Old Books, God and Ourselves, Norman Cox, Part 3.
Sin can be fun -- as any well heeled prodigal knows: “Credit of all kinds is easy to get. When a man has resources, while some of his inheritance or talent or reputation is still left, many friends are eager to be helpful and kind. They sell him the wine that creates illusions of grandeur.... By flattery they intoxicate his vanity until he is sure that he is of all men most superior.” I imagine Adam & Eve’s first bite of the forbidden fruit was sweet -- it was the aftertaste that sent them scurrying to the bushes.

When a prodigal’s money or the talent is spent, so is the pleasure: “Satan’s salesmen cease to smile and entertain and become his bill collectors. Suddenly a man finds himself stranded with nothing. He is harried with demands for payment. Eventually he reaches despair.” His wild oats have “ripened into famine, his purchased friends into grunting swine.”

Oh, the depths of his humiliation! “This was the most horrible spiritual hell that could ever befall a halfway decent Jew of that day. To work for a Gentile was bad enough, but to feed pigs was even worse.” Feeding animals which the Law said were unclean, would have been a pious Jew’s “ultimate degradation” -- worse than a Gentile being “forced into begging, thievery, or even prostitution.” After soaring “on the wings of godless self-will,” he was suddenly “falling deep into chasms where he is shattered on the hard, flinty rocks of reality.... This is the inevitable end of those who run away from God and try to be God for themselves.”

No parent would want to watch his child reap such devastation. But it may be good news. When a prodigal comes to the end of himself -- his own strength, his own plans, his own devices -- he may be ready to put his life back in God’s hands. Some people only learn the hard way that life’s kicks have kickbacks.