Smoodock's Blog

I have been studying of late the eschatology of Jesus’ Parable of the Wedding, found in Matthew 22:1-14. In it a king extends his invitation to attend his son’s wedding to certain people, but they refuse his offer to be his guests at the wedding. I have demonstrated in my previous study that this parable points to the Lord’s judgment upon the Jewish nation in 70 AD when Jerusalem was conquered by the Roman armies, who also destroyed the Temple (Matthew 22:7). The wedding feast was then to occur afterward.

Contrary to this motif presented in the scriptures, futurists have put the coming of the Lord and the subsequent judgment and wedding far into the future from when it was supposed to have taken place. Many Biblical scholars will agree that the judgment in Matthew 22 points to 70 AD, but the coming of the Lord and the subsequent wedding had to have been delayed and is to be fulfilled in our future. For example:

[The Lord sent] the Roman armies …to invade the land and destroy Jerusalem. The final destruction of that city was the fulfillment of the words of the Lord Jesus, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2).

Now we see the gospel going out to the Gentiles… “Go out into the hedges and the highways; go out among all classes everywhere… no matter how vile and sinful, bid them to the marriage feast; invite them to come in!” And so we read “… and the wedding was furnished with guests.”

It is a graphic picture of what has gone on for the last nineteen hundred years. God’s servants have been going from land to land, from city to city, and out into the uttermost parts of the earth. They have been going everywhere inviting poor, lost men to come to the marriage feast which God has prepared for His Son. [Matthew 22:7-10; emphasis mine][1]

Had the Jews accepted the invitation, the implication is that the Wedding Feast would have taken place immediately, because “all things were ready” (Matthew 22:4). The question then needs to be asked: if everything was ready in the first century AD (Matthew 22:4), and they were still ready when judgment was administered (Matthew 22:8), why wait another 1900 to 2000 years to celebrate the marriage? If all things were prepared at that time and ready, what is the purpose of waiting nearly two millennia to celebrate the wedding? It seems to me that the context of the parable should dictate its interpretation. There is an element of imminence in the parable that is lost and even contradicted by “a graphic picture of what has gone on for the last nineteen hundred years.”

Paul tells us in Romans 15:8 that Jesus was the Servant of the Jews for the sake of the truth in order to fulfill all the promises God made to them through the fathers. In Jeremiah 31:31-33 not only do we find a New Covenant promised, but we understand that God’s covenant with the Jews at Sinai was a marriage covenant. In other words, if the New Covenant is valid at all, today, the wedding had to have taken place. The Wedding Feast **is** the formalizing of the New Covenant!

As I claimed in my previous study,[2] according to Hosea, God divorced Israel by destroying that nation and sending them into captivity (cf. Hosea 1:9; 2:2). Nevertheless, in the latter days (Hosea 3:5) the Lord promised to come again to remarry his people (Hosea 1:10; 2:23). This second invitation is given by Jesus in The Parable of the Wedding (Matthew 22:1-14), and is the object of the Gospel he gave to the Apostles to preach throughout the world. They were not sent to the gentiles (Paul was). They were sent to the lost tribes of Israel (Matthew 10:5-7, 23). The New Covenant, in other words, is not a gentile covenant. It was between the Lord, Jesus, and the righteous remnant of Israel (12 tribes) and gentiles who believed.

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[1] Ironside, Notes on Selected Books, Matthew 22.

[2] See my previous study, The Wedding Feast.