marbren wrote:
“Until today I loved this for the teaching on God’s Grace. What if ...”
Beware the dangerous ground on which you tread here.
The whole Bible, Old and New Testament, teaches God’s grace. That is its purpose. Why don’t you, instead of trying to analyze everything by means of an Israel/Church dialectic, analyze everything by means of the dialect the Bible itself lays out: sin/grace. A false dialectic will yield a false understanding.
Take the political world. When one analyzes everything using the Marxist dialectic, he strives to fashion a world that not only doesn’t exist, but cannot exist.
Man sinned, sins, and will sin. God calls man’s sin damnable, i.e., something that cannot and will not ever co-exist with Him, who is holy, righteous, perfect, and eternal. God, while not retracting His judgment of man in the least - not one jot or tittle of it! - in His grace provides a way of escape that man could never have imagined or accomplished. That way of escape is to send His only begotten Son into the world, to become man, and thus by His actively fulfilling all of God’s moral law in thought, word, and deed, and then taking upon Himself our sin and guilt in order to bear the full weight of God’s judgment against sin, remove the condemnation from us, provide true righteousness to us, and, so, bring us back into fellowship with God.
That is what is depicted in the parable, a parable spoken to the Jew first and then to the Greek, but ultimately to the whole world Jew and Greek (Gentile). None of us is a son by virtue of our birth, ethnicity, family connections, etc. We are sons through repentance and faith - the very thing depicted in the parable, faith in the One who alone has the right to remain in God’s house forever. The parable is simply the illustration of the truth of Hebrews 3.
The younger son is whoever recognizes his sin and counts as his only hope the goodness and grace of the father. That is point of the parable. That you should continue to love all the days of your life and not to be shaken from it, as it would appear you are.
You ain't seen nothing yet! The show will get very intense very soon!