But let us go on to this next chapter (22.). It is exceedingly lovely. It is not return for money here. There is no thought of profit in a marriage feast. Man was under probation from the time he was created up to the cross. But all was over then. Morally, the cross is the end of man. What we have been looking at shows that man is incorrigible. The crowning sin was, that when the Son was sent, He was murdered, But this parable shows that God is determined to put honor on His Son; and He will have His Son honored. And another thing we may notice. In Matthew's Gospel throughout, things are presented dispensationally. So here it is, “A certain king,” whilst in Luke 14 which corresponds somewhat to what we have here, it is not the king and the execution of his wrath, it is simply, “A certain man” made a great supper.
Ver. 4. “All things are ready.” This is on the ground of the finished work of Christ. So it is beautiful to see the time comes when the servants are sent with that message. The previous verse says that those who had been invited would not come, as in John 5:40. But the sending forth of “other servants” in this fourth verse assumes the death of Christ. “I have prepared my dinner.” Not only is God's glory secured in the death of Christ, but the deepest needs of the human soul are met. Righteousness for the ungodly—that is the wedding garment. His grace goes out to the most unlikely and to the most unworthy.
The Lord said about Samaria that the fields were “white already to harvest"; and we see in Acts 8 Philip reaping therein. The Lord had sown largely there. This remains true while the day of grace runs on. In Luke it says, “all things are now ready.” It is not what a man gives, or gives up, but what he receives that makes him a Christian. We are blessed by being recipients of God's grace. The Lord is showing us the danger of making so much of time and sense that the things of eternity are crowded out. The world cannot understand that the Lord Jesus, “the man of sorrows” pre-eminently, was yet the happiest man that ever lived. So Paul could write, “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” In one that is going on really with the Lord, while there will be deep joy, yet there will be a chastened spirit. But Paul was a good calculator. “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” Ver. 6. The multitude did take the servants, as we see in Acts 12 when James was killed and Peter imprisoned. Absolutely there is none good (ver. 10), but comparatively there are good and bad. As to our nature, sin is the same in everyone: but as to character, there are bad and good. In the “highways” etc., we get the Gentiles, “The salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles, and they will hear it.” We have here the contrast to what we had in the previous chapter. It is the One sent from the Father, God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, but in answer to all this
“Man meted to the Sinless One
The cross, the grave.”
And this parable shows that God is bent on putting honor on His Son. The righteousness of God in Christ is set forth in this wedding garment. It runs right through the scriptures. In the beginning we see the ineffectual efforts of our first parents to make themselves fit for God, in the fig leaves which did not satisfy even themselves; but they were clothed by God with that which brings in Christ in His death, the coats of skins. There is no mention of blood there, but how could coats of skins be provided without its shedding? Here of course it shows how essential it is to have Christ as our needed clothing before God. All is ready, and Luke 20 shows us how the poor sinner gets the best robe, not by reformation, not by being (as he thought possible when in the far country) a faithful servant—a legality which dwells in every natural heart. That foolish thought was kissed away. A servant needs character—he had none. But if he had been the best son that ever was, he could not have had a better welcome. When he was received he could not add “Make me as one of thy hired servants!” The servant is not received so. The immediate response to his confession was, “Bring forth the best robe” —the best, the very best, God had, and that is none other than Christ, “who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). When real communion with God comes in, it is the peace offering, the fatted calf. That is fellowship. God has His table and His food. The priest also had his portion, and the offerer likewise—a lovely type of communion.
Bishop Ryle once told the story of a ball in Paris, to which a very wealthy man invited his friends. He had the ballroom fitted up with electric light, which was suddenly turned on in the midst of the festivities. But instead of the pleasure which he had intended for his guests, he caused dismay and consternation! What might have passed in gas light would not pass in the searching light of electricity, and there was a sudden rush for the dressing rooms!
But the infinitely surpassing brightness of uncreated light will only reveal the perfection of that “best robe;” and the work of the precious blood of Jesus. The Epistle to the Romans shows us that the source of our justification is the grace of God, and the ground of it the precious blood. The angels excel in strength, but if all their power had been combined it were impossible for them to save one soul from hell. Jehovah laid help upon One that is mighty, mighty to save. This man without the wedding garment represents a religious man, and one on very good terms with himself, he thought he was better than most, equal to any. He had a robe that passed muster before others, but not before the holy eyes of Him who counts nothing but Christ, and who measures all by His glory.
“Friend!” it was addressed to Judas and to the laborer in the vineyard, an ominous sound. We must not think this scene is heaven. It is a parable to show the absolute necessity of having Christ as our righteousness, not the righteousness of Christ's law-keeping, though this is a common thought. It is He “who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption,” as we have already observed. In 2 Cor. 5 He who knew no sin was made “sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” All is founded on His death and resurrection. The Holy Ghost is here in the world; and because of His presence here, the world is convicted of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. “Of righteousness because I go to the Father” God's answer to all Christ did to the glory of God. If you want to see the righteousness of God, look up and see the One, Who here was crucified and crowned with thorns, there crowned with glory and honor.
The wrath of verse 7 is God's governmental wrath on earth. But “of judgment” (John 16:8) —this is eternal. The blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords must deal when His Son is insulted. God's Son and the work of the Son were alike insulted by this man who despised the wedding garment. And the true awfulness of the eternal state of the Christ-rejector is exceedingly solemn! We need to speak of it with bated breath, and not go beyond scripture.
We ought to be very careful. There is no one who presents it in such an awful aspect as the Lord Himself, as for instance, Mark 9:43-48.
“Many are called, but few are chosen” (ver. 14). This is put in to show that while only one may be here mentioned, the application is to many—and the portion of every unbeliever. The word calling is used in a twofold sense. There is a calling that can be refused, and there is another that is effectual. We cannot reason it out. It is ours to believe. It will all be clear to us by and by. If you could master every difficulty in God's word, it would prove that it was not divine-not of a mind greater than your own.
That is a sound argument—
“Thou hast died for sinners,
Therefore, Lord, for me.”
Believe then in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.
Ver. 15. They were all united: we are getting to the end now of the Savior's course, and the hatred is more pronounced; and those antagonistic to each other are linked together against God. Man is his very essence, religious or irreligious, is enmity against God. The same principle was in the woman. Why did God permit the serpent to come and tempt her? The blessed thing is to have no guile. I can tell God the very worst thing I know about myself and have nothing to cover up.
Ver. 16. Here we are come to that which demonstrates what the Lord said, “He that falleth on that stone shall be broken.” This was true of those who opposed themselves then. “On whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” This is when He shall come in glory: when He shall judge and make war. His mighty power will be seen crushing to powder. Turn to Deut. 17:14, 15. The very fact of their having a foreigner (Herod) over them reveals their sin. Had the people been faithful, it would have been impossible for any to have got the victory over them. What they wanted here was to get the Lord on the horns of a dilemma. He must either say He Himself was not the monarch and had no right to the throne, or else, refuse allegiance to Caesar. And it would look as if the Jews as a rule felt having to pay tribute to a foreigner, and that Christian Jews also had that feeling as well, for Peter impresses subjection on them. Paul also presses the same (Rom. 13) “tribute to whom tribute is due,” etc. The Romans claimed from the Jews under them a poll tax of a denarius a year (7 1/2d.). So the Lord said, “Show me” what you pay—the Roman coin. You never find the Lord Jesus with any money. To pay the temple tax he instructs Peter to catch the fish, and find the piece of money enough for them both; so here He does not put His hand in His pocket. Judas was their treasurer; and evidently he acted under the Lord's instruction, but he was a thief. “Show me the tribute money.”
It is very solemn that in the last days of the church on earth, when about to be spued out of the Lord's mouth, there may be “works,” but what are they worth? Putting saints before the Lord, He Himself outside the door of the assembly (not here the sinner's heart!) Only two words give us God's nature. “Light,” the purity of His nature; “love,” the activity of His nature. He can never give up the purity of His nature. Hence the need of the atonement. “Love” can never override “light.”
“They brought unto him a penny—a denarius (ver. 20). The image thereon might have been a very poor likeness, but it represented Caesar. It was his “image.” The Lord Jesus is the image of the invisible God, but it would be a fearful error to speak of Him as the likeness of God. This would deny His Godhead. He was made in “the likeness” (not in the reality) of sinful flesh, for He was holy, but truly became flesh. How was it that coin was there? What a testimony to their sin and rebellion! Had they been true, there would have been no coin of the foreigner in the land. Turn to Deut. 26. It was grace that gave them the land but they had to fight for it. So have we, but it is against wicked spirits in heavenly places. You cannot enjoy your heavenly inheritance except by dependence and obedience; and all the scriptures quoted by the Lord to the devil during the temptation in the wilderness was from the book of Deuteronomy, where obedience is particularly impressed on them.
In Josh. 1 Joshua is told to be courageous. In a scene like this where the world, the flesh, and the devil are against us we need courage. “Add to your faith courage.” Then it goes on to show us the importance of the word of God. “To observe to do.” Do we read the Bible to have the holy privilege of obeying it, or is it only to make us intelligent Christians?
Ver. 22. “They were broken.” I was thinking as to “Render unto God the things that are God's.” You get the very opposite in Malachi. There they brought to God what they would not have given to their Governor. The blind and the lame they offered to Him! Let us put Him in the first place, and let us take all the hindrances and trying experiences as from the Lord who allows them.
Well, the Herodians were shut up; then came other servants of the devil. They were the Rationalists of their day. They did not make anything of the tradition of the elders, and were the bitter antagonists of the Pharisees. They also rejected a great part of the Scriptures, but professed to believe in the Pentateuch; so they spoke of Moses. They believed in annihilation—that when a man died he ceased to be! What they brought forward no doubt they had used in argument a thousand times—an extreme case in order to hold it up to ridicule, for the principle would be the same if but two brothers. Man is a trinity in unity—spirit, soul and body. If the grave retain the body, man is not in his entirety. He is incomplete. The perfect state is in resurrection, when the believer's body is conformed to Christ's body of glory. So the Lord told Herod, “the third day I shall be perfected.” He was a perfect man, but while His body was in the grave, He would not be “perfected.” Departed saints of God were waiting, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, etc., for the resurrection. They were living to God, but will not be perfected until the resurrection. It is far better than being here to depart to be with Christ. Those fallen asleep are in the better waiting place. But there is all the difference between an O.T. saint and a Christian. The O.T. saint left his peculiar blessings behind, when he died. Look at Hezekiah.
If he had not lived that extra fifteen years, his son who turned out to be the worst king that ever reigned over Judah, would not have been born! We go to be with One we love, Who loved us, and gave Himself for us. “Absent from the body, present with the Lord.” The secret of the Lord from the beginning is resurrection. Abraham knew it. He believed God, and his faith is spoken of (Heb. 11) as receiving Isaac from the dead, in a figure.
They wanted to crush Him, and found themselves broken. Many times when they thought they had the Lord on the horns of a dilemma they found their folly. So Herodians, Pharisees and Sadducees, found the truth of the Lord's own statement, and were broken; by and by He will crush them without remedy to powder. These antagonists to each other were quite prepared to co-operate to crush the Lord. As we get toward the end, their enmity deepens.
We have to remember that “spiritual things are spiritually discerned"; the natural man does not understand them. Having this subject as to their question of the Lord, it may be well for us to remark that the Christian is not under law. The law had its purpose. It came in by the way. God gave it as one of His tests. Man was under probation from the creation to the cross. In giving the law, God has justified Himself in blessing man in free and unconditional grace. He gave the promises to Abraham before the law. The law was the lowest standard God could give. It was not the revelation of what God is, but the lowest revelation of what man should be. Therefore God has justified Himself in unconditional grace because man could not keep the law. That is the force of the word in Rom. 5 “when we were yet without strength,” after being under law 1500 years.
There was nothing wrong with the law, but with the material it had to do with. “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” It is the Spirit that gives power to fulfill the righteous requirements of the law, and for that which is higher, viz., to walk as Christ walked. When man fell there were two things necessary to make him right with God, life and righteousness. John's First Epistle shows us that He has provided these (chap. 4:9, 10).
A new covenant will be made with Israel in the coming day, and the Lord Jesus said on the night of His betrayal, when He instituted the supper, “This is my blood of the new covenant.” So the blood has been shed, and we get the blessings of the new covenant, but we are not under it, or any covenant. Heb. 10 shows us, “your sins and iniquities I will remember no more.” But in the millennium He will deal with them differently. There will be a fountain opened, and He will take away the stony heart that said, “Crucify Him,” and give them a heart of flesh; and then they will say, “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed.”
We do not perceive the beauty of that chapter (Isa. 53) unless we see this. Our stony heart has not been taken away, and is as bad as ever. Nevertheless, our hearts have been purified by faith, and our standing is in Christ. In our case “we love because He first loved us.” The first and great commandment (and this is true for us) is love to Him. The natural man can never give that. It must be in the power of the Holy Ghost. But we have the life that has fulfilled the law. They “that are of works of law,” who take that ground, “are under curse.”
“Whose son is he?” (ver. 42). This is very plain in scripture. First of all, the seed of the woman; then, the seed of Abraham; then the seed of David; then, in Isaiah 7 born of the virgin. But they all knew Him to be David's son. They were not prepared for a suffering Messiah. They wanted a great conqueror like David. In resurrection it is “I will give you the sure mercies of David"; for all will be make good in resurrection. This shows that if we have not faith in the Lord Jesus as a divine person, we have not the right key—faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as an eternally divine person. “If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins,” their case is hopeless. I do not think we can be too plain about this. If a man dies in his sins, he will be raised in his sins, he will be judged in his sins, and will be cast into an eternal gehenna in his sins. When we say, “judged in his sins,” we do not mean that his doom awaits to be decided hereafter, for the sinner's doom is already determined. But then, it will be the apportionment of measure, not of duration. Some will be beaten with many stripes. In John 5 the Son of God gives life, and as Son of man he judges. And all will have to accept His righteous judgment.
In Heb. 10:13, we find a remarkable ellipsis. In ver. 12 we get the work of the Lord Jesus and its effect, and in ver. 14 the glories of His work in contrast with the many sacrifices of the law. But in between, we find the words, “From henceforth expecting till His enemies be made His footstool.” These verses show us what very few Christians realize, viz., the blessedness that belongs to them—a purged conscience, no more conscience of sins, for by one offering He hath “perfected forever” them that are sanctified. When once the blood is applied to me, and I have the blessing of that perfect cleansing, sin can never again be charged against me as guilt, and there can be no second application of the blood. Sin in the case of the believer is very far worse than with the unbeliever, but it can never be charged against him as guilt. It needs to be cleansed, but the cleansing is not by blood, but by “the washing of water by the word” (Eph. 5:26). Forgiveness of sins is my standing; allowance of sin affects my communion. What is a Christian if he has not the joy of communion? “Sit thou on my right hand.” The Lord is not regarded in Scripture as now sitting on His own throne, but He will shortly. He is now on the Father's throne, but when He sits on His own throne we shall sit with Him (Rev. 3:21, and see Matt. 25:31).
It is a wonderful place that David has even in the N.T. Directly we are in it the Spirit draws our attention to the Son of David and in the last chapter of the Revelation we read of “the root and the offspring of David.” Christ sprang from David, and David sprang from Him. In Romans, where the foundations of the gospel are given, it is concerning God's Son, but historically it is “the Son of David.” Well indeed might the apostle say, “Great is the mystery of godliness!” If men look at Him as a mere man they cannot answer this no more than were the Pharisees able. And if He was not the Son of God He could not have met our need. There is nothing so jealously guarded in scripture as the person of Christ, from Genesis to Revelation. We had a reading meeting here yesterday, and our subject was 1 Cor. 12, the gifts in the body; and we were noticing what the Spirit of God is doing for them there in the ministry of His Spirit. Other spirits too there are, which we are to try (1 John 4:1), and we are told that no one can say that Jesus Christ is Lord but by the Holy Ghost. And we can be quite sure that as we listen (for God has given us a perfect standard), if the ministry glorifies the Lord Jesus that it is of the Spirit; but if it puts a spot on the Spotless One, or in any way derogates from Him, then we know that it is a demon speaking, and we must be subject to the declaration of scripture, not to our thoughts about Him. The two tests of truth are the person of Christ, and the word of God. What we have here and in the chapter which follows, connects itself with Psa. 40 There are very few passages in the O.T. which take us back to eternity. In the N.T. it is very different. The blessings of an earthly people are counted from the foundation of the world; but the Christian was chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. We find that voice in Eternity (Psa. 40:7).