Walking With God by Costen J. Harrell (1928)
“Bring forth the best [first] robe and put it on him.” Luke 15: 22.
The prodigal son had taken his fling at the world and had returned to his father. “I am no more worthy to be called thy son,” sobbed the lad as his father embraced him and kissed him repeatedly. The boy had barely begun his confession when his father called his servants to bring a certain robe and put it on him. Our English Bible translates the command, “Bring forth a robe, the first,” and so it is translated by the excellent scholar, Dr. David Smith¹. Not a few interpreters of the Scriptures have understood this robe to be none other than the old coat which the prodigal had left behind when he left home for the far country. The father had lost his boy, but he had kept his boy’s coat. “It is the robe he wore before he ran his ramble,” says Matthew Henry. This throws a new light on the old parable.
There is a scene in Dickens’s “David Copperfield” which beautifully illustrates the meaning of the robe in our Lords parable. In Dickens’s great novel poor Dan’el Peggotty’s little Emily ran away from home. Every night he searched for her in the wicked haunts of the city. One day David went to Dan’el’s modest lodging, and there he witnessed the yearning love of poor Dan’el as he waited for the return of his prodigal Emily. “The room was very neat and orderly. I saw in a moment that it was always kept prepared for her reception, and that he never went out but that he thought it possible he might bring her home…. I saw how carefully he adjusted the little room, put a candle ready and the means of lighting it, arranged by the bed, and finally took out of her drawer one of her dresses (I remember to have seen her wear it) neatly folded with some other garments, and a bonnet, which he placed upon a chair…. There they had waited for her many and many a night, no doubt.” Dan’el was waiting to put on Emily the dress of her innocent girlhood and receive her again into her home!
“Here is the very picture which our Lord portrays in the parable,” says Dr. David Smith. “The prodigal had forgotten his father in the far country, but the father had never forgotten him. He had preserved his lost son’s old robe and laid it by as a precious memorial. ‘bring forth a robe,’ he cries; but not any robe, not the best robe in the house, but ‘the first,’ his old robe. And the servants would understand. Many a time they had seen their master take that old robe and unfold it tenderly with trembling hands and survey it wistfully with dim eyes. No other robe would serve. The past was forgiven, and the father would banish it forever from his remembrance as though it had never been. The sweet old days had returned, and his hungry heart was satisfied.”
By one little word in the story Jesus tells us how God receives us, when we, repentant, turn to him. He forgives – and more, he restores. Some human fathers forgive, but they do not forget. David forgave Absalom, but after that “Absalom dwelt two full years in Jerusalem and saw not the King’s face” (2 Sam. 14:28). When God forgives he restores us as well to all the privileges of sonship, as though we had never broken covenant with him. Wonderful grace is this.
“Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
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¹ “The Atonement in the Light of History and the Modern Spirit,” Smith, page 145ff.
