Is God Dead? (The Long Way Home)

 

Is God Dead? (The Long Way Home)

"And when he came to himself…" Luke 15:17

There is a moment in every journey home that nobody talks about.

It is not the moment you arrive.

It is not the moment the door opens.

It is not the moment forgiveness is spoken over everything you broke.

It is the moment you finally stop pretending the far country still has something left to offer you.

That is where the prodigal found himself.

Hungry.

Alone.

Surrounded by the consequences of his own decisions.

He had spent everything. Money. Time. Opportunity. Identity. He had chased the life he was convinced would satisfy him, and now he was standing in the wreckage of it, feeding animals he had once believed he was too good to be near.

He left home looking for freedom.

He found bondage.

He left believing his father's house was holding him back.

He discovered that the far country had no intention of letting him go whole.

He wanted a life without the father, and eventually he received exactly what he asked for.

Distance.

And distance always costs more than we expect.

Scripture says that when the famine came, he began to be in want.

That line carries more weight than it first appears.

He had wanted before.

He wanted independence.

He wanted his inheritance.

He wanted pleasure.

He wanted life on his own terms.

But now he was in want.

This was no longer appetite. It was emptiness.

No longer desire. Desperation.

No longer the thrill of leaving. The terror of realizing there may be nowhere left to go.

And then Scripture says something beautiful.

"And when he came to himself…"

Before he came home, he came awake.

There was a moment when the haze lifted. When the promises of the far country finally sounded as hollow as they had always been. When he looked around at the life he had built and saw it clearly for the first time.

This is not freedom.

This is not who I am.

This is not where I belong.

There is bread in my father's house, and I am dying here.

That is repentance.

Not merely feeling bad.

Not being embarrassed because life fell apart.

Not wishing the consequences were less painful.

Repentance is the moment you finally see the far country for what it is and turn your face toward home.

It is the moment you stop blaming the father for the emptiness created by leaving him.

It is the moment you stop trying to make the pigpen comfortable.

It is the moment something inside you says, "I will arise."

That is where humanity stands.

For generations, we have wandered farther from God, insisting that every step away was progress.

We wanted freedom from His authority.

Freedom from His morality.

Freedom from His expectations.

Freedom from any truth that existed outside our own desires.

We demanded our inheritance and left the Father's house certain that we could build something better.

And now we are standing in the field.

We are surrounded by everything we wanted and starving in the middle of it.

We have knowledge without wisdom.

Connection without communion.

Pleasure without fulfillment.

Freedom without purpose.

We have accumulated more than any civilization before us and lost the ability to explain why any of it matters.

And still we keep trying to improve the pigpen.

We decorate it.

We rename it.

We make it more comfortable.

We add better lighting, louder music, faster internet, stronger medication, and endless entertainment, hoping that if we can distract ourselves long enough, we will stop remembering there was once a table.

But the soul remembers.

It remembers bread.

It remembers belonging.

It remembers the sound of the Father's voice.

It remembers home.

That memory is why the emptiness hurts so much.

If humanity had truly outgrown God, we would not still ache for transcendence.

We would not still hunger for meaning.

We would not still cry out in hospital rooms, search for hope at gravesides, or reach toward heaven when the ground beneath us begins to move.

The ache remains because we were made for Him.

The hunger remains because there is still bread in the Father's house.

The pull remains because home still exists.

And this entire series has wrestled with one question:

Is God dead?

We have examined the God we pushed out of culture.

The God we locked behind ceremony.

The God we reduced to a fairytale.

The God we accused of being cruel, powerless, absent, indulgent, reckless, or unconcerned.

We have looked at the distorted images humanity created because the real God was too demanding, too holy, too powerful, and too difficult to control.

We declared Him dead because we no longer wanted Him to speak.

But God was never dead.

We were distant.

God was never silent.

We had filled our lives with too much noise to hear Him.

God was never powerless.

We simply wanted His power to serve our comfort instead of His purpose.

God never stopped loving us.

We misunderstood love because we wanted acceptance without transformation, mercy without repentance, and relationship without surrender.

God never disappeared.

We left home.

That is the answer.

The story was never about whether God was gone.

It was about whether humanity would finally come home.

And coming home begins with honesty.

The prodigal did not rehearse an excuse.

He rehearsed a confession.

"I have sinned against heaven, and before thee."

He did not return demanding his old room.

He did not return explaining why his father should overlook what happened.

He did not walk toward home still defending the decisions that destroyed him.

He returned broken enough to tell the truth.

I was wrong.

I left.

I wasted what you gave me.

I am no longer worthy.

That confession was not what made the father love him again.

The father had never stopped loving him.

It simply brought the son back into the place where he could finally receive that love.

And while the son was still a great way off, the father saw him.

That means the father was looking.

Day after day.

Watching the horizon.

Waiting for one familiar shape to appear in the distance.

The son had forgotten home, but the father had not forgotten his son.

He saw him.

He had compassion.

He ran.

He fell on his neck.

He kissed him.

The son came home expecting servanthood.

The father restored sonship.

He expected punishment.

The father prepared a celebration.

He expected to beg for bread.

The father brought out a robe, a ring, and shoes.

Because the father was not waiting for a chance to humiliate him.

He was waiting for a chance to restore him.

This is the God we buried.

This is the God we accused of being distant.

This is the God humanity decided it no longer needed.

A Father watching the road.

A Father running toward broken people.

A Father who refuses to call a returning son a servant.

A Father who still has bread in His house.

God does not call us home because He needs more servants.

He calls us home because we are His children.

But there is still a road between the field and the house.

The father ran when he saw the son, but the son still had to arise.

He still had to leave the pigpen.

He still had to turn from the far country.

He still had to begin walking home.

And that is the moment facing every person who feels the ache.

You can keep feeding on what has never satisfied you.

You can keep decorating the distance.

You can keep calling starvation freedom because admitting the truth feels too painful.

Or you can come to yourself.

You can look around at the life this world promised would fulfill you and finally say:

There is bread in my Father's house.

I will arise.

I will go home.

Maybe you have never known Him.

Maybe you knew Him once and wandered.

Maybe you never physically left church, but somewhere along the way your heart moved into the far country.

You still know the songs.

You still know when to stand.

You still know how to speak the language.

But you have been living at a distance, surviving on memories of a closeness you no longer feel.

The road home is still open.

The Father is still watching.

The table is still prepared.

The bread has not run out.

But you have to arise.

There comes a moment when the ache must become movement.

When conviction must become repentance.

When longing must become surrender.

When remembering home is no longer enough.

You have to turn toward it.

So, is God dead?

No.

He is standing at the edge of eternity, watching the road. Waiting for prodigals. Waiting for the broken. Waiting for the angry, the disappointed, the confused, the wounded, the skeptical, and the ashamed. Waiting for the people who tried everything else and finally realized nothing else was Him.

He is not buried beneath the ruins of modern culture.

He is not trapped inside the churches that misrepresented Him.

He is not weakened by humanity's disbelief.

He is alive.

He is calling.

He is still restoring.

I started this series on December 4th, 2016.

I have lived a lot of life since then.

I have buried things. Questioned things. Wandered farther than I would like to admit and come back more times than I deserved.

But in all of it, I have watched God stay exactly who He has always been. Unchanging. Unshaken. Still powerful. Still present.

And more than anything I have learned about His power, I have felt His open arms.

I have seen Him run down the road toward me more times than I ever deserved.

That is the God I have been writing about and discovering all these years.

Not a theory. Not a fairytale. Not a distant deity.

A Father.

Watching the road.

So wherever you are, however far the far country has taken you, hear this before you close it:

The table is still prepared. The bread has not run out. And the moment you turn toward home, you will find He was already running toward you.

The son is no longer standing in the field.

He has turned toward the road.

The Father has seen him.

And He is running.