Lost Like a Coin: Luke 15:8-10

Coming immediately following our parable about the lost sheep, Jesus continues by sharing another similarly themed parable that is set in a different context. While the previous parables we looked at focused on a sheep getting lost, or perhaps wandering off, this second parable involves finding something that was lost that could not really get lost on its own.

Let’s read the parable and discover what happened. Our passage is found in the gospel of Luke, chapter 15, and we will read it from the New American Standard Bible. Starting in verse 8, Jesus continued by saying:

⁸ “Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? ⁹ When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!’ ¹⁰ In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

When reading this short parable, I am intrigued by the detail that while a sheep could wander off and get itself lost, a coin can’t really lose itself. Sure, if the coin is bumped off of a table, gravity helps the coin fall and get the energy to bounce and/or roll away from the table, but after the coin has stopped moving, it will stay in the spot it stopped until it has been found by someone or something. On the surface, it sounds as though in this parable, God is capable of losing something.

However, this illustration Jesus told does not teach this. This illustration is not a parable that describes the kingdom of heaven in a traditional sense. When looking specifically at this parable, the emphasis is not on the losing, but on the type of joy that is experienced when what was lost has been found.

Imagine with me that you misplaced a check for one thousand dollars. This check had arrived as a gift in the mail and you hadn’t gotten the chance to deposit it yet. Whether one thousand dollars is a large amount of money for you or not, I am pretty confident that you would search your house from top to bottom until you found it. If the check was worth two or three months worth of your income, you might not have much of a house left after searching through it to find the lost check.

But continue imagining with me for a moment. Once you have found the check, it’s likely you’d race to deposit or cash it in, and then following that, you would breathe a huge sigh of relief. You may even celebrate depending on how difficult it was to find.

The gist of Jesus’ parable is that a similar joy and/or celebration happens “in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents”.

Part of me wonders if this actually is more accurate to how God looks at many people in the world today than the illustration of a lost sheep. While a lost sheep implies that it was part of God’s flock of sheep at one point in its past, the sheep may realize that it is lost after it wandered off.

However, a lost coin has no awareness of being lost, a lost coin doesn’t have any awareness of its value in the owner’s eyes, and a lost coin has no possible way of being found other than the owner, or someone else, recognizing and rescuing it.

In my mind, this is a better picture of our world today. Most people who don’t know Jesus wouldn’t think of themselves as lost. Most people don’t have any clue how valuable they are in God’s eyes. Most people have no idea that God desires to recognize and rescue them from the sin that is destroying this world.

When the majority of the people in the world believe that if God exists, that He started history then walked away, this belief supports the idea that God doesn’t care about them or the state of the world today. In most people’s minds, God is absent, and we are left on our own. If God exists and if He started everything, that doesn’t change anything today because God is off doing his own thing leaving us on our own.

Except that if that were the case, Jesus wouldn’t have come, and we likely wouldn’t exist. If God wanted a perfect universe, and part of the universe became infected with sin, a distant, uncaring God would simply wipe that part of the universe away. We wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t have any clue.

This doesn’t mean that we came into existence without God’s involvement. Instead, this means that because we are still alive and breathing, God cares about us. Just as we focused on in our last parable and episode, this parable concludes with the same big idea. Verse 10 tells us that “In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Jesus’ conclusion to these parables speaks volumes regarding who we are, who God is, and His plan for our lives. Unlike a coin that has no idea it is lost, we are able to recognize our need for God, we are able to repent, and we are able to return to God after we have gotten lost.

However, the huge truth in these parables is that when we get lost, we are not capable of finding ourselves. Instead, when we are lost, God is the One who finds us. Sometimes God finds us personally, through the Holy Spirit, while other times the Holy Spirit partners with others who God has found to help us return to Him. It is less relevant how God finds us; it is more relevant that when God has found us that we choose to repent, because when we repent, there is a celebration in heaven!

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As always, continue to seek God first in your life and to place Him as your number one priority. Choose to accept that because you and I exist, that means that God still has a purpose for us being alive in the world today and that He still has something for us to learn and help others in this world tainted by sin. However, also realize that God’s goal isn’t for us to live forever in sin. Instead, it is for all of His people to live forever in a new, recreated sinless new heaven and new earth.

Also, continue praying and studying the Bible for yourself to learn what God wants to teach you about Himself and about His goals and ideals for your life. God’s view of us is infinitely higher than our own view of ourselves, and we know this because of what God gave in order to redeem us from sin. God gave Jesus to die for us to take our punishment for sin upon Himself.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or drift away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!