As soon as the earliest dawn of independent thought comes, we are going away from God. As soon as we begin to think for ourselves, we say, ‘I want my way, I want to do what I want to do. I want people to admire me, I want to be special, I want to have lots of things. I want to enjoy myself.’ We are ready to set off away from God, and to leave him. We answer exactly to this younger son.
Where the prodigal headed for is a picture of us. It is exactly the same with us. When we set out in this life we want to get far away from God and have nothing to do with him. Yes, there are those who have a form of religion, but they do not want the living God in their lives. When somebody from time to time would decide to tell us about God, some friend, some contact would talk to us, perhaps tell us about our need of the Lord, we didn't want to know anything about that. We would change the subject, stop the conversation, get very irritable perhaps. If there should be somebody in the office who goes to church and who is apt to talk about those things, we'll keep as far clear from him or her as we possibly can. Why? Because we are in a far country. We are living as far away from God as we can, and we don’t want to hear anything about God. We don’t want our conscience to trouble us. We are on the run from God.
‘And there wasted his substance with riotous living’, with loose living. He wasted his inheritance and it ran down. The word ‘wasted’ gives us the impression that he just went around throwing his money away, overspending, being thoroughly wasteful, so that soon he ran out of money. The Greek doesn't actually indicate that. In fact the word ‘wasted’ comes from a Greek word which means to be stung by a scorpion, so that you've got poison in you, and then you begin to go to pieces. You emaciate and waste away, because you get sick. This is the thought. It's not so much that the prodigal son was wasteful in the sense that he just threw his money away; he was very rich, but inevitably as time went on he lost his money. He just hurled himself into every kind of excess. He wanted no restraint. He wasn't necessarily being careless with it, but naturally it was bound to run down until he came down to nothing and he was poor. He might have said to himself, ‘I can't go on like this. I can have one or two or three expensive years like this, living as I am in this riotous way. But at the rate I'm spending, if I just do a little bit of arithmetic, I can't survive for long. You can get into your twenties, and you can throw yourself into whatever you want to do and shut out God, and scorn him. You can get into your thirties and beyond, but haven't you ever thought? Life is passing by. Life is going. One day you're going to have to give an account for all this. He then came to the point where he was well-nigh starving. All his means disappeared.
This too is a picture of you and me before we are converted. We say, ‘God, I don't want anything to do with you’, or at least we behave as though we were saying that. We take our gifts and our abilities, our minds, our bodies, our lives, and we go away from God. But there's something we haven't reckoned with. As the years pass, we are running down; we are wasting away in a number of respects. As the years pass, this is the most obvious: you're running out of time, you're wasting away in your years. First of all, your youth disappears, and you get older and then you are going to get very old and your powers will fail and your energy will be gone, and maybe your health, and then at last your life. Have you considered that? We are away from God; we have taken the things that he has given us, and they are running down and disappearing before our eyes. One day we are going to have to face him.
But then there's another sense in which we are running down. When you're away from God, your character is running down. Now of course we are fallen sinners to begin with, all of us. We don't have much character to begin with; we are sinners against God. But nevertheless, in early life there is some bit of genuineness in most people, there are some idealistic things. It is nothing like enough to get you to heaven, to counterbalance the great weight of your sins, but it may be that when you're young, you have some aspects of niceness. Perhaps you're one of those younger people that wants to do something useful with your life. Perhaps you're one of those people that doesn't like to lie too much. But you know, even such shreds of character that you have are going to be stripped away from you little by little as the years go by in this world. You'll soon harden. You are wasting away. You will become a much better liar, more deceitful, more defensive. What was, even on the fringe, nice and pleasant and altruistic about you will probably have disappeared from you, you will become hard or neurotic or something of that kind. Your temper will get worse; everything is going downhill without any doubt, and you're not the person you used to be. How often we hear this in life! People who in teens and twenties had certain aspects of their personality that was likable and winsome – meet them at forty, and it's gone, it's disappeared. They have been compromised and hardened off by the years.
You run down in another respect. When you are younger you think, ‘I don't need God, I'm happy, I'm a young person, I enjoy life. I enjoy my pleasures; I enjoy my studies, my job. It's exciting. It fascinates me. These things interest me, I'm happy.’ Yes but you are away from God, and even those enjoyments will run down. There may come a time when you can't stand your job, when the things that used to please you now bore you out of mind. The pleasures that so lifted you up no longer give you anything like the kick they used to, and you need a double and treble dose of everything. And in between the bits of pleasure, there's all the heaviness of heart and the difficulties and the trials. You're running down, you won't have the capacity to stay up on that balloon of enjoyment away from God.