for losing something precious or losing yourself, there first must be a successful search for the what and the why it was lost.
The irony is that we are the ones outside of the faith if we believe that the messianic prophecies are no longer compelling enough to put as our main faith motivation. When we come to understand that Jesus Christ himself, as the Word of God, is the prophecies made flesh, we are not the “lost,” we were never even in the faith fold from which to become lost.
If anything is lost, let’s find that lost coin.
Please see these articles:
Christ and the Norming of Transcendence: Passing by Nehushtan
The Meaning of the Cross, part 3: Persecution
When I Survey the Wondrous Nace, part 1: Passing by Nehushtan
Tertullian, in his On Modesty, says also that this search is by the aid of God’s Word. The Old Testament is the only candidate for this, and if of the Old Testament it is of the messianic stream. ↩
Methodius, in his Banquet of the Ten Virgins, says much the same, where the swept dust is “the passions which obscure and cloud the mind, which increase in us from our luxuriousness and carelessness” ↩
