If you haven’t read Tim Keller’s previous book “The Reason For God” or listened to any of Keller’s sermons, you are robbing yourself of a valuable perspective and unique insight.

In much the same vein as his first book, Keller takes a very familiar parable from the Bible and provides a very different take on it than most of us have heard growing up in church or attending mass.  The book is not written for people who would call themselves Christian, although it is a must read for that group as well, but is written for those who are skeptics.  Those who are wary of Christianity.  Those who equate following Jesus with what they’ve seen from the “elder brothers” in churches for most of their lives.

Tim Keller is a brilliant man and this book is inspired (at least in part) by a sermon one of his dear friends (Edmund Clowney) preached.  Keller argues that in the parable of the prodigal son, we learn that the parable really isn’t about the prodigal son at all.  It’s really about the elder brother (both the one we have been presented with most of our lives and the one we long to have).  You’ll have to read the book to discover what I’m talking about.

The book is a small book with only 134 pages and should take an average reader about 4 - 6 hours to digest.  It’s well worth it and follows a lot of the same logic and reasoning that Keller presented when he preached on the parable himself.  I would love to put thousands of copies of this book into the hands of folks here in Jefferson City…I think it’s that good.  Here’s the money quote:

We sentimentalize this parable if we do that.  The targets of this story are not “wayward sinners” but religious people who do everything the Bible requires.  Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders.  He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.  It is a mistake, then, to think that Jesus tells this story primarily to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.

No, the original listeners were not melted into tears by this story but rather they were thunderstruck, offended, and infuriated.  Jesus’ purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.  Through this parable, Jesus challenges what nearly everyone had thought about God, sin, and salvation.  History reveals the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but it also condemns the older brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms.  Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost, both paths are dead-ends, and that every thought the human race had about how to connect to God has been wrong.

This book will be a recommended resource for all folks at Eternity. Check out the others over at our Nomad page as well as additional Keller resources on that page as well.