Luke 15:18

I will arise. Perhaps as much morally as physically. He arose from the lethargy and despair that had spread over the skies of his life with the ominous threat of disaster and desolation. As yet he had no concept of the nature of his father’s love. But a sense of his father’s justice gave birth to the desperate hope that his father would treat him as he treated his hired help.

I have sinned. It seems not to have entered his thoughts to contrive some excuse for his course of action, much less to blame his father for it. His present state testified to the fact that his father had been right all along, and that he had been in the wrong. His confession was to be honest and unqualified.

Against heaven. The religious instruction he had received in his father’s home had not been entirely forgotten. He realized that any wrong act toward his fellow men was construed in heaven as if it had been done to God (see Gen. 39:9). All along he had been openly violating the principles of the fifth commandment, if not the others as well.