COME TO THE
BANQUET
This is a great season in the life of
our pastors because we are now watching our children enter into the joys of
marriage. Last year, Ricky Mill and I
delighted in the weddings of our sons to beautiful, extraordinary brides. A couple of years before, George Tous and
George Tissiere cried tears of joy as their daughters were married. Next weekend and again in July, Leon Tucker
will joyfully celebrate as two of his sons also take beautiful, godly
wives. What a day to be alive when you
watch in awe as your children get married!
The parties and
receptions and feasts of such celebrations can never be forgotten because they
are so full of joy and wonder. In fact,
one of the most difficult things is to decide who all can be invited to share
in such a day of bliss!
But can you
imagine how any of us, or any of you, would have felt if instead of good wishes
and blessings on that day, we would have faced scorn, derision and insults by
the very ones we asked to share such an intimate moment in the life of our
family? That is the experience Jesus
presents to us for our consideration in this parable from Matthew’s gospel.
THESIS: The coming
wedding feast of Christ to celebrate His union with His Bride, the church, is
reserved for those who have been prepared and made ready, and who have come to
the banquet with joyful thanksgiving for the privilege of participating at the
invitation of the King of Glory!
I. An
Invitation to the Banquet
--In this parable, Jesus once again speaks to the issues of
belief and trust as He describes the reaction of certain people to the call of
God to come to Him in the only way possible—through His Son.
--What a vivid picture this parable gives of God’s love for
His Son, His passion for His glory, and His desire for His people to enjoy His
abundant blessing!
A. The Glory
of the Son
--The Royal King wanted this occasion to honor His Son in
the most magnificent way because He knew Him to be worthy and deserving of
nothing less than the best.
1. Personal
Worth in Character
Goodness—The Son is noted for His goodness and for those essential
character qualities that set Him apart as wholly admirable, exemplary and
wonderfully agreeable in every way.
Humility—In spite of all the reasons He could have for being proud
and arrogant, the Son always takes the low place and sees Himself first as a
servant of others, never pushing Himself to the front.
Innocence—In word, thought and deed, the Son has maintained a perfect
purity and innocence so that His character has never been stained by anything
having to do with rebellion, mischief or evil.
Compassion—His heart beats for others and looks for ways to offer them
His support and help because He genuinely and deeply cares for them.
2. Positional
Worth as Sovereign
All Authority—As the Son of the King, He has all the authority to rule
over the kingdom and to determine the courses of life for those over whom He
reigns.
All Power—With that authority, He has the power to execute His will
and do whatever He pleases…and frankly has no reason to account for His actions
to anyone because He has all power to do as He wills.
All Wisdom—Yet far from allowing His authority and power to corrupt,
He orders the affairs of His kingdom with perfect wisdom, always doing and
saying and choosing the absolute best ways for the good of His people and the
glory of His Father’s name.
--Therefore, when the time came for the marriage of His Son,
the King wanted to honor Him in the most magnificent possible manner—because
His Son deserved the very best His Father could lavish upon Him.
B. The
Gladness of the Father
--The heart of the Father was overflowing with joy and
gladness that this time had come and that He could have the privilege of
honoring His Son in this way.
1. His Delight in His Son
--The Father’s delight in His Son was expressed in so many
ways, but a couple of places in the gospels serve to prove the point.
Matthew 3:17 and behold, a voice out of the heavens,
saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”
Matthew 12:18 “Behold, My Servant whom I have
chosen; My Beloved in whom My soul is well-pleased; I will put My Spirit upon
Him, And He shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
--The Father found soul-satisfying pleasure in His Son and
delighted in this occasion to declare it.
2. His Joy
over the Bride
--For as much as the Father loves His Son, do you think He
could be joyful if He did not care for the bride?
Isaiah 62:3-5 You will also be a crown of beauty in the
hand of the LORD, And a royal diadem in the hand of your God. 4 It will no longer be said to
you, “Forsaken,” Nor to your land will it any longer be said, “Desolate”; But
you will be called, “My delight is in her,” And your land, “Married”; For the
LORD delights in you, And to Him your land will be married. 5 For as a young man marries a
virgin, So your sons will marry you; And as the bridegroom rejoices over the
bride, So your God will rejoice over you.
--The Father loves the bride and rejoices over her, expressing
not only His delight in her but His plans for her to enter into the glory of
His royal family and take her place in His eternal presence.
C. The
Grandeur of the Occasion
1. A Royal
Wedding
--The marriage of royals always calls for a regal splendor,
full of grandeur and glory seldom seen.
Many of us remember the royal wedding of our generation when on July 29, 1981, Prince Charles married
Lady Diana. Few of us passed a crowd of
600,000 lining the streets as we went to the church of our wedding…had 3500
attend the ceremony…had a national holiday declared on our wedding day. Royal weddings are big deals!
--Here Jesus speaks of the Son of a King and a royal wedding
of such a scale that we cannot comprehend its magnitude.
2. A Bountiful Feast
--Following the wedding, the customs in Jesus’ day
prescribed a feast to celebrate the joyful occasion.
--Here the Father mentions only the bare details of the
preparations, but enough to suggest the extent of the banqueting table’s
bounty.
Matthew 22:4 “Again he sent out other slaves saying,
‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen
and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to
the wedding feast.”’
3. An Exclusive Invitation
The hottest ticket in town in 1981 was a royal
invitation to St. Paul’s cathedral for Charles and Diana’s wedding and even
though 3500 were able to attend, hundreds of thousands stood outside longing to
take part.
One of the toughest duties of
preparing for a wedding is to decide who will and who will not be invited.
--The King sent His slaves out to call on those who had been
invited and personally inform them that the day was approaching and their
presence was requested at this glorious event.
--An invitation to the wedding of the King’s Son! What an incredible honor, what an undeserved
favor, what a gracious gesture on the part of the King!
--But the parable takes an unexpected turn at this point…
II. An
Insult to the Host
--Instead of the response we would have expected, those who
were invited to take their place at the table of honor insulted the King by
totally rejecting the invitation as if such an event was beneath them, an
occasion of no importance or consequence to them at all.
--Instead of viewing the invitation as an honor, it was
dismissed as an unwanted and unnecessary interruption to what they considered a
greater priority—their own affairs demanded center stage.
A. The Unwillingness of Some Guests
--For reasons of their own, Jesus says that they were unwilling to come—not that they could not come, but that they would not come.
--Nothing was so important that it kept them from attending…they
simply were unwilling to inconvenience themselves or make any effort to step
away from what they were doing to go.
B. The
Indifference of Some Guests
C. The
Hostility of Some Guests
--The most mysterious response, the shocking one, was the
violent hostility of those who expressed their utter hatred for the King and
their disdain for His Son by the extreme act of murdering the messengers who
brought the good news of this glorious event.
--Their treasonous actions and their insulting treatment of
emissaries of the King revealed an irrational response to the One who had
ultimate authority over them as their Sovereign Ruler.
As Jesus told this story to the chief priests and elders of Israel, He
was facing the same kind of irrational hatred and uncontrolled hostility He was describing. Still today, some of the most passionate objections to Christ and
His invitation to come to His wedding banquet arise from men and women who have
an irrational and consuming hostility toward the existence of anyone who had
authority and position and power over them.
Therefore, many who have been invited to come to share in the bounty of
the table of the Lord reject that invitation just as firmly and sometimes with
as much hostility as those in the parable.
III. The
Indignation of the King
--Very little imagination is needed to understand the
indignation of the King to the incredible offensiveness and blatant provocation
of those who were invited to attend the wedding banquet of His Son.
A. A Justifiable Wrath
--Can anyone blame the King for His rage toward those who
murdered His messengers and acted so belligerently toward Him in response to
His extraordinary gesture of generosity in inviting them to the feast?
--Yet people today have lost all sense of proportion and see
nothing offensive about their treasonous treatment of the King of Glory and
resent any insinuation that God has a right to condemn those who absolutely and
unashamedly reject His Son and His invitation to life.
B. A
Righteous Judgment
--Those who were invited can in no way be viewed as worthy
of their invitation and only the heart of the King contains the reason He
extended an offer to them to join Him in the first place!
--No one is actually worthy to join Him at such a holy and
glorious occasion, so we can affirm without danger of contradiction that people
such as these were rightly judged to be unworthy of coming into the presence of
the King and His Son!
In their weekly religious advice column in The News
and Observer, Rabbi Marc Gellman and Monsignor Thomas Hartmann from Long
Island, NY, try to answer questions from their readers. They identify themselves and their column
with the name, “God Squad,” but neither appears to represent either Judaism or
Catholicism in any recognizable way.
When asked about who gets into heaven, this is their answer (from their
4/16/04 column):
“Our take is that all good people go to
heaven, either because they’re just good (Marc’s version) or because they’re
good and even though they don’t know it, they have been saved by the atoning
death and resurrection of Christ (Tom’s version). The notion of a God who’d keep Gandhi out of heaven is just too
grotesque for us to contemplate.”
How the priest reconciles his answer to the official
teachings of his church, or more importantly to the scriptures…well, he cannot reconcile his answer and seems to
have no interest in trying!
In fact, both of these men offer this answer based
on nothing more authoritative than their own personal opinions. Unfortunately, that is all that the reading
public seems to be interested in hearing since there appears to be little
interest in finding out what the Bible has to say anymore.
--Without understanding the nature of the King and the
offense created in the rejection of His Son, few will grasp why God is
absolutely just in His judgments and perfectly righteous when He condemns
treason in those whose only response to His invitation is rejection and rebellion.
--This is the message Jesus is conveying as He speaks to the
rebellious religious leaders of Israel, and in so doing, to everyone who has
received an invitation to share in the joy of the wedding feast of God’s Son.
--Because of their rejection and rebellion, He extends His
invitation into a broader field and includes those along the way who appear to
be unworthy of attending because they have no status, no religious standing,
nothing to commend them.
IV. An
Expansion of the Invitation
--The time has come, Jesus is saying, to offer the invitation
to those beyond the borders of the religious elite, to extend this offer to all
who will come!
A. A Broad Appeal
B.
A
sweeping invitation
--Both the good and the evil who were invited needed to be
prepared for the feast and were not expected to enter without the proper
preparations.
C. AN
UNWELCOME GUEST
Matthew 22:11-12 “But when the king came in to look over the
dinner guests, he saw there a man not dressed in wedding clothes, 12 and he said to him, ‘Friend,
how did you come in here without wedding clothes?’ And he was speechless.
--When I first came to this portion of the parable, I was
confused because it did not seem fair that a man who had been brought in from
the highways was thrown out because he did not come in the proper attire.
--Then as I studied the passage, it became clear that none
of the guests had proper attire and had been cleansed and clothed by the host
before entering in.
--Here was a man who had the same rebellious heart of those
who had remained outside in defiance of the King—and suffered for it—but who
had been brazen enough to mock the assembly by trying to assert his right to
come to the banquet on terms of his own choosing, not those of the Lord of the
feast.
--In the prophet Zechariah, we read of the high priest,
Joshua as he came to take his place before an angel of the Lord and needed to
be prepared before entering in.
Zechariah 3:3-4 Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments
and standing before the angel. 4
And he spoke and said to those who were standing before him saying, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” Again
he said to him, “See, I have taken your iniquity away from you and will clothe
you with festal robes.”
--Those same festal robes, the robes of righteousness and
purity, are available to everyone invited to the wedding feast of the Son!
--The unwelcome guest at the feast had attempted what many
in the church try today—to defy the Lord and His Son by demanding to come to
Him on their terms instead of His…with this unhappy result!
Matthew 22:13-14 “Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind
him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; in that place there
shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 “For many are
called, but few are chosen.”
I do not know how I would have
responded if people had insulted our family by refusing to come to such a
treasured event as the marriage of our son to his special bride. But I can understand why God responds the
way He does when His invitation to join in the celebration of the wedding of
His only Son is met with rebellion and rejection, and even hostility.
Christ Jesus
will one day be united with the Bride of Christ, the church. And all of you here today are invited to the
joyous feast of this most amazing royal wedding of the King of kings. How will you respond?
Revelation 19:7-9 “Let us rejoice and be glad and give the
glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made
herself ready.” 8 And it was
given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean; for the fine
linen is the righteous acts of the saints.
9 And he said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are
invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’” And he said to me, “These are
true words of God.”
Many are called and invited to come…will you be among those who say ‘yes’? Those chosen will all come and be made ready. God is calling to live in preparation for that day by following His Son in a life of righteousness that keeps the wedding garments pure until that incredible day. Are you making yourself ready by following the Lamb of God?
April 18, 2004
Providence Baptist Church
© David Horner 2004
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