Bible Text: St Matthew 25:1-46 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
What Jesus wants you to be absolutely sure of in these foundational parables of Judgment Day is that when that day comes you will be invited into perfect joy and exultation and glory and peace, not because of anything you have done, but because God has loved you. “Come you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” One sentence and three times Jesus stresses His work, not yours. Come you blessed. Blessed in Greek is Eulogeo, to speak good words. So you are blessed because God has spoken good words to you. Come let us reason together, though your sins are as scarlet yet they shall be white as snow. Glory and honor and praise are sung to the Lamb in heaven in Revelation. Why? Because He loves us and has redeemed us from our sins by His blood. Those are the good words and they have blessed you – the Son of God is your Brother. He loves you. He has spilt His blood for you. The sin that divides you from God and from heaven, He bore and He faced their horror and their punishment, and He is now the firstborn of the dead, and He has given you life in Him. Take and eat His life-giving body and blood, receive His blessing and you are blessed and you will hear those words spoken to you from your Savior’s own mouth that Great Day.
Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit. That’s what you’ll hear. Children inherit. They inherit because they’re children. And what do children do to become children? Nothing. My little Micah is a month old today and up to date he has still done absolutely nothing to become or remain my child. Before he has done anything good or bad I love him because he’s my child. You inherit the kingdom of God because you are God’s child. And you did nothing to become that. God gave you birth. You were born dead in your transgression, under the power of the evil one in this evil age, and God rescued you, gave you new birth, a new name, united you to the death and resurrection of Jesus, gave you His spirit, made you His child. And He loves His children and tells them they will inherit with His Son all things.
He calls it, calls what you will inherit, the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Before you ever existed, God prepared that kingdom for you. Before anything existed. The Father loved you and determined to send His Son to rescue you and the Son resolved to become your Brother and lay down His life for you. And the Spirit, before He hovered over the face of the deep, knew you, the hairs on your head, the course of your life, and it was already reality, already decided, prepared that He would bring the kingdom to you, the kingship of Christ, that you would be sheep and listen to the voice of your Shepherd and He would guide you to the living fountain of waters and wipe every tear from your eyes.
So three times, emphatically, Jesus gives you the divine assurance sealed by the Spirit of Truth that you are blessed, inheritors and children, of a kingdom bought by the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.
And all the rest of His parables describe not why you inherit, but what you do on this earth because you are already inheritors. How do Christians live in this life?
First, the parable of the ten virgins who wait for the coming of the Bridegroom. The five wise have oil. The five foolish don’t. The oil is faith in Jesus, and faith in Jesus is no idle thing, no mere head knowledge of certain facts about Jesus, It is the longing to see Him, to be with Him. I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Judgment Day is described in the Bible both as a day of dread and terror and as a day of pure joy. For the Christian it means the end of sin and fear and worry and pain and struggle; it means seeing with our eyes and feeling in every fiber of our resurrected body and sinless soul the truth of all that we believed and hoped for in Christ. It is pure joy. We are eternal optimists: the future cannot scare us because the future belongs to Jesus and we belong to Him.
The wicked are not so, but are like chaff driven by the wind. It’s not coincidental that the predictions of the future in our time are so dismal: global warming, the destruction of the earth, economic collapse, foreboding for that is to come. There’s truth in it. This globe will be warmed so hot on Judgment Day that the heavens will be set on fire and all that the wicked put their trust in, all their wealth and pleasures, will go up with it; but the blessed of the Father will watch as the Son creates the new heavens and the new earth and the Spirit once again eternally hovers over the face of the deep filling us with perpetual peace.
Christians look forward to Judgment Day.
Second, the parable of the talents. A talent is a unit of money, a lot of money, it is wealth. And the wealth God entrusts to us is the righteousness of Christ. It’s not stuff, it’s not even, first of all, our talents, our smarts, our abilities. It’s Christ. He is our treasure; our talent. Inheritors use this talent. We don’t receive it like that wicked servant and then bury it in the ground and forget about it. We use it in our lives and it bears abundant fruit. God forgives, that’s our treasure, and we forgive those who sin against us, and one talent becomes two. God teaches us and fathers and mothers and teachers give that teaching to children. And two talents become four. God comforts us in our sorrow and we comfort one another and five talents become ten.
We use the Gospel. It becomes our life, and it grows. And we do it unafraid, because there is no risk when we use it, we can’t lose it by using it. We can only grow in it. The wicked servant hid his talent because he thought his master was a hard man, unfair, reaping where he did not sow; this is the picture of those who think Christianity is a burden, God’s demand on them, who would rather bury it out of their mind and lives because to embrace it means confronting sin and death and hell and they don’t trust in the Savior who frees us from all sin and death and hell by bearing it Himself.
The other two servants run to their master, excited, gleeful, totally trusting that He will smile on them and love them. Look, You gave me Your wealth, Your righteousness, Your love, and I used it. I confessed my sins, I took comfort everyday in the forgiveness Your blood gives me, and see what happened. See two become four and five, ten, because their treasure can only increase.
Christians use the forgiveness of sins in their lives.
And finally, the parable of the sheep and the goats. Inheritors of the kingdom don’t trust in their works, they don’t even understand how they can be so precious to Jesus because we know our sin. But we work. And work is wonderful when you love what you do and the people you’re doing it with. A person can enjoy digging ditches if he’s doing it with people he loves. I remember digging an outhouse hole with my son and enjoying every minute of it because my mom and dad really wanted a new outhouse and I was doing the work with a man I loved. This is Christian work, no matter how lowly it seems, clothing and changing diapers for babies, and then for moms and dads in their old age, cleaning the church, feeding families who just had a new baby. If you know that Jesus your Savior wants it and blesses it and works with you and you are doing it for His Christians, who are His body, then it’s a joy.
You kill the joy when you take your face off Christ and your neighbor. Works-righteousness, the lie of the devil that we earn God’s favor because of what we do, is pure selfishness. The goats are surprised at Jesus’ words, “You didn’t do it to me,” because they trusted in their works. They thought that by doing them they were gaining Jesus’ favor, but as long as they thought that, they were doing it all for themselves. We do it for Jesus. Precisely because we don’t need to earn a thing. He has earned it. He has given it. We love because He has first loved us.
We are excited for Judgment Day. So is Jesus. We want to see Him. He wants to see His Bride. That’s how the church is described in Revelation, “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” He will come for us because He wants to see us and He will see a beautiful bride. He won’t see any sin or ugliness or anything evil, only good, His precious bride. And that’s how He sees you even now by the forgiveness of your sins, clothed in His righteousness.
Inheritors of the Kingdom look forward to Jesus’ return. Inheritors treasure Christ’s righteousness daily and use it in their lives, and they work not to earn God’s favor, but because they already have it.
Lord Jesus, make us ready for Your coming to receive you with joy. And come quickly so that we can see You, our hearts’ desire, and live with You in the glory which You share with the Father and the Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.