I say unto you, that thus there shall be joy in heaven for one repenting sinner, [more] than for ninety and nine righteous who have no need of repentance.
Religious leaders had complained that Jesus welcomed disreputable people and ate with them. He answers with the parable of the lost sheep, then tells them what heaven celebrates: one repenting sinner set against ninety-nine who need no repentance.
Two groups stood around Jesus: outcasts drawn to Him, and religious leaders who resented it.
There is a drawing power in the person of Christ that brings tax collectors and sinners to hear Him. The Pharisees and scribes resented this. In proud self-righteousness they condemned Him for receiving and eating with sinners. Sad indeed that they can discern the sin of others while blind to the sin of their own hearts.
The same moment produced two opposite feelings on earth. Heaven joins only one of them.
He was rejoicing. The Pharisees were murmuring. But others would share His joy. The inhabitants of heaven could understand it, and they all will have part in it. … It is enough for now to call attention to the untiring love of the true Shepherd in seeking, and to His unceasing joy at finding. The Lord was telling out secrets of His own heart.
The comparison is no compliment to a better class of people. It points straight at the men who were complaining.
The ninety-nine who need no repentance never know they are lost, so they will never be debtors to God's mere mercy. Such were those Pharisees who were finding fault with grace… What is the definition, then, that the Lord gives of a repenting sinner? A "lost sheep." You see, He was speaking to the heart — not mere doctrine. He spoke this way to lay hold of the souls around Him. These poor sinners, at least, would know that the lost sheep meant them. And these Pharisees would know that the ninety-nine who needed no repentance were themselves. In fact, there were no such persons.
But suppose such people could be found. Heaven's joy would still fall on the other side.
On earth you cannot find the "ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance." But it is sadly easy to find ninety-nine who imagine themselves to be such. Yet even if they existed, there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over them. All the countless holy angels in heaven have never caused such joy as one repentant sinner. What astounding grace this is!
The joy has a precise object. It is not the rescue itself.
Notice, finally, that it is joy "over one sinner who repents," not exactly over his salvation. It is joy over a soul brought to confess its sin, judge itself, and vindicate God. We tend to be more occupied with the deliverance from immediate danger. In short, we tend to feel for the human side far more than we enter into God's moral glory or His grace. The joy in heaven is over the repenting sinner.
So everything turns on the word "repents." The usual definitions of it fall short.
Some say it is sorrow for sin. Some say it is a change of mind, resting on the literal meaning of the word. Others say it includes the decision to forsake sin and to do the will of God in the future. In truth it is none of these, nor all of them combined… Scriptural repentance is nothing less than our siding with God in His judgment of our sins. It is taking His part against ourselves, and so bowing in the dust before Him in true self-judgment.
One sinner outweighs everything the world calls great.
Empires may rise and fall. Kings may step down or be crowned. These things shake the world and fill the front pages of our newspapers, but they do not move heaven. Yet if one sinner repents and turns to God, if the Shepherd finds one sheep, there is joy in heaven. Incredible! Yes, we would say that, if Jesus had not told us — but He surely knows what heaven values.
Since the verse reports what heaven feels, it also exposes what we feel.
But man as such does not rejoice when his fellow turns in sorrow and self-judgment to God. This is not the feeling of the earth, where sin and selfishness reign. But it is certainly the mind of heaven… The Lord here assures us that a repentant sinner sets the keynote of joy on high. There are no murmurers there; it is universal delight in love. Is it so with us?
- Murmur — The verse answers a complaint. Religious men resented that Jesus received sinners. They saw sin in others and missed it in themselves.
- Mirror — The ninety-nine who need no repentance are those same complainers, as they saw themselves. No such person exists.
- Meaning — Heaven's joy is over a repenting sinner. That means one who sides with God against himself in true self-judgment, not just one pulled out of danger.
- Measure — Heaven's scale is not ours. Empires rise and fall without moving heaven. One returning sinner sets its keynote of joy.
- Match — Earth murmurs where heaven rejoices. There are no murmurers in heaven, so the test is simple: does our joy match heaven's?
Or, what woman having ten drachmas, if she lose one drachma, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek carefully till she find it?
The middle parable of Luke 15 is the shortest of the three: a woman, a house, a lamp, and one small silver coin. Everything turns on what is lost, who does the searching, and why she takes such trouble over so little.
In the first parable a living animal wanders off. Here the lost thing cannot move at all.
This time a sheep does not stand for the lost creature. A sheep has life of a certain sort, but it has that life only to go astray. In this parable the lost piece of money is a lifeless thing, and that best expresses what a lost sinner is in the mind of the Spirit of God. He not only slipped aside... but meanwhile the soul is only a dead thing spiritually, with no more power to return than the missing piece of silver.
The two pictures fit together. Each matches a way the letters of the New Testament describe the sinner.
Here that which is lost is lifeless, in contrast with the first parable, which represents a living thing as going astray (the lost sheep). The letters to the Romans and to the Ephesians view the sinner from these two points of view. Activity in sin is the point in Romans; death — spiritual death — is the point in Ephesians.
Commentators differ over whom the woman stands for:
Some, including Stier and Alford, have followed Bengel in treating the woman as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, since the Hebrew word for spirit is feminine. Maclaren, however, on this verse and on verse 4, says that "the owner should be the seeker … Jesus." The mention of "friends and neighbours" (verses 5, 9) seems to support this.
Where the coin was lost matters as much as what it was.
Unlike the sheep, which had strayed upon the mountains, the piece of silver was lost in the house. 2 Timothy 2:20 compares the great professing mass called Christendom to "a great house" holding a mixed collection of the precious and the vile. So it is not only the immoral and the wicked who are lost, but many religious people too. You may find perishing souls in both the tavern and the "place of worship."
She lights, sweeps, and searches. Each act pictures a stage in how God reaches a person.
The lamp being lit speaks of testimony. Sweeping the house reminds us of spreading the gospel of grace far and wide. The diligent search is the special care of personal concern for individual souls. How wonderful that the living God gives the Church the great privilege of sharing His care for souls.
A lamp still needs someone to light it — and silver says something about what the lost thing is worth.
So it fits that we now hear of a lamp lit for the search. The lamp is, of course, the Word of God shining in the darkness of the world. Yet the Spirit of God must light it if it is to show where the lost soul is. That soul often lies in corners dark and secret enough, covered with the dust and grime of sin. You would not recognise it at all as having the value it has for God. A lost piece of silver speaks of that value. A lost soul may easily outweigh the whole world gained. In Israel the atonement money was paid in silver, and it is atonement that shows the true value of a soul gained for God — regained, for He is the owner of it all through.
Ten coins, one missing — and the woman turns the whole house over for it.
There is another thing in the second parable: the hard work of this love. It searches eagerly, determined to succeed in finding what was lost. She does everything to get the money. The woman lights the lamp and sweeps the house. She could not stop this task of love — diligent, active love — until she found the piece. It was her affair and her interest again, because the money was hers.
From that everyday care the parable reasons upward:
What diligence and hard work for one coin worth eightpence! In ordinary life the shepherd could care that much for his sheep, and the woman that much for her coin — called in the original a drachma. If they could be so concerned, was it surprising that the Lord should care for sinners? They are immortal creatures, of far more value than a drachma or a sheep.
- Lost. The coin cannot stray and cannot return; it pictures a soul with no power in itself to come back to God.
- Owned. The silver was hers before it was missing, and that ownership is why she will not let the loss stand.
- Lit. The lamp is the Word of God, and the Spirit of God must light it before it shows where the lost soul lies.
- Swept. The search is thorough and personal — the whole house turned over for one piece.
- Found. She stops only "until she finds it," and the worth of one soul is what makes such effort reasonable.
and having found it she calls together the friends and neighbours, saying, Rejoice with me, for I have found the drachma which I had lost.
The woman finds her lost coin, and her first move is to gather people to be glad with her. Why does her joy need company, and whose joy is it in the end?
Jesus answers His critics with a picture of gladness. One writer asks how anyone standing nearby could resent a woman's delight over her recovered coin:
Would his neighbours, do you think, complain at the shepherd's joy over his lost sheep now found by him? Or would the woman's friends resent her pleasure as she swept her piece of money into her lap? So it is with God. It is His own joy in the salvation of sinners that Jesus offers as His warrant and His defence. Hold this thought deeply: the gospel of our peace is a spring of joy to Him Who planned and accomplished it. Our God has done nothing less than lay the scene of His own happiness in our salvation, as these parables show us.
She calls the coin hers. What makes it matter is not what it can do:
The piece of money, like the sheep, could do nothing. It was the joy of those who had lost them to get them back again, because they valued them. Worthless in one sense, yet to God's love the sinner is immensely valuable.
Commentators differ here. One writer sets the two readings side by side:
Stier and Alford have followed Bengel in treating the woman as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the Hebrew word for which is feminine. Maclaren, however, observes that "the owner should be the seeker … Jesus." The mention of "friends and neighbors" seems to support this.
A third writer holds the two together:
The woman is not a picture of the Spirit, but of the Church of God, in which the power of the Spirit works to seek the lost. It is wonderful that the Church has the great privilege of sharing with the living God in His care for souls, and in His joy over the repentance of the lost… The woman also expected others to rejoice with her in finding the silver.
The shared joy in this chapter goes back further than the woman's friends:
In every case — whether it is the Son, or the Father, or the Holy Spirit — there is communion. Here that joy spreads to everyone who enters into the mind of God. So there is real delight on every side. Each Person of the Godhead has His own fitting place and part in the wonderful work of redemption. Beyond that, there is deep divine joy in the result of redemption.
One writer takes the detail further, matching each "Rejoice with me" to a Person of the Godhead:
One has suggested that this may refer to the Father and the Holy Spirit rejoicing in the work of the Son in verse 6. In verse 9 the Father and the Son rejoice in the work of the Spirit. "Let us eat and celebrate" (verse 23) would be Father, Son and Holy Spirit rejoicing together. God does bring us into a joy of our own. But these verses seem to point to the distinct joy of the Persons in the Godhead over the recovery of man for Their pleasure.
This joy does not stay where it starts. It grows as it travels:
And the joy of the Holy Spirit — will He not make it felt in the hearts of His people? He must have "friends" to share it with. It spreads, multiplying itself as it travels from heart to heart, the way a fire grows with fresh fuel.
- Value — The coin could not find itself. It mattered because it belonged to her, and that is the sinner's worth to God's love.
- Finding — She does not announce a search. She announces a result: what was lost is hers again.
- Sharing — Her first act after finding is to gather people. Joy like this looks for company.
- Communion — Father, Son and Spirit each have a part in this work. Each shares the gladness the others bring.
- Overflow — The Spirit gives the same joy to His people. It spreads from heart to heart, like fire given fresh fuel.
Thus, I say unto you, there is joy before the angels of God for one repenting sinner.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.