In a few moments we’re going to sing together a
favorite Isaac Watts hymn
“How Sweet and Aweful is the Place. It’s
a hymn about this great parable –
He opens the first verse by describing the great and
admire-able feast of Christ’s Kingdom – It is a feast that is sweet and full of
awe … and one that displays the choicest foods from His stores.
And when we join together for that great feast, from
our hearts, we will cry out to the Lord – “Why
am I a guest? Why did I
hear Your voice inviting me here when so many others choose to starve outside?”
Watts gives us the correct answer. The Lord replies – “The same sweet love that spread this feast drew you here. Without it, you also would have refused and
perished.”
So Watts finishes the hymn with a prayer for us to
sing together.
And it is the application of this Kingdom parable.
After confessing that the only reason we’ve been
invited into the Kingdom feast was the sweetness of God’s love toward us, we
pray and ask Him to have compassion on the nations and to extend the call of
His sweet love to all the earth. We ask
Him to constrain or draw strangers to their true home and to make His Word
victorious, that it would triumph in our world.
The fact that unworthies such as we have been invited
to Christ’s great banquet-feast fills us with longing to see all of His
churches filled with people to join us in singing from our hearts with one
voice the hymn of His redeeming grace.
Why did Israel receive the immeasurable blessings of
the Covenant? Why have we received the priceless
blessings of the Kingdom?
Not because we earned it. Not because God knew He’d get a good return
on His investment. In fact, as we’ll see
– God-willing – later this season when we get to Lk 17, when we have done
all we can, we will still have failed to return God any profit for what He spent
on us.
By inviting us to His feast, Christ has been gracious
to those who can never repay Him, just as He has called us to do. And so the Father has exalted Him and will yet still reward Him
at the consummation of all things – the resurrection of the just and the
wedding feast of the Lamb.
