Tuesdays with Edwards!
Sometime between August 1728 and February 1729 Edwards preached The Spiritual Blessings of the Gospel Represented by a Feast based on Luke 14:16 Then said he unto him, A certain man made a great supper and bade many. The next several Tuesdays with Edwards posts will look at one of the ways which show “how gospel provision is well represented by a feast.” First he showed how he saw this in the expensiveness of gospel blessings, in the free offer of it, and as it nourishes the soul as food does the body. This week’s post looks at the fourth reason.
You can read this sermon in its entirety at www.edwards.yale.edu. This selection is from Sermons and Discourses, 1723-1729, ed. Kenneth P. Minkema, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 14 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) Pages 284-285.
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But we shall show in some particular instances how gospel provision is well represented by a feast….
VI. The spiritual provision of the gospel is well represented [by a feast], because of the excellency of it. We call those meals “feasts”, where the provision is what excels ordinary food.2 The provision that God has made for our souls in Christ is exceeding excellent. ‘Tis of the most noble kind: that which is to nourish the nobler part of men, viz. his soul, and that which is most suitable proper nourishment; that which tends, above all that can be conceived of, to give the soul the most excellent life and the most excellent satisfaction: which is evident by what had been already said about the costliness of it, its being what “cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof” [Job 28:15].
Doubtless, that food which cost the Son of God his blood and life is pure dainties, when it is procured. And it is everywhere represented as the richest and most noble and excellent food. It is called the “bread of heaven” and “angels’ food” (Psalms 105:40). So we are invited in Isaiah 55:2 not to “spend money for that which is not bread, and labor for that which satisfieth not,” but to come to Christ, to eat “that which is good,” that our souls may delight themselves in fatness. So this feast in Isaiah 25:6 is called “a feast of fat things, of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.”
This feast is a royal feast, the feast of a king. So we read in the parable, Matthew 22, of a certain king that made a feast.
Christ tells his spouse that he had laid up for her all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old. Those dainties must needs be the sweetest and what give exceeding satisfaction and happiness to the soul, for [they are] the same kind that Christ himself is as it were delighted with; they are what satisfy him and make him [happy]. Therefore he tells his disciples of drinking of the fruit of the vine new with them in his Father’s kingdom [Matthew 26:29]. That which now makes Christ happy in heaven is the same sort of wine with which he satisfies thirsty souls on earth and will satisfy them in heaven.
Learning To Be Full Of Grace And Truth. 