THE TRIUMPH OF GOD: ENSURING A FULL HOUSE

Matthew 22: 1-14

INTRODUCTION

In 1980, Jane and I moved to LaCrosse, WI. We were on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ and I had been assigned the task of directing the Campus Crusade work at UW-LaCrosse. We had three other people on our team, another married couple and a single woman. Campus Crusade was active at UW-LaCrosse for many years prior to our arrival. We were told that there was a group of about 40 students meeting the previous year as Campus Crusade. We moved into our rented home in August. Together with the rest of our staff team we put signs all over campus announcing our first meeting of the year and inviting students to attend. We reserved a room in the student union and ordered enough refreshments for fifty people. Steve and Rita planned to lead the singing, Becky was going to share her testimony and I prepared a talk to encourage the students to make seeking Christ a priority for the school year that was just beginning. The meeting was set to begin at 7:00pm. We arrived at 6 to get everything ready and to pray one last time. At 7:00pm there were two student women present and by 7:05pm two more students entered. Not knowing what to do, we went ahead with the program we had planned for fifty people with only four people in the room. I can still feel the embarrassment, disappointment and rejection we felt that evening.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever planned a party or a meeting, sent out invitations, prepared a fun time and then nobody showed up or only a fraction of those whom you invited? That is a very unpleasant experience. If you will use your imagination with me for just a little bit, I would say that if the world had ended when Jesus Christ died on the cross, that would have been God’s experience. When you read the history of the world contained in the pages of the OT and then read the gospel of Matthew asking the question, how many people does it appear are going to be in heaven, the number you would arrive at would be very small. Out of the millions of people who populated the earth up to the time of Jesus’ death, the indications of large numbers of people fulfilling God’s requirements for heaven are not very optimistic. There are individuals named, like Adam and Eve, their sons Able and Seth. Then there is Enoch and Noah and Abraham and his son, Isaac. There’s the story of Sodom and Gomorrah which were large cities but the Lord says there was only one righteous person out of the multitudes that lived there, Abraham’s nephew, Lot. Whenever there are numbers reported in the history of Israel it is usually large numbers of people that God destroyed because of their persistent disobedience. Usually the entire nation of Israel, containing millions of people, is condemned as unfit for heaven. We just heard that passage in Paul where he quotes God telling Elijah, who thinks he is the only righteous person that there are 7000 Israelites who did not worship the false god Baal. 7000 is better than one but it’s only a small fraction of the millions of Israelites and the tens of millions of non-Jewish people alive at the time.

As we have been studying our way through Matthew’s biography of Jesus we have seen that while lots of people seem to be impressed with him, nobody, not even the disciples, actually gets who he is or what he is doing. If you’ve read the rest of the gospel you know that everyone abandons him at the end. Jesus tells this parable, this story of a king who has planned a huge party for the wedding of his son to show how, in spite of what things look like, God is going to make sure that the wedding supper of his son is full of happy people. Jesus wants the religious leaders to know that in spite of their rejection, God is working to make sure heaven will be full of worshippers. He also tells this story as part of the invitation that God makes to these religious leaders and to us. So we are not to simply see here what God is doing but to also view this as God’s invitation to us to come to the feast.

MAIN POINT

God the king is working to ensure that the wedding of his son is full of joyful guests by…

I. Giving multiple invitations describing the greatness of the celebration (vv. 1-4)

Jesus is using here an illustration to which all of us can relate. All of us have been invited to parties, to celebrations of significant events in the lives of our friends and family. The party to which the people in this story are being invited is a grand party. This invitation is amazing for three reasons. It is amazing first of all because of who it is that is making the invitation, the king. This isn’t a party being thrown by your husband’s third cousin who lives in a trailer with her alcoholic boyfriend. This is an invitation to a royal gala, a party fit for a king. This is like being personally invited to the inaugural ball in Washington, D.C. by your favorite president. This is like being personally invited by your favorite music artist or actor to a private party in their home. All of us have gotten an invitation to a party or celebration from someone we really admire and like and it fills us with joy to get the invitation because of who is inviting us. Jesus is saying that the greatest of beings, God himself, has invited you to a party. He wants you to come and spend time enjoying his presence and his hospitality.

The second thing that makes this invitation so amazing is because of what the celebration is about. It is the wedding celebration for the son of the king. The prince of the kingdom, the heir to the throne is getting married and you are invited to the wedding and to the reception. This is a momentous occasion in the life of the kingdom and in the life of the king’s family. It is a history-making event. Everybody who is anybody will be at this wedding and you are personally invited to it. This is bigger than getting an invitation to a Packer game with your friend who has tickets on the 50 yard line. It’s infinitely bigger than the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. It’s even bigger than the on again off again wedding of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. The wedding that Jesus is referring to here is the wedding supper of the eternal Son of God. This is the banquet promised in Isaiah and pictured in Revelation where all the people of God gather to rejoice in the great Son of Man.

Finally it is amazing because of the abundance of the feast. This is an eternal feast. It will never end. It is an infinite feast. The pleasures of this feast can never be completely experienced. You can never consume all the delights that are freely offered to you. There will be no disappointments in the feast. The food will not run out, the music will never stop, there will be no awkward moments when you’ll feel alone and out of place though surrounded by others. The conversation will always be pleasant and not forced. Everyone at this celebration will be taken up with the excellencies of the host and his son and rejoicing in the kindness and abundance that is made available to all.

What Jesus is describing here is the eternal state, the ultimate end of all the promises of God. He is summarizing in this brief portrait what God has spent the previous 3000 years doing with the nation Israel. Beginning with Abraham all the way up to this moment when Jesus tells this story, God has sent his servants to describe to the Jewish people this amazing banquet and to plead with them to come to the feast. This is the message of the OT. God has prepared a wedding celebration for his son that you cannot believe and he wants you to come to it. In our day it is the same invitation that he is making. The difference between Israel and us is that we have the promises made more sure by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we can see more clearly what was only hinted at in the OT. We know more about how amazing this banquet really is because of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, let us pay more careful attention to what we have heard so that we do not drift away.

God the king is working to ensure that the wedding of his son is full of joyful guests by…

•  Giving multiple invitations describing the abundance of the feast

•  And by…

II. Justly destroying those who refuse his gracious invitations (vv. 5-7)

I want you to think for a minute as to why you turn down invitations to parties and celebrations. You and I turn down invitations because something else is more important or necessary. There are other things that we believe are more necessary for our happiness than attending the celebration. Even when we say we would prefer to go to the party, the fact is that when we do something other than go to the party we do so because we believe that the other thing is more necessary to our well being than the party. We value the other thing more than the party. There is another reason we turn down invitations. We don’t go because we don’t like the person who invited us. If you will look at vv. 5-6 you will see that the reasons those who were invited, turned down the king’s invitations are the same reasons. They had more important things to do than to attend the wedding of the king’s son and they didn’t like the king. In fact, they hated him as can be seen by how they treated the king’s emissaries.

The refusal and hostility of those who were invited is astounding. They refuse the invitation of the king. They do not consider an invitation by the king at all remarkable. They are not overcome with amazement that the king would invite them to his son’s wedding feast. They exhibit proud and haughty hearts that treat the king’s kindness and generosity with contempt. They are not honored by the king’s invitation but scornful. Additionally they are not afraid to refuse the king. Even if you don’t like the king, you still do not refuse him because it is not a safe thing to offend the king. Many of us have attended parties that we did not want to attend because the invitation came from someone who has authority over us. These people who were invited disdain the kings power. They believe that visiting a field or going to work is more pleasurable than attending the prince’s wedding. They hate this king who has done nothing but care for them and offer them exquisite pleasures in this wedding feast. They treat his servants the way that we might imagine Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel treating some of Yassar Arrafat’s diplomats who come to invite him to the wedding of his son. They are full of hatred and contempt for this king, his son and his hospitality.

Aren’t vv. 5-6 simply shocking to you? These people are so foolish and so evil. They have received this amazing invitation and yet they prefer work to the pleasures offered. They have been treated with such kindness and yet they repay the kindness with such disrespect. Jesus is trying to capture here in a graphic way the foolishness and wickedness of sin. To prefer having sex with your girlfriend to the eternal joys of heaven is ridiculous. To prefer 50 years of leisure on earth to an eternity of joy with God is stupid. To reject eternal fellowship with the God who made you and who offers you such a future in order to watch football and go hunting and retire at 55 is evil. To believe that any other pleasure is superior to the banquet that is offered to us through Jesus is irrational and wicked.

What Jesus is picturing here is how the religious leaders and the majority of the Israelite nation has treated God. If you are at all familiar with the OT you will recognize in this rejection and murderous treatment of the king’s servants how the nation Israel has responded to God throughout their history. The Jewish religious leaders are simply doing what has been done by the majority of the Israelites for thousands of years. In spite of how God, their king has cared for them and in spite of all the promises he has made to them and invitations he has extended they have chosen the pleasures of this world over the eternal pleasures he offers. Therefore, when we read v. 7 we ought not to be shocked. No king, but especially not God the King, can long endure this kind of treatment. God is slow to anger and he is long suffering with the rebellion of his people but there is a limit to his patience.

Jesus here is announcing to the religious leaders that God has determined to end the existence of Israel as a nation. Verse 7 may be a specific prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Jewish state by the Romans in A.D. 70. There is much debate. Whether it is a prediction of this particular event or not, what you can be sure of is that Jesus is using the language of the OT to declare that God is full of anger and is going to destroy all those who display their contempt and hatred for him by refusing his invitation and choosing instead the pleasures of sin and of this world. The majority of the Jewish nation followed their leaders in rejecting Christ and thus his invitation to the wedding supper of the Lamb and so God destroyed them as a warning to all who hear this invitation and refuse him by preferring other pleasures over the pleasure of his hospitality. Is the response of the king in v. 7 out of proportion to the scorn and cruelty of these people? Not at all. This is how God is going to treat all who refuse his kindness. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 2, “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness leads to repentance. But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God will give to each person according to what he has done.” He will not be scorned forever. There is a limit to his patience.

God the king is working to ensure that the wedding of his son is full of joyful guests by…

•  Giving multiple invitations describing the abundance of the feast

•  Justly destroying those who refuse his gracious invitations

•  And by…

III. Effectually calling all kinds of people from all over the earth (vv. 8-10)

In the story, the king, after the destruction of those who refused his invitation, still has a wedding feast prepared. He still wants to honor his son with a hall full of people enjoying his hospitality and admiring his son. Therefore, he commands his servants to go out into the streets and to call everyone they find there without distinction to come to the wedding feast. When I read vv. 8-9 in light of what has just happened in vv. 4-7 I wonder what it is that gives the king any confidence that anyone will come? Especially when we see behind the story Jesus tells, the story of Israel. The people of Israel were shown such amazing displays of God’s power over the years. Beginning with Abraham and going on all the way through the prophets, Israel witnessed astounding miracles. They received the most profound teaching and gracious laws. They were delivered time and time again from their enemies. Their sins were repeatedly forgiven. They were the recipients of the most eloquent invitations to embrace the promises of God. Yet they persistently refused the invitations and they are now plotting to kill the Messiah that they have been promised since the beginning of creation. How can the king, God, have any confidence that others who have not had these manifestations of divine power and glory are going to respond? Why does he think that simply going out onto the street corners is going to result in people coming to the wedding?

In verses 8-10 Jesus is stating what God has said to the nation Israel for hundreds of years, beginning with Abraham. Remember the promise he made to Abraham? He told Abraham that he would make him into a great nation. He said he would bless him and, as a result, he and his descendants would be a blessing. In fact, all the nations on earth would be blessed through him. Hundreds of times in the OT God told the people of Israel that his chosen people consisted of people out of all the nations of the world . Here’s just one example from Isaiah 55. “Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander of the peoples. Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations that do not know you will hasten to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor.” Again, in Isaiah 65 he says, “I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name, I said, ‘Here am I, here am I.’” For the most part the Jewish nation ignored these promises choosing instead to believe that God only loved them and would only accept those out of the nations who became Jewish. This is what the religious leaders believed and forms one of the reasons that they rejected Jesus. They saw in him and his “good news of the kingdom” a different message than the one they proclaimed. They taught salvation by ethnicity and by religious performance and by moral self effort. Jesus taught salvation by grace through faith, as all the prophets had done throughout their history.

This has been God’s plan from the creation of the world, to make one people out of all the nations of the world. It has been his plan to gather diverse peoples together united by their common admiration for his son. The power to accomplish this is in the word that is proclaimed to the nations. This word becomes effective because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. When the religious leaders kill Jesus they prove how just it is for God to reject the nation Israel. Then because of Christ’s death, he is just in sending the Holy Spirit to empower the message of the cross with converting power. This is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:22-24, “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks but to those whom God has called , both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” The servants go out into the streets and issue the same invitation that was rejected by the religious leaders but it is accepted as good news by all they find, both good and bad. The wedding hall is made full by the power of the message. The message has power because of the giving of the Holy Spirit, which is due to the death and resurrection of Christ.

God the king is working to ensure that the wedding of his son is full of joyful guests by…

•  Giving multiple invitations describing the abundance of the feast

•  Justly destroying those who refuse his gracious invitations

•  Effectually calling all kinds of people from all over the earth

•  And by…

IV. Making sure that all who come are dressed, fit for a king (vv. 11-14)

Why didn’t Jesus end his parable at verse 10? What is the point of adding this strange and terrifying scene at the end of the story? Why does he finish the parable with this strange little saying, “For many are called but few are chosen”? The answer lies in v. 10. Jesus says that the servants, by the power of the word proclaimed, gathered all they found, both good and evil into the wedding hall. On one hand that verse is such good news for people like us. God does not invite people into his wedding feast based upon race, economic status, religious performance or moral behavior. His invitation is for all who will accept it. His invitation is for everyone who views it as good news. However, by accepting both the good and the evil God’s justice and holiness are called into question. How can it be that evil people are permitted into the wedding feast of the king? How can it be that the great banquet that Isaiah predicted is attended by the wicked? Verse 10 is clearly a claim that God forgives and accepts evil and guilty people into his eternal kingdom. How can that be right?

Jesus adds this final scene to explain how it is right for God to welcome sinners into his eternal banquet. The king comes into the wedding hall for the purpose of seeing the guests. The word that is used for “see” is not the usual word. In Matthew it is used for a seeing that is very intentional. It has more of the idea of inspect for the purpose of evaluation. He observes a man who was not wearing wedding clothes. When he inquires of the man why he is not wearing the proper attire, the man is speechless. He has nothing to say because he knows he is wrong. Then the king commands that he be tied up, hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The king’s response seems out of all proportion to the fact that the man is not wearing wedding clothes. The language that Jesus uses here is the language of eternal judgment. This is one of six times Jesus uses this language in the gospel of Matthew and it always refers to sending people to hell. Therefore, not wearing wedding clothes is a very serious offense. Why is that?

While we are not told explicitly how it happened it is obvious that everyone knew that they could not enter into the wedding hall without being properly dressed. Also, given the rapidity of the servants filling the hall it would seem obvious that the proper attire was not something that was possessed by the guests but something that was provided to them upon entering the wedding feast. In other words, each invited guest, upon entering the wedding feast was given a set of clothing to put on. The king provided to each person the clothing that was appropriate for the wedding. What happened in the case of the man without the wedding clothes is he refused the wedding clothes, choosing instead to wear his own clothing. We see in him, just as we saw in those who refused the invitation the pride of self-righteousness. He was unwilling to submit to the king’s requirements. His clothes were just fine. When confronted by the king he knew that he was wrong and so he had no defense. The king justly refused to accept him into the wedding feast because he refused the king’s clothing.

We see hear the grace of God. He is the one who has done all the work. It is his son’s wedding feast. He is the one who provides the abundant feast. He is the one who sends out his word, by his servants, to bring the guests in. He is the one who provides the necessary clothing for attending the feast. There is no work of man here. The only way to be excluded is to refuse the invitation or to try to get in without putting on the clothing the king gives you. I don’t think that Jesus is trying to give any hints as to what the clothing represents, it is enough to see it is something the king provides and is necessary to wear to be part of the wedding feast. However, it is hard to resist the many references in both the OT and NT to the “clothing” that must be worn in order to come into God’s presence. Listen to this verse from Isaiah 61:10, “I delight greatly in the Lord; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness , as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.” Then listen to what Paul says in Galatians 3:26-27, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Then again, in Romans 13:12 &14, “So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light…clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not even think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” It seems to me that it is not inappropriate for us to see that the clothing that God gives to all who enter the wedding feast is Jesus Christ. We are clothed in his righteousness as a gift from God. We are clothed with actual deeds of righteousness that God has given to us, through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Then, in v. 14, Jesus gives the ultimate reason for the rejection and acceptance of all the people in the story (The verse begins with the word “for”.). The story emphasizes human choice. Humans reject the king’s invitation. Humans reject the wedding clothes. It appears that humans are in control of who gets into the wedding feast and not the king. So Jesus states the ultimate cause behind who is accepted and who is rejected. The invitation goes out into the whole world but only those whom God has chosen respond to it. The way you know that you are chosen is by accepting the invitation and by putting on the wedding garment provided by the king. However, if you were to ask any person at the wedding banquet, “how is it that you ended up here?” Each one would say it is entirely a work of God’s grace. I did nothing to gain entry. God provided the banquet, extended the invitation, provided the wedding clothes and enabled me to accept it all. I am here by grace all praise belongs to him, none to me. God was not unjust in condemning those who refused the invitation or rejected the wedding clothes. He was gracious to all those who attended the wedding feast.

Again today, you are hearing the invitation to leave behind all the pleasures of sin and of this world and come to the wedding feast of the son. Accept of Christ his righteousness. Abandon all other hopes and all other loves and hope in him alone. Turn from your sins and embrace the only Savior from sin, Jesus Christ. There is no pleasure this world has to offer that can compare with the eternal pleasures given at the wedding feast of the Son of God. Stop saying no to his invitation. Stop trying to get into the banquet clothed in your own righteousness. Accept the invitation by turning away from the pleasures of sin and putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.

God the king is working to ensure that the wedding of his son is full of joyful guests by…

•  Giving multiple invitations describing the abundance of the feast

•  Justly destroying those who refuse his gracious invitations

•  Effectually calling all kinds of people from all over the earth

•  Making sure that all who come are dressed for a king’s wedding

BENEDICTION

Jude 22-24