A Wedding Garment

A WEDDING GARMENT

 

This term is mentioned in (Matt 22:11-12), and was part of a parable that Jesus told about a certain king who had prepared celebrations for the marriage of his son. If we read from verse 1-14 for the whole parable, we see that it was told partly for the benefit of the Pharisees, who represented the religious crowd of the day. They were meant to be the man without the proper "wedding garment" in the story, and the last 2 verses explain his end result of being in hell. Bob Mumford gives a good illustration in his teaching series called the Agape Road. He uses this term "wedding garment" to explain the truth brought out by Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth. In the fifth chapter (2 Cor 5:17-21) he tells about how God brought us lost sinners back to Himself, by allowing His Son Jesus, who was "sinless", to become sin for us and die on the cross to redeem us by paying the price for our sins, for the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23), and only a perfectly "sinless" man could pay the price of this sin, and satisfy the demands of a Holy God. Jesus was the only man who qualified to be our one and only Savior!!

 

Bob uses a pure white piece of cloth to represent God's righteousness, which he refers to as the "wedding garment". He lays it over his left hand that is made into a fist, and calls that God "imputing" His righteousness to us as a "gift", and he takes his finger and forces this cloth down into the space between the fingers made into the fist, and calls that Jesus "imparting" this righteousness to us. In other words it is definitely a "gift" that we do not earn by good works, given to us at salvation when He "adopts" us into His Forever Family, and seals this transaction by leaving His Holy Spirit, as a "down payment", so to speak, until we collect our final purchase at our resurrection! (Eph 1:3-14). When we read scriptures like these ones written by Paul, the "Apostle to the Gentiles", to whom God revealed the "mystery" of the Church that Jesus said He would build (Matt 16:18), we know that we can depend on this truth. This is an easy way to pass on this truth to others, who may not yet know Jesus as Lord and Savior, and are depending on their religious activities to gain acceptance with God. This is part of the lie that the devil, who Jesus said is the father of lies, has spread in many churches!! We need to be alert to this lie that many sincere "Christians" have been taught as if it was true.

Sincerely submitted.

Dave Jamer                                                                                  06/03/12