This prodigal lad only wanted to be placed in the position of a
slave, but his father said, 'Put a ring on his finger.' The ring is
an emblem of wealth, position, honour; that is one signification of
this gift to the penitent. Still further, it is an ornament to the
hand on which it glistens; that is another. It is a sign of
delegated authority and of representative character; as when Joseph
was exalted to be the second man in Egypt, and Pharaoh's signet ring
was plucked off and placed upon his finger. All these thoughts are,
as it seems to me, clustered in, and fairly deducible from, this one
detail.
Freedom, exaltation, dignity of position are expressed. And that
opens up a thought which needs to be set forth with many
reservations, and much guarding, but still is true--viz., that, by
the mercy and miraculous loving-kindness and quickening power of God
in the Gospel, it is possible that the lower a man falls the higher
he may rise. I know, of course, that it is better to be innocent
than to be cleansed. I know, and every man that looks into his own
heart knows, that forgiven sins may leave scars; that the memory may
be loaded with many a foul and many a painful remembrance; that the
fetters may be stricken off the limbs, but the marks of them, and
the way of walking that they compelled, may persist long after
deliverance. But I know, too, that redeemed men are higher in final
position than angels that never fell; and that, though it is too
much to say that the greater the sinner the greater the saint, it
still remains true that sin repented and forgiven may be, as it
were, an elevation upon which a man may stand to reach higher than,
apparently, he otherwise would in the divine life.
And so, though I do not say to any man, Make the experiment; for,
indeed, the poorest of us has sins enough to get all the benefit out
of repentance and forgiveness which is included in them, yet, if
there is any man here--and I hope there is--saying to himself,
'I have got too low down ever to master this, that, or the other
evil; I have stained myself so foully that I cannot hope to have the
black marks erased,' I say to such; 'Remember that the man who ended
with a ring on his finger, honoured and dignified, was the man that
had herded with pigs, and stank, and all but rotted, with his
fleshly crimes.' And so nobody need doubt but that for him, however
low he has gone, and however far he has gone, there is restoration
possible to a higher dignity than the pure spirits that never
transgressed at any time God's commandment will ever attain; for he
who has within himself the experience of repentance, of pardon, and
who has come into living contact with Jesus Christ as Redeemer, can
teach angels how blessed it is to be a child of God.
Nor less distinctly are the other two things which I have referred
to brought out in this metaphor. Not only is the ring the sign of
dignity, but it is also the sign of delegated authority and
representative character. God sets poor penitents to be His
witnesses in His world, and to do His work here. And a ring is an
ornament to the hand that wears it; which being translated is this:
where God gives pardon, He gives a strange beauty of character, to
which, if a man is true to himself, and to his Redeemer, he will
assuredly attain. There should be no lives so lovely, none that
flash with so many jewelled colours, as the lives of the men and
women who have learned what it is to be miserable, what it is to
repent, what it is to be forgiven. So, though our 'hands have been
full of blood,' as the prophet says, though they have dabbled in all
manner of pollution, though they have been the ready instruments of
many evil things, we may all hope that, cleansed and whitened, even
our hands will not want the lustre of that adornment which the
loving father clasped upon the fingers of his penitent boy.