His Robe, Not Mine
by Pastor Darryl Bentley
Midland, MI March 7, 2009
Homiletical
Idea: Each
sinner walks through this life naturally clothed in the filthy rags of their
sin. In order to overcome that we need
to be stripped clean and have Christ’s robe of righteousness placed upon us if
we expect to have victory over sin. It
is not our work to place the robe upon ourselves, we must surrender ourselves
to Jesus and He will do the work of cleaning us up and fitting us to receive
His righteousness. The parable of the
wedding feast shows us that each one is invited to be guests at the marriage
supper of the Lamb and in order to be there we must be clothed in the robe of
Christ’s righteousness.
Why Should
I Go?
Have
you ever received an invitation to an event that you really did not want to go
to? I think perhaps we all have. Maybe it was a party or perhaps it was wedding
or a shower of some sort.
I can remember the
first time I was invited to a baby shower.
I would have rather been digging ditches than sitting around while a
bunch of women “ah” and “oh” over baby stuff.
Under normal circumstances I would have flat out refused to go. The problem was that my buddy whose wife was
having the baby did not have the fortitude to stand up to his wife and tell her
that he was not going. You see if he’d
had the nerve to take a strong stand then me and the couple of other guys who went
could have easily gotten out of going.
Of course because
he was going all of us other guys had to hear about how sweet he was for
wanting to be there to support his wife.
We let him hear about it but we still had to go. The strange thing about it was that it was
not that bad. Yes, there was a lot of
gushing over the clothes and everything else, but I have had to endure much
worse things for sure. I don’t know if
that one event stripped away my masculinity or what but I can tolerate showers
or any other event now.
Kingly
Invite
A
long, long time ago there was invitation extended to a group of people. This group of people had been chosen to
perform a very special task by their King.
In fact, their task was to tell the world about
the King’s Son who was to come and rid the world of sin. At first the people were excited about their
mission and they faithfully—for some parts—sought to do the will of their King. But when the King finally sent His Son the
people rejected Him outright for the most part.
In fact, they not only rejected Him, they had Him killed. They worked feverishly to have Him hung upon
a cross of shame and torture.
A
Little Child Shall Lead Them
When Jesus, the King’s Son, was on
this earth He sought desperately to win back the hearts of the people to God. Jesus went about His ministry attempting to
correct and encourage those who for so long allowed the maxims of men to
prevail over the mandate of God.
I
find it so interesting that even at the age of twelve Jesus was filled with
greater wisdom than the Jewish teachers because His education was based
entirely on the Word of God and not the traditions of men. In Luke
2:47 we read how the crowd gathered in the temple was amazed at Jesus’
understanding and His answers.
In fact, Jesus was
forced to speak out openly against the rulers of His day because they esteemed
the traditions of men above the commandments of God. If we look Mark 7:8 we find this quite clearly. Christ even goes on to say to them that they
are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep their
traditions. The same thing happens today
in churches around the world. Many
churches have elevated tradition above the Word of God in order to place themselves
in equality with God.
Desire
to Save
When you consider the life and
ministry of Jesus you will fast recognize that He sought to reach out to the
leaders of His day. He surely wanted
them to repent of their ways and to rejoice in His coming: a coming that was to
pave the way for men of all ages to be saved for eternity with God.
Over
and over Christ sat before them all. Day
in and day out He taught openly and honestly calling
each to turn from the evil in their lives.
Of course one of the ways that he sought to teach and train them was
through parables.
I
find it very interesting to read that Jesus did not speak to the crowds or the
Jewish leaders unless He used parables (Matthew
13:34).
Transition
to the Text
As
we consider that Jesus taught in parables, let us now turn our minds to one of
those parables where Jesus speaks of that special invitation the King of kings
had given so long ago.
**Read Matthew 22:1-4**
As
with all the parables that Jesus taught, this one too is full of rich
symbolism. Let’s take a few moments and
decipher, if you will, some of the symbols He uses here.
First
we see that the King is holding a wedding feast for His son. Weddings in Bible times and Middle Eastern
culture were not one day events. They
were events that lasted for several days.
According to the custom of the day Jesus speaks of this wedding
feast. All who heard this story would
know the routine of a great many being invited to the wedding feast. Only a small group actually witnessed the wedding
ceremony, but many were invited to celebrate afterwards.
Who
is Getting Married?
Before
we move forward we need to ask the question, “Who is getting married?” For whom is the feast? The Son is of course getting married, right? To whom is He to be married? Let’s look to the Bible and find out. Obviously the king in this story is God the
Father and the son of the king is Jesus, the Son of God. Discovering the bride may be a little
trickier to discover but the Bible gives us answers today.
In
Matthew 25 we find the parable of
the 10 virgins who await the coming of the bridegroom. We know that this parable also represents
many things, but among them is the fact that Jesus is one day going to come
again and take us to be with Him in heaven.
So we have an indication that the people of God are the bride of
Christ. Paul gives some support to this
in 2 Corinthians 11:2 where he says
that he has betrothed us to one husband so that he can present the church as a
chaste or pure virgin to Christ.
So
we have Jesus and Paul both telling us that the church is the bride of
Christ. But not so fast, let’s look at
another passage in Revelation 21:9.
**Read Revelation 21:9-ff**
Here
we discover that bride of Christ, the Lamb, is the holy city, New
Jerusalem. So what are we to make of
these seemingly conflicting accounts? It
is actually quite simple. When we
realize that Jesus came to win this world back from Satan we can easily
understand that the New Jerusalem is brought to this earth as a prize for Jesus
as part of the victory celebration for Jesus overcoming sin and thereby
overcoming Satan as ruler of this world.
You see, the world was lost to Satan when Adam chose to sin and turn
away from God. In the beginning Adam was
given dominion over this planet (Genesis
1:26-28) but that was forfeited when Adam sinned. We see this in Job 1:6 when we are told that the sons of God came to present
themselves to God and Satan came too.
Why did he come? Satan came as
the ruler of this planet because Adam had handed it over to him.
When
Jesus won the victory for us at Calvary, He also won back this planet from
Satan. Jesus succeeded where Adam
failed. Yes, Jesus has not taken over
what rightfully belongs to Him yet, but that day will come at the end of the
thousand years. So when we read in Revelation 21:9 that the holy city is
the bride of the Lamb we can understand that it is His bride in the sense that
it will serve as the capital city of the center of the universe where Jesus
will rule with the Father.
What
kingdom would be complete without subjects?
So in the sense that the redeemed will live in the earth made new with
Christ we too are married to Him, and the wedding feast in heaven will be a
feast to commemorate the victories of Christ with those to whom He has also
given victory over sin. This is a
beautiful picture to me of the immeasurable love of Christ.
Back
to the Feast
Now
that we understand the feast a bit better, let us look at the guests. I think it is pretty easy to see that the
original guests mentioned in the parable are a direct reference to the Jews. This is made even more apparent when you look
at verse 15. The Pharisees went out to
plot against Jesus because they understood that they were the guests being
mentioned that rejected the invitation.
As
I mentioned earlier, they were first invited to be the messengers of God to
this world. They were chosen to be the
light bearers to this planet darkened with sin.
But in their zeal to be admired among men the focus turned from
proclaiming the coming of the messiah to the world to attempting to appear
pious and holy before men. That is why
they placed their teachings and burdensome rules above the commandments and
teachings of God.
Jewish
Messianic Covenant
They
had a long history of following God for a while then falling back into
apostasy. The book of Judges gives us a
clear picture of this cycle. God in His
mercy even decided to give them an additional 490 years after bringing them out
of exile.
We
find this spelled out clearly in Daniel
9:24-27. God was more gracious to
the Jews that we can ever imagine. He
was patient, long-suffering, gracious, merciful, and tolerant of their wavering
faithfulness.
In
this passage from Daniel we see that God wanted the Jews to get on track and do
all that He had for them to do. He
wanted them to put an end to sin in their midst, make atonement for iniquity,
bring in everlasting righteousness, seal up the vision and prophecy, and anoint
the most holy place. But they failed God
and when they stoned Stephen in 34 A.D. they, much like Adam, forfeited their
place as God’s chosen people and the gospel was then given to the Gentiles;
which means other nations.
In
the parable Jesus makes direct reference to the fact the Jews have not
fulfilled their mission for God as of that time and through this parable He
predicts that they will not turn from their course of action.
In
Matthew 23:38 Jesus tells them that
their house is left unto them desolate; meaning that they will have no
inheritance in the kingdom of God.
From
the Highways
Because the Jews failed to meet
their obligations with the King, God was forced to give His invitation to the
Gentiles Himself. We see this in the
latter half of Jesus’ parable.
** Read Matthew 22:5-10**
Not
only do we see others being invited besides the Jews, but we see another
prophecy that foretells the destruction of the Jews. Verse 7 is a direct reference to the
then-coming destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
At
first the disciples had a hard time with the gospel going to the Gentiles. I would encourage you to read the account of
Peter’s vision of the unclean animals that came down on a sheet to him. Much of the world sees this as a mandate to
eat anything we please, but the vision in Acts
10 had nothing to do with food. The
Lord was trying to tell Peter that the Gentiles were not to be viewed as
unclean any longer and to take the gospel to them.
Our
parallel in the parable is seen very clearly and I am very happy for this
portion of the parable because I am not a Jew.
I dare say that most of you here today are not Jewish in your
heritage. We are Gentiles my friends and
I praise God that we too have been invited to the feast. The King wants us to come into His feast and
dine with His Son.
The
Wedding Garment
Now
let us look at the last and perhaps most important part of our parable. After the guests are assembled, the King
comes in to look over the gathering.
Upon looking around He discovers that there is one guest there who does
not have on a wedding garment.
A
couple of questions need to be asked.
Why does the King come in and bother with looking at everyone’s clothes,
who provides the garments, and why does everyone need a garment?
Let’s look at the
first one as to why the King came in to inspect the guests. We can see this clearly as an act of
judgment. The King’s slaves were
instructed to bring in anyone and everyone from the street and the King wanted
to see who came. This is clearly an act
of judgment upon the guests.
While conducting
this act of judgment the King discovers one who is not clothed properly. In the Bible clothing is used to represent
character. We see this in many places. In Isaiah
64:6 we see that our righteousness is compared to filthy rags.
In Job 29:14 it says that he put on
righteousness and it clothed him. He
says his judgment was a robe and a crown.
This gives us insight to answer our second question: who provides the
garments? If we, like Job, have to put
on righteousness then we must be putting on the righteousness of someone
else. That “someone else” is none other
than Jesus and God. Jesus Himself told
us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33). If we are to
seek His righteousness then we can clearly see that the garments for the feast
must be provided by the King.
For a guest to come
in without the King’s garment is to show contempt toward the King and His
requirements. This of course leads us to
our third question: why does everyone need a garment. The reason that we all need a garment is
because our garments, our righteousness are filthy rags remember? So we need those filthy rags, those dirty,
sin-stained clothes to be taken away. We
need to be washed clean of our sins and have the clean, bright, pure, character
of Christ to be placed upon us so that we may be counted worthy to enter the
feast. Not because of what we have done,
but because of what Christ has done our behalf.
We have only to
accept Him and live our lives in His service.
Outer
Darkness
I do not want to focus here for too
long, but I do want you to notice what happens to the one who refused to take
the King’s garments. Just as we saw last
week, the one who rejects Christ’s offer must suffer the penalty of their
actions. We see the same here again this
week. We see that code language that we
saw last time. Those that reject Christ
will be thrown into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of
teeth.
You
may recall that outer darkness is code language for the second death mentioned
in Revelation 20. It is code language for finding your place in
the lake of fire. I do not mention this
to scare you out of hell today friends; I mention this to remind you of the
alternative to not accepting God’s love for you.
Wrap-up
and Appeal
Today, it is my
desire that each of you here will choose to follow Jesus with all of your
heart. It is my desire to see each of
you at the wedding feast in heaven.
There is no reason why anyone here today should miss out on heaven. I implore you to not wait to make a decision
for Jesus. Be a Joshua today
friends. Be willing to say, “As for me
and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
When you chose to
serve Jesus above all others, then you too will be given the robe of Christ’s
righteousness. You too will secure your
place at the table of God in the kingdom of God. Why not let today be the last day that you
serve self? Why not choose today in this
moment to follow the Lord Jesus Christ all the way in every area of your
life? I can promise you that when you
do, disappointment will not be your lot.
For to serve Jesus is truly have our souls satisfied.
**Appeal**