What Exceeding Great Reason We Have to Admire the Grace of God Towards us in Giving Us this Feast.

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. My Tuesdays with Edwards posts have been looking at the ways which show “how gospel provision is well represented by a feast.”

Edwards showed how he saw this:

in the expensiveness of gospel blessings,

in the free offer of it,

as it nourishes the soul as food does the body,

because of the excellency of it,

by the abundance and variety of it,

by the friendship of those that feast together,

by the communion of the saints,

and by how it represents the joy of Christianity.

Today’s post looks at the second of several applications of this.

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) Page 289.

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II. Hence we learn what exceeding great reason we have to admire the grace of God towards us, that he should so lay out himself to provide such a feast for our souls. God han’t provided this feast for those that are rich, that are able to recompense him by inviting him again, nor for them that are able to make any recompense at all; but those that are poor and have nothing to pay. We were in a famishing miserable condition when the King invited to the marriage feast of his Son, and not only so, but to be his bride.

God did not make this feast for those that were excellent and worthy to be invited to such a royal feast, but for those that [were] filthy, that were loathsome creatures clothed in rags, or rather naked, and defiled with filth. He did not invite those that were happy already, but poor beggars that were scattered, wandering in the highways and dwelling under hedges, those that were halt and lame and blind. Such all naturally are, but God sends forth his messengers, and calls many such to his houses, and washes them from their filthiness and clothes them with white raiment, adorns [them] with robes as king’s children and makes them to sit down at his table.

O, what reason have we [to] admire the wonderful grace of God herein!