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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dean Cullinane

The Lost Coin

Father in heaven, this is your Word and we ask that you would share it.

Father, use me, humble me, hide me, and let your Word do that which it was designed to do, to change hearts, change us, all of us.

Father, help us to recognize that we have sinned against you and against heaven.

Father God, we are not worthy to be called your daughters or your sons.

But we're so grateful for your Son, Jesus Christ, for He will forever be worthy to be called our Savior.

So we ask that He would speak to us, and we pray in His name, amen.

I have a passion for stories in the Bible that are too often used as children's stories.

Sometimes we grow up, you know, we graduate from our junior Sabbath school classes and we're adults now and We think that really the only things worth studying may be Galatians and Romans and Thessalonians and these books are of course great, they're inspired just as the rest of the Bible are, but sometimes we neglect the stories that were so Central when we were finding our faith stories such as Noah's Ark How many times have you heard us a sermon about Noah's Ark in the past 10 years?

But you've probably heard many a children's story about it You know come on into the ark little children when really Noah was preaching for a hundred and 20 years you better get in this thing or everyone's going to die." It was a serious message.

And the same with a lot of these parables.

The parables of the prodigal son, the parable of the lost sheep, and the parable of the lost coin.

So I want to spend just a little time this afternoon, I guess I've made the preacher mistake of saying that this won't take that long, but it might.

Now this woman, this woman it says she has how many pieces of silver?

How many of you have ever lost money before?

But just for the sake of me knowing whether this is even at all relevant, I can just move on to the next point.

Once you lose it, of course, you want to find it.

I have this annoying habit of putting money in places where I shouldn't, like suit jacket pockets and stuff like that.

And then I lose it, and I'm counting, I can't find it, but then I, you know, months later, look in my suit jacket pocket, I'm like, wow, look, what a blessing, money in my...

But Rarely do we follow the pattern of this woman, where we lose some money and we diligently search to find it, but then when we find it, we just call everyone over.

Guys, come over, I lost some money and now I found it.

Let's come together and let's celebrate." How many of you have ever done that?

And then even still, you don't really want to call them over because then they'll know.

And so the woman loses a piece of silver, but I don't know, reading it, I just felt like maybe it was a little overreaction for just losing a silver coin.

And so I thought, you know, this is maybe something that I need to dig to really understand it.

And I found that these coins were called drachmas.

It's the Greek coin that's the equivalent of a Roman denarius.

Now, in these days, it was said that married women, what kind of women?

So if you're not married, the sermon is still for you.

But married women wore a headband that was made up of coins that would have been strung together.

They would have worn this headpiece that would have had coins strung together and these coins, or even the entire headpiece at times, would have been provided by the woman's father when she was getting married.

And it had very specific functions for the married woman.

The first 1 is that it declared that she was in fact married.

A man would see that the woman is wearing the headband and she would see, okay, he would see she's married, I shouldn't approach her.

Kind of like the modern day equivalent of the wedding ring.

The wedding ring is designed to show, okay, We are in a union that cannot be broken and some men, hopefully all men, would see a wedding ring and think that woman is taken I won't make any advances.

So the headband served as a Function in a similar way It showed that this woman was in fact married.

Another application or another function that this headband of coins had is it declared that the woman was in fact independent.

She was married, but she was also independent.

It showed that the woman, if something had happened, if the husband decided to leave or if he wanted to divorce her, it showed that she would be able to look after herself.

It was a constant reminder to the husband that if you do mess this woman about, and you send her elsewhere, it's not like she's going to die.

She's going to be able to, at least for a time, look after herself until she can find a greater support group.

It was also, however, used to identify sinful women.

Because if there were coins missing from this headrest, normally what would happen, if a husband had found that his wife had been unfaithful, he would remove 1 of the coins.

We can probably infer from this that this couple, the woman in question and her likely husband, if he was still alive, were actually quite poor because they only had 10.

Richer families would have headrests that have many more coins.

So if you counted only 9, it said to the rest of society, the social groups, and so on and so forth, that this woman was in fact unfaithful.

So this headrest told people a lot about the woman.

So it kind of makes sense now why it seems to be so precious to her that if she loses just a single piece, she still has 9 more.

It's not a drastic financial deficit, but to the woman, given what it means, it's important.

She loses 1 piece and she searches diligently for it.

It cannot adorn her head while it is lost.

It cannot help provide the essentials of life when it was lost.

And so it is imperative to this woman that she find this piece of silver.

In other words, the silver represented to the woman her glory.

And there's something about these 3 parables.

They all have, in fact, there's numerous things that these parables have in common.

But I think it's essential for us just to keep in mind that the woman loses the coin in the house.

What does a woman normally represent in the Scriptures?

Right, normally when we read of a woman, we read of an actual woman.

But in certain places, it alludes to a church.

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The Lost Coin

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