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In Jesus’ Parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew 22, verses 1 through 14, He gives us a visual picture of a period of evangelism that progresses to His second coming and the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
The Parable of the Wedding Feast, the Ten Virgins and the Bride of Christ
The parable begins with the king who sends his servants to invite the guests to the feast. The king represents the Lord, and the servants are His disciples, His evangelists. These are the ones who are intimate with Him, and can receive direction from Him through His word and His Holy Spirit.
We see them bringing His invitation to the people and being rejected by them. Initially the gospel was brought to the Jews first and the Lord is showing us that He was going to be rejected for the most part, by His own people. In verse seven we are shown that the city of those who had rejected Him was destroyed. Jesus is prophesying of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD in the wake of the Jews’ rejection of the gospel.
He then sends His servants out again to everyone. This represents the ongoing ministry to the Gentiles, which cumulates at the Lord’s second coming.
This event also connects us to another related Parable of the Ten Virgins. In this parable, the bridegroom is coming and the virgins who have been waiting for this event trim their lamps.
The darkness they have been slumbering through represents the spiritual darkness of the age; the tribulation that has preceded Jesus’ return.
We are shown in Jesus’ instructions to His disciples in Matthew 24, verses 21, and 29 through 31, that He returns after the great tribulation for His elect, and He sends His angels to gather them. Thus we understand that the virgins represent the church that has gone through the tribulation and believers who have come to the Lord during the tribulation.
The remnant that has been taken up before the tribulation and all the believers through the ages who have died in the Lord, are already with Him, experiencing the intimacy and union with His Spirit and they are His bride, His church. The Apostle Paul said from II Corinthians 5:6, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
The virgins, the church that has been left behind and endured the tribulation, were believers that had harbored the errors described in Revelation chapters 2 and 3, including those who had been infected with the Jezebel spirit. They were promised that they would endure great tribulation unless they repented (Rev. 2:22). Thus the tribulation period is the refining fire that corrects them and qualifies them to be gathered to their Bridegroom when He comes again.
We see that five virgins out of the ten, did not bring enough oil and are told by the others to go and buy (Matt.25:9). By this time in earth’s history, the prophesied one world beast system or empire, would have come into its fullness either before or during the tribulation, and would have instigated the mark of the beast (Rev. 13:16). Anyone who has disobeyed God’s commandment to not take the mark, (Rev. 14:9-11) would be excluded from salvation and the marriage feast of the lamb.
The five who left to go buy their oil had to have taken the mark to be able to buy any goods. The taking of the mark represents a denial of Christ, thus when He comes He tells these ones that He never knew them (Matthew 25:12). Their salvation and the Holy Spirit represented by the oil in their lamps had gone out and could not be replaced thus resulting in the virgins being permanently rejected. Those who had remained faithful to the gospel and had not denied the atonement and that Jesus is the only way to the Father (John 14:6), are gathered into His embrace.
This returns us back to the parable of the wedding feast where the virgins would be the guests who have been gathered after the tribulation and the second coming. Remember all those who had gone before were already with the Bridegroom.
The guest that is rejected because he did not have a wedding garment, which can only be received by the Bridegroom, symbolizes those five virgins who took the mark and all those to whom the gospel has been preached and rejected it. The wedding garment represents the righteousness of the saints that can only be imparted through faith in God’s plan of redemption, the atoning death of the Messiah Jesus.
We are shown in Revelation 21: 9-27, that the entire church is seen as the Bride of Christ after the judgment and the millennial reign of Jesus on earth. This means that those wedding guests who had not literally been with the Lord prior to the wedding feast, had come through the fires of their purging during the tribulation and now had been with Him in heaven, reigned with Him on earth during the millennial and were His bride as truly as all those who had preceded them.
The apostles and the entire counsel of God’s word tells us specifically that those who have received Jesus as the Messiah are His bride and His church.
God says to His people, “I am married to you” (Jeremiah 3:14). All true believers can rejoice in the intimacy of our holy union with God the Father and with His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus, our Messiah.
Copyright 2024 by H.D. Shively