Here is a wonderful picture for us. The journey of life is perfectly described here with all its dangers. Somehow, it seems an easy journey – easy in the sense that any downhill journey is easy – and yet it is a dangerous journey. You come down a steep hill, and you just cover the ground without realising it. That is like the journey of life. It is amazing how time flies – five, ten years pass by. When you stop and think, it's alarming – the pace which we go through life. Early on, when you are very young, you don't seem to notice it. Everything seems to take an age, and then it goes faster and faster. You look back and you look forward and you try to get a little perspective, a sense of time. You realize how quickly you get through this journey. It's a sort of downhill journey.
But life is a downhill journey in another sense too. The further you go along life's pathway, the worse you get. The more you get into difficulties, the more your worries seem to grow. You look back to when you were a little child and you think, ‘What did I worry about?’ We had some worries, of course; everybody has them, even little children in this sin-sick world. But you see they were nothing compared to the problems and the difficulties and the trials which come later. It's downhill in the sense that, the further you go on, the more you run into the trials and difficulties created by sin.
As you go down life's journey, you encounter thieves and robbers. Your time is going to be stolen from you by sin and by the effects of living in this world. Your youth is going to be stolen from you. Your powers and capacities are going to be taken. Although every one of us is unrighteous, even the shred of decency and youthful idealism which we do have, are going to be taken from us. Your peace is going to be taken from you. Your happiness is going to be taken from you. All your ambitions and your pleasures, these things one by one are going to be stolen by sin and by the affairs of life.
The expert thief knows what he's doing. He's done a little reconnaissance. He's got the things set up. He knows when to strike and how to strike. These robbers had probably been up in the hillside. They had got a good sight of the person coming. They had it all worked out. They said to themselves, ‘He is by himself. This will be quite easy. We'll take him on such and such a bend.’ And so it is with us. Don't be naive about this life. As you go down life's journey, the enemy of your soul and all the powers of evil know exactly how they are going to take you. They have taken many others before you. They are far more experienced than you are, and temptation is going to come to you. They know where to strike. You are without doubt going to fall to sin, and get into deep water. Your happiness and your peace, your little bit of innocence is going to be taken from you. Life's plunderers, temptation and sin, will take your moral power. They strip away your righteousness, take your happiness and your peace, and leave you wounded. If you think you can live in this life without God, it will leave you wounded. You will be hurt again and again, and life will be nothing but heartache and trial. It doesn't matter how hard you fight; you will be left wounded by sin. Ever since the first man fell and disobeyed, we all start out with this wound in a sense. But how we add to our wounds, trying to get through life without God, being progressively ruined because we scorn him.
We are viewed in the parable as half dead. Man is composed of body, soul, and spirit. You have a body and a skeleton and muscles and blood vessels, but you are also supposed to have a spirit which is alive. The physical part of you may be the only part that you can see and touch, but it's the smallest part of you. This body is mortal and will die, but the spirit goes on forever. Not only is it the biggest and the most important part, but it's the part that determines how happy and successful the physical part is. The word of God is being very kind by saying that we are only half dead, when really we are almost entirely dead. If we do not know God, and we have no experience of the things of God. The lawyer had asked, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ The Lord Jesus Christ responds, ‘You are half dead, you cannot do anything.’
In order to find the Lord we have got to see how lonely we are. We are not talking about human loneliness: we may have husband, wife, family, surrounded with friends. Yes, but as far as God is concerned we are alone. He does not bless us. He is not with us. We do not belong to him, so we are like that wounded man. When it comes to the wounds that sin has inflicted on us, all human help is in vain. This world does not even acknowledge the problem that we face, our own mortality and the burden of our guilt. It does not want to think about these things, let alone suggest a remedy to them. There are many care professionals in life today who we look to for help. That is not to put them in the same category as the hypocritical priest and Levite, but really they cannot help us when it comes to the needs of the soul. To discover this is to discover just how alone we really are.