THERE will be but two congregations in eternity, and in one or the other of these, my reader, you will have your place. God will dwell with the one, and those who compose it will necessarily be fit for His holy presence; the other, shut out from God, and only fit for the presence of the devil, will with him have to find their “everlasting habitations” in the darkness of hellish despair. It is a mistake to think that heaven is merely a place for men to be happy in. It is a place for God’s happiness, and nothing to mar His joy will ever enter there. Sin enter there? Impossible. Fallen human nature? Never, never. God must be allowed to judge of who are accounted suitable for His own holy company, and woe betide the man who dares dispute the point with Him. He has taken the utmost pains to show us what those requirements are, and moreover at His own personal cost He has met those very requirements by His crucified and risen Son. And now, even to use the language of Old Testament Scripture, “The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead” (Prov. 21:1616The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead. (Proverbs 21:16)). The ungodly shall not stand in the congregation of the righteous (Psa. 1:55Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. (Psalm 1:5)).
Let me tell you of two men who left one of these congregations to join the other, in hope that if you are still in the “congregation of the dead” you may change places this very hour.
We will let Scripture speak for itself. “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts” (Heb. 11:44By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh. (Hebrews 11:4)). Sin had come into the world, and death by sin, and man born naturally was under its power and judgment. By nature, therefore, Abel belonged to the “congregation of the dead,” and had no title whatever to the “congregation of the righteous.” But God did not leave him in this hopeless position. He devised means whereby those banished from Him might be blessed with Him; and moreover He let the sons of Adam into His gracious secret. In what way this was done we are not told, unless it was by covering Adam and Eve with the skin of the animal, an act which plainly declared that they could only stand before Him in that which involved the death of another. But whatever was the means of the revelation, Abel’s faith accepted the gracious provision revealed. He took his place before God on the ground of the death and acceptability of the slain lamb, and God pronounced him righteous. Not righteous because of any personal merits as a natural man, but because of the excellency and acceptability of the offering which he brought― “God testifying of his gifts.” If Abel, therefore, entered the congregation of the righteous, it was all because of the grace of God and the excellency of the sacrifice. God had brought him there, and therefore God and the Lamb must have the full praise of it eternally.
Turn now to a sadder picture (Matt. 22). We read there of one who was found at the wedding feast without the wedding garment. The feast was worthy of Him who in honor of His Son had provided it, and the fitness for the feast must be of the same character also. This man lacked the required fitness, and therefore, silenced and sorrowful, he had to hear the solemn sentence, “Take him away.” Unfit for the presence of the righteous King, he is bound hand and foot, and cast into outer darkness; where there was “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Did not his guilty silence prove that he knew that the One who had spread the feast had provided the fitness also? Yet, like Cain, he dared to stand before God in a fancied fitness of his own devising. He wandered “out of the way of understanding.” He followed “in the way of Cain”; and, like him, therefore, must “remain, in the congregation of the dead.”
Reader, where are you? If you would leave the “congregation of the dead” you must accept the death of Christ as your only way out. If you would be found in “the congregation of the righteous” when the tabernacle of God shall be with men, and when God shall dwell with them, you must find your fitness in the acceptability of a risen Christ.
Thus, whether in your deliverance from the one or your entrance into the other, Christ alone must be honored, and hence the beauty and importance of that opening sentence in the parable, “A certain King” made a marriage feast for His SON. Be sure of your “congregation.” In the words of another, may you be able to say―
“I stand upon His merits,
I know no safer stand,
Not e’en where glory dwelleth,
In Emmanuel’s land.”