We’ve Got This All Backwards

In Matthew 22, Jesus tells a parable about a king (God) who prepared a wedding feast for his son (Christ). Once everything was ready, he sent out his servants to let those who had been invited (the Jews) know that “all things are ready. Come to the wedding” (v. 4). But those invited “made light of it and went their way” (v. 5). Some of them even “seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them” (v. 6). Not too surprisingly, “when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city” (v. 7). Not to put too fine a point on it, but what kind of idiots would, number one, reject an invitation to a feast from a KING, and number two, kill his servants when they came with the invitation? It’s not terribly surprising that someone (the king) who had absolute power acted as he did.

The parable continues. Since “those who were invited were not worthy” (v. 8), the king sent his servants “into the highways, and as many as you find (the Gentiles), invite to the wedding” (v. 9). The servants obeyed, and “the wedding hall was filled with guests,” “both bad and good” (v. 10). The king’s invitation was now open to anyone. One guest failed to show the proper respect for the occasion and he was removed (vs. 11-13), but that’s somewhat incidental to the point I want to make in this article.

What Jesus is teaching here is that the gospel invitation went out to the Jews first. By and large, they rejected it, and the kingdom, to this very day, is mostly composed of Gentiles, or non-Jews. That kind of teaching is what got Jesus killed.

But what I want to emphasize is how incredibly reversed this whole situation is. Think about it. The great God of heaven and earth, the perfect, holy, righteous, omnipotent Almighty preparing a feast for us, who, at least compared to Him, are worms, wicked, sinful, miserably rebellious and wretched creatures. We have no right to even approach Him or be in His presence. If anybody ought to be preparing a feast for somebody else, it is us for Him. It is an awesome thought to me—that God would prepare a feast for man. Invite us to come. Let us in. And we have certainly done absolutely nothing to deserve it, indeed, just the opposite. There can exist no greater dichotomy than this, no two opposites could be farther apart than God spreading a rich, luxuriant, bountiful table full of blessings for humans. It boggles the mind, if we truly consider it.

Yet, how many of us, just like those invited in the parable, are ungrateful and unthankful? How many look on the marvelous banquet which a holy God has laid out before wicked, undeserving man with contempt, mockery, or apathy? What greater insult could there possibly be than man rejecting God’s feast? In the parable, the king, when “he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city,” certainly was entirely justified. God, wholly by His grace, has laid before us incomparable riches. He didn’t have to prepare this feast for us, you know. He was under no obligation to invite us. He could have, and been completely within the boundaries of His rights, demanded that we prepare a feast for Him. That’s the way it ought to be. This whole thing is backwards.

So what do you think we deserve if we fail to attend the feast prepared for us?