We
turn now to Luke 14, to what is called the story of the
Great Supper and the Great Invitation. It might be
thought that this story has very little relationship to
what we have been considering. But I want to correct that
idea immediately and to say that it is an integral part
of this very matter of the kind of people that God has
set His heart upon, who are to be the fruit of
Christ’s travail.
There
are two applications of this story. There is what we may
call the dispensational interpretation, and there is the
wider interpretation and application in relation to the
Kingdom of God.
A Time of Transition
The
dispensational interpretation finds this story closely
related to what was happening at the time that the Lord
Jesus spoke these words. It was in the time of the great
transition from Israel to the church, from Judaism to
Christianity. The utterances of the Lord Jesus in these
chapters, including the so well-known fifteenth chapter
of Luke, containing the parables of the lost things
— the lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son
— these utterances were all of a piece, and were
probably gathered into the last week of our Lord’s
ministry.
If you
go back to the Gospel by Matthew and take it up at say
chapter 21 and move right on, you will recognise that
these are undoubtedly the closing days. What is being
said here has to do with His going and the great crisis
which was immediately in view — the crisis of the
Cross. In chapter 21 He has made that statement to the
Jews, to Israel as a nation after the flesh:
“Therefore the kingdom of God shall be taken away
from you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth
the fruits thereof”, and then straight into chapter
22, and to a story about a king who made a marriage
supper for his son, very similar to this one in Luke 14.
The same kind of invitations went out.
Now
this story in Luke is all of a piece with that: it
circles round the great crisis. Israel is about to be set
aside, rejected; the Kingdom of Heaven is about to be
taken away from them, and to be given to a nation which
would bring forth the fruits of that Kingdom — the
nation to which Peter later referred when he spoke of
believers in Christ as a “holy nation”. It
would be not another nation on this earth, but God’s
own people out of the nations of this world, the people
for His Name. So you see, this story in its historic
setting relates to that great crisis, that great
transition, that change-over: the rejection of one people
and the putting in their place of another. We have to
read the story in the light of that, for here we have the
death-knell of Israel after the flesh.
Who Shall Enter the Kingdom?
And,
as I said, it is in keeping, in the main, with what we
are considering at the present — a people, a kind of
people, secured by God through the travail of His Son in
the Cross. I think that is the outstanding thing in this
story and in these stories: the kind of people that will
inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. There is a much larger
application and interpretation than the immediate, for it
applies to the whole meaning of the Kingdom of God. And
that is a matter of supreme, of superlative importance
— who will be in the Kingdom of Heaven? Here we have
the Gospel of the Kingdom, there is no doubt about it.
There
are certain very clearly defined features to this story
of the Great Supper and the Great Invitation. Firstly, we
find here God in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, and
speaking as by His mouth, for what He says is what came
from God. God is here taking up a common, social custom,
a feast, and bringing it into use in relation to the
Gospel of the Kingdom. We notice, of course, that Jesus
was, at the time when He gave this story, at a feast. If
you look at the earlier part of the chapter, you will see
that He went to a feast that was made by a prominent
Pharisee, evidently a wealthy man, in a good position,
because certain very important people — in their own
eyes at any rate — came in and took the top places.
Jesus noted all that and had something to say about it.
But the point is: it was a feast and Jesus went to it,
and it says that they watched Him. Now there is a great
deal of detail that we leave untouched, but we note that
Jesus took hold of this and enlarged it in relation to
the Kingdom of God. That is, He took up this common
social custom of a feast and used it for Gospel purposes,
to interpret the Gospel, to interpret the Kingdom of
Heaven, to interpret the whole matter of who would and
who would not get in at the feast.
The Significance of Acceptance
Appreciation — appetite
— fellowship
There
are certain things about this feast which, although not
exactly stated, are quite evidently implied. We might
note three of them. A certain man made a feast and sent
out his servant with invitations. The implication is that
that man would be respected and honoured. He would not
have done it if he had thought that he was in disfavour
and that no one would accept his invitation. He was
assuming that they would respect him and his invitation,
and be quite glad to go to his feast and to be with him
in his house. Now that is quite simple, but you will see
what it means as we go on. It is the assumption that the
invitation would be welcomed and that he would be in good
standing with them, and they would give him respect and
honour and respond suitably to the invitation and would
go to his feast. The second thing that is assumed is that
the invited people would have an appetite for a feast. A
feast might not interest some people very much: they
would turn down any invitation purely on the ground that
they have no appetite for such things, or there is
something wrong with their digestion; they just could not
face it all. But it is assumed here that the people who
were invited would have an appetite for the feast, for
the provision. That is very simple. And then, of course,
the third thing that is assumed is that they would be
quite happy to meet other people in this house and have
good intercourse and fellowship, have a good time
together. These are things which are part of any feast of
this kind. We are glad to go and meet the host, glad to
go and meet the other people, and we are glad to have
what is provided. That is the atmosphere; these are the
elements of this very thing. Dismiss any of them, and you
dismiss the whole point of a feast: the feast breaks down
at once.
The Forbearing Grace of God
Jesus
is not speaking casually. He knows; He has a very deep
and comprehensive knowledge, indeed: He knows God’s
mind. Now note this: God foreknew the refusal that would
come to His invitation: the foreknowledge of God, His
omniscience made Him to know that this would be the
reaction — they would not accept, they would not
come. And Jesus knew that, otherwise He would not have
said all these things, especially perhaps that consummate
thing: “Therefore… the kingdom of God shall be
taken away from you and given to a nation bringing forth
the fruits thereof.” He knew what the issue would
be, God knew what the reaction would be, but God did not
act upon His foreknowledge in this matter — He sent
out the invitation. In that is one of the great gospel
principles. God, who foreknows all about men and their
reactions to His invitation and His great provision, does
not begin from that point and say, “I know they
won’t accept, and I know it will be to their doom:
therefore I will never invite them; I will doom them
right away in My foreknowledge.” “God sent not
his Son into the world to condemn the world…”
Whatever God may know about men’s refusal, He leaves
the door wide open; He always takes the positive line in
grace, never the negative line in judgment. That is one
of the great things about the gospel. Though He knows,
nevertheless, God comes right out in infinite grace and
opens the door wide and makes His appeal and says,
“Come, for all things are now ready.” You see,
God keeps back that foreknowledge of His while He tries
in grace to make a way. It is a tremendous thing that,
the grace of God holding back the judgment of God until
the thing is settled by man himself. He knows the truth,
and yet He does not, in the first instance, act according
to His knowledge of men’s reactions: He acts in
grace to give them an opportunity to respond.
But
note that there is something else involved in this. God
removes all ground upon which man’s doom could be
laid to His charge. In the end it will never be possible
for any doomed man or woman to say: “You never gave
me a chance; You never gave me an opportunity; the door
was never opened to me; the way was never provided.”
No, God removes all that ground. You see, in His grace
and His mercy He takes all the ground of the possibility
of His own condemnation away and puts the whole issue
upon man. If anybody misses all that God has provided and
calls them unto, it will be their own fault entirely. God
is seeing to that. He puts it back on us.
Condition Indicated by the Choice
As we
read a story like this, it looks on the face of things as
though — and now put God into the place of the man
who makes the feast and sends out the invitations —
it looks as though He assumes that those invited will
respect Him, honour Him, and give Him credit for being
worthy of their acceptance. It looks as though God
assumes that. Of course, He knows, but nevertheless He
proceeds upon this basis, and in His procedure He is
appealing to man to give some expression to and some
proof of his respect for God; and if man does not respond
to God’s appeal and invitation, it means that man
has no respect for God: he has not given God His place,
he has put Him out, he thinks He is not worth
considering. The implications are tremendous, are they
not?
Further,
it means that man has no appetite for the things of God.
We have only to imagine these people, when they received
the invitation, saying, “Well, now, I don’t
care about his feast, I don’t think I want to go, I
have not much of an appetite for that.” Ah, yes, but
look: that very desire or absence of desire for the
things of God is the deciding factor — the Kingdom
or not the Kingdom. Jesus had elsewhere said,
“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness.” There is something bound up with
this appetite or the lack of it. The same applies to this
matter of the people of God. It is very discriminating.
To refuse means, not only that I have no interest in God
and His things, but that I do not want to have any
association with His people. All this, you see, is
forcing a choice.
God the Only Joy of His People
Now,
if we turn that round, it is surely not difficult to see
what kind of people will inherit the Kingdom, what kind
of a seed this will be that He shall see as of the
travail of His soul. A people, in the first place, who,
above all other things, desire God: and then, who desire
God’s things, to feed upon them: and then, who
desire God’s people. It is a remarkable thing, is it
not, how that takes place and becomes the very
constitution, the make-up and nature of children of the
Kingdom of Heaven. One thing that is pre-eminent with
them is their love for God, their desire for God; that He
is their joy — not only their chiefest joy, but
really their only joy. It is a wonderful thing that
happens in us. Something happens, something takes place
so that we come to the state where we just cannot live
without God. If there should be an hour in our life when
any shadow comes between us and God, that is the darkest
hour, the most wretched time. He has spoilt us for all
but Himself, He has made Himself indispensable to us, we
cannot get on without Him. It is not only a matter of
being able to, having a desire to — we just long to
be in His presence. Our hearts cry with the Psalmist:
“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so
panteth my soul after thee, O God.” It is like that;
something happens inside.
The Oneness of the
Children of the Kingdom
That
is a test as to whether we are children of the Kingdom or
not, and a test as to whether we are going to inherit the
Kingdom. It would be a poor lookout for anybody who had
not that disposition to have to live in the presence of
God for all eternity; it would be a very miserable thing.
But it will not happen, of course. And what is true in
that connection is true in these other two things.
Something happens to us so that OUR company, OUR
people — may I use the word? — OUR
set, is the people of God. We have to move in this world,
and we have to live with others, but we are not happy
with them; there is no deep, basic, fundamental oneness
between us: we belong to two different worlds. But with
the people of God it is different: we are at home, we are
in the family. It is something that happens to us, it is
not something that we decide upon: that we are going to
be Christians and mix with Christians, and have meetings.
It is simply this: we long for the fellowship of
God’s people, and if we are deprived of it, we are
deprived of our very life. I think that those who have
very much of it are sometimes in danger of losing the
sense of its value, but if you were to ask some of those
Christians who have to live in isolation, with little or
no Christian fellowship, you would soon discover that
something has happened in them. They long for this
fellowship. These are the children of the Kingdom!
And as
for the feast, the things of God spread for His children!
Is not the coming together of the Lord’s people, in
some places in such large companies, an evidence, not
only of the Lord’s desire to provide, to spread a
feast, but also of a deep hunger? There is something
constitutional about this; there is an appetite. These
are the children of the Kingdom. You see, God is working
on that principle; discriminating, selecting, in order to
give the Kingdom.
Now,
we must go back to the story, to the other,
disappointing, aspect. God in His grace, putting back in
His foreknowledge the doom which He knows will most
certainly come upon many who will react unfavourably to
His invitation, putting that back and saying nothing
about it for the moment, goes out in grace, inviting,
inviting, inviting, in spite of His knowledge of them. It
is a question of who will respond. So we see here what is
really shown to be the case with many. They are totally
indifferent to all these things: to Him, to His feast,
and to His people; they are totally indifferent. They are
not touched by the invitation, it makes no appeal to
them; there is no sense that they are either under
obligation or in peril of losing something of vital
importance. And that is their judgment: that is their
condemnation: that is their doom.
The Wilfulness of Human Choice
Let us
look at this setting as to Israel, as to the Jewish
nation. You remember how the Lord Jesus put this to them
in another way. Weeping over Jerusalem, He said: “O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and
stoneth them that are sent unto her! How often would I
have gathered thy children together, even as a hen
gathereth her own brood under her wings, and ye would
not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”
… “because thou knewest not the time of thy
visitation” (Luke 13:34,35; 19:44). Now note two
things: “ye would not”, “thou knewest
not”. But that was something in themselves. It was
not that they COULD not, but that they WOULD not.
It was not that they could not know, it was because they
would not know. They did not want to know. And they had
decided that they were not going to know.
God
knows the heart, and it is not merely that we are like
that. Somewhere, somehow we have taken an attitude: we
have taken the attitude, “I am not interested in
that, I don’t want that; that is not for me, I am
not going that way.” “Thou wouldest not…
thou knewest not…”, when you might have known.
That is always the ground of judgment.
Let us
then look at these people. Whether they were actual
people, whether it was a real story from life or what is
called a parable, does not matter. The Lord Jesus knew
what He was saying. They were not only indifferent, but
would, when it came to the test, reject the invitation.
And this is where we are found out, you know. When it
really comes to it and someone says, “Look here, the
Lord wants you, the Lord calls you, the Lord has sent His
Word to invite you to come”, then we are found out;
then the real attitude is disclosed. “And they all
with one consent began to make excuse.”
EXCUSES.
I don’t really know how far the Lord Jesus had a
sense of irony or of humour. He presents one as saying,
“I have bought a piece of land and I must go and see
it.” Now may I be quite blunt here: that is a thing
that not one of you would do. If you did you would be a
fool! Who would buy a piece of land without first of all
having seen it! That is very lame; oh, no, that
won’t pass, that is not good enough. But you see,
when we are really run to earth it is found out that we
have no solid basis. We are just evading, we are trying
to get round, we are looking for a back-door way out. It
is an excuse, it is not a reason. Another man said,
“I have bought five yoke of oxen and I must go and
prove them.” Well, what would practical farmers say
to that! Is that the way of going about business, buying
before having seen? You see how empty it is. The third
man said he had married a wife, and therefore he could
not come, but the Lord Jesus said that that was an excuse
all the same. How was it an excuse? Something in the
realm of natural affections was accounted of greater
value than the Kingdom of God. And that is a poor excuse
at best.
The
point is, if we face the matter squarely, there is no
really solid ground for this kind of reaction. It is a
“don’t want”, it is a failure to recognise
the infinite seriousness and value of this Kingdom of
God, this gospel of the grace of God. It discloses a
state of heart and mind and will which in itself is the
ground of rejection. “Therefore… the Kingdom of
God shall be taken away from you and shall be given to a
nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” And what
are the fruits? Hungering and thirsting after
righteousness. Thirsting for the living God, a sense of
real business, not this prevarication and excuse. These
are the conditions of inheriting the Kingdom.
And,
of course, these conditions are capable of very
far-reaching, widely-extending application. They touch so
many things, they are principles. But it is not just the
immediate connection, it is that which is betrayed, the
attitude of heart.
“Well”,
says the Lord, “none of those shall come to my
feast, none of those shall enter or inherit the Kingdom.
Go out”, He says to His servant, “into the
streets and the lanes of the city, and call the poor, the
maimed, the blind, the lame”; and the servant comes
back and says, “It is done, I have brought them in
and yet there is room.” “Out again into the
highways and hedges, compel them to come in, the poor,
the maimed, the blind, the lame, the vagabonds, the
wayfarers.” Jesus said to the Jewish leaders:
“The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom
before you.” On this principle we see who they are
that will inherit the Kingdom, and not only get into it
initially, but who will come into all the fullness that
the Lord has provided. And what a vast fullness it is! We
could profitably dwell upon this feast and what there is
in it. Paul speaks much about it himself:
“Blessed… with every spiritual blessing in the
heavenlies in Christ” (Eph. 1:3). How much there is
in this inheritance, this Kingdom!
The Contrast — a
Consciousness of Need
And
who is it that enters in? Those who know their own
poverty. These people did not know that: they were
independent; they did not need the provision that had
been made; they felt they could get on quite well without
it. They had no sense of their own poverty. They were in
the grip of pride, not poverty. The maimed — those
who had suffered in life, whom life had treated cruelly,
who on the way had met with hurt, damage; who were marred
and marked. The blind who longed to see; from whom a
whole world was shut out — if only their eyes could
see. The lame — poor people who found it very
difficult and very hard going, who were limited in their
capacity and were knowing it. And what shall we say about
the vagabonds and wayfarers from the highways and the
hedges? You see, they are all people who, in some way or
another, had a consciousness of need, and that is the
great contrasting factor here. You will go a long way if
that is your consciousness. You will go a long way in the
things of God, if you really have heart hunger, if yours
is really a heart set upon the Lord and His things and
His church.
Now
this is a challenge, a solemn challenge to us all —
both to Christians and to those who are not the
Lord’s alike. He calls; He has made a great
provision; He is dealing with us in infinite grace and
not in judgment. He has placed everything open to us and
said: “Come, for all things are now ready.” Oh,
we Christians know that little phrase “all
things”, do we not? Go to Paul’s letters again
and collect up all the occurrences of that phrase,
“all things… ”, “all things…
” “All things in Christ”, that is the
great theme, is it not? And what a vast “all
things” that comes to be when we look into it. All
things! “Come, for all things are now ready.”
It is a challenge to those who have not come at all. But
it is a challenge to us who have come. There is a range
and a depth of those “all things” that you and
I have never yet fathomed. It is all so much a matter of
where our heart is — whether we really mean
business, or whether we can be put off, be like these
people and make excuses. It is a challenge.
And it
is a test of capacity for appreciating the things of God.
May I say this as the last word: Blessed be God, when we
get there, we shall no longer be poor and maimed and
blind and vagabonds. There is a wonderful healing that
goes on as soon as we get into the Kingdom: all these
things clear up. Now you see, Jesus had taught the
Kingdom of God in action. He was teaching the Kingdom of
God in action as much as in word. His life and His work
were a demonstration of the meaning of the Kingdom. He
healed the maimed and the lame, He opened the eyes of the
blind, He called the poor and the needy, publicans,
sinners and harlots, and cleansed them. He demonstrated
in action the Kingdom of God. And that is what happens.
When we come, we find that in that Kingdom there is a
tree, and the leaves of that tree are for the healing of
the nations. He is the tree, and there is a healing that
takes place. And when we are in, thank God, humbly we are
able to say, “Yes, my eyes have been opened, my
faltering steps have been strengthened, my wounds have
been healed, my wanderings in the highways and byways
have ceased, my vagabond life has been redeemed.”
That is what happens, that is the Gospel of the Kingdom.
Are you going to make excuses to avoid all that? It is
not worth it, is it? It is nonsense. They are mere empty
excuses. May God give us to see the tremendous divide
made by the invitation.
God’s
offer can be missed, it can be lost, it can be put beyond
reach. Do not forget, there stands in this world the
greatest object-lesson that ever God has given to men of
this very thing. You remember the place that the Jewish
nation once had with God in blessing and prospering, yes,
in favour. What a place they had! And then God called
them into the Kingdom of His Son, and they began to make
excuses; they showed that they were not interested in
that. Look at them! For these two thousand years,
vagabonds on the earth, without a kingdom and a home,
wounded, blinded — Paul says, “Blindness hath
happened to Israel” — they are all in these
conditions. They are in rejection, and what suffering,
and what they have lost! They have lost the Kingdom of
Heaven. That is the most terrible demonstration and
object-lesson of what it means to lose the Kingdom of
Heaven. But mark you, that is only an illustration in the
temporal realm. Our peril is of it being in the eternal
realm. One does not like speaking like that, but there it
is. Here is a tremendous issue.
Well,
there was one of their own number who responded and came.
His testimony afterward was: “I was not disobedient
to the heavenly vision.” And that man went a long,
long way. That was none other than the apostle Paul
himself. The Lord incline our hearts to respond. He says:
“Come, for all things are now ready.” May our
heart say, “I am coming, Lord, and I am coming
now.”