Heaven does not restrain its mercies on account of the protests of the self-righteous. Heaven is not ashamed to rejoice at the salvation of genuine sinners, who have by grace been brought to bow the knee to Christ and ask him to save them from their sins. When he hears them and transforms them, the angels of heaven rejoice, and they rejoice especially when great sinners are pardoned, because it is proof of the magnitude of God’s redeeming grace. And those in sympathy with heaven rejoice on earth. The true churches love to hear the testimonies of those who have come to faith.
In the first place, this elder son represents the attitude of the majority of the Jews, who looked down on the Gentiles, and prized their supposed position as the favourites of God, and were not willing to share these wonderful benefits with anyone outside their nation. To hear that the gospel had gone to the Gentiles filled them with jealousy and anger (Acts 15:24; Galatians 1:7; 5:10). This hostility led to the rise of the Judaizers, who followed the apostle Paul and tried to undo the blessings experienced by believing Gentiles. Indeed, Paul tells us that God made use of this envy towards the Gentiles, and used it to provoke unbelieving Israel to seek the blessings for themselves, which they saw God had given to believing Gentiles (Romans 11:11).
But more than that, he represents all who wrongly believe that they have a relationship with God based on their conduct, and their imagined righteousness. It represents those who believe themselves to be morally superior, and who despise others as ‘sinners’, and who then discover that God has forgiven those sinners, and received them as his children. To the self-righteous, that is an outrage. Those sinners have been forgiven freely and without achieving any of the moral standing of those who pride themselves on their piety. What does that tell them about all that the they righteous think they have achieved? Apparently God sets no store by any of it, and is willing to receive total outsiders on the basis of their faith alone. So the acceptance of ‘sinners’ seems to make a nonsense of the efforts of the religious formalists, and to discredit all his efforts to achieve righteousness. This creates a deep resentment in the hearts of the self-righteous, a resentment that led to Cain murdering his brother Abel.
But self-righteousness is not limited to the religious. There is also a non-religious variety of self-righteous. Even the atheist can believe he is morally superior, and can despise the churchgoer who he regards as a hypocrite. Certainly there are hypocrites in the churches, but they are not converted people. There are also genuine believers who worship God, who make conscience of all that they do, and judge themselves more severely than anyone else judges them. But the self-righteous atheist despises these as well. Satan sows confusion, and it is hard for those who are not instructed from God’s word to sort out all these complexities. The parable is about the attitude of those who do not know God towards those who have genuinely been humbled and brought to repentance. Human being make comparisons with each other on the basis of a perceived scale of morality. But grace totally overthrows this order. In some cases, there will be greater sinners in heaven, than in hell! There will be those in heaven who have been forgiven greater sins, and others who never repented and trusted in Christ for salvation, and who end up in hell. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ makes a nonsense of human morality.