Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2096
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, July 21, 1889
“Let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to Him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come and His wife has made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.” Revelation 19:7,8.
LAST LORD’S Day we saw clearly from God’s Word that our Lord is worshipped in Heaven under the Character of a Lamb. Now, by a Lamb was meant sacrifice, sacrifice for the putting away of sin—according to the text, “Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world.” It is against the great doctrine of atonement and substitutionary death that the attacks of the present unbelieving age are constantly being made. And therefore I set before you the Truth of God that substitution and sacrifice were not a temporary expedient but that they continue all through the whole history of salvation and remain in the very highest place, even in Heaven itself and will continue evermore.
Do not forget that whenever we read of Christ as a Lamb, it is to remind us of His sufferings and death in our place, for the putting away of our sin. Under that Character we looked to Him, some of us, years ago and found peace at the first. We are still looking to Him under that same Character. And when we attain to Heaven, we shall not have to change our thought of Him but we shall still see Him as a Lamb that has been slain. In our lowest place, when we came out of the Egypt of our bondage, He was the Lamb of God’s Passover. And in our highest place, in the heavenly temple, we shall still regard Him as “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
This morning my principal aim shall be to show you that the blessed and glorious union, which is to be celebrated between the Church and her Lord, will be the marriage “of the Lamb.” The ever blessed and eternal union of hearts with Christ will be in reference to His sacrifice, especially and emphatically. The perfected union of the entire Church of God with her Divine Husband is here described by the beloved Apostle, who laid his head upon his Master’s bosom and knew most about Him and who was under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, in these words—“The marriage of the Lamb is come and His wife has made herself ready.”
Whatever else we think of at this time, my discourse will aim at this as the white of the target—namely, that Jesus Christ as the Lamb, the Sacrifice, is not only the beginning but the end. Not only the foundation but the topstone of the whole sacred edifice of the Temple of Grace. The consummation of the whole work of redemption is the marriage of the Church to Christ. And, according to “the true sayings of God,” this is “the marriage of the Lamb.”
I will set forth this marriage as best I am able. It is divinely veiled as well as revealed in this Revelation. God forbid we should intrude where the Holy Spirit shuts us out. But still, what we do know of it, let us now think upon—and may the sacred Spirit make it profitable to us!
I. First, I invite your attention to THE ANTECEDENTS OF THIS MARRIAGE. What will happen before the public marriage is celebrated? One great event will be the destruction of the harlot Church. I have just read, in your hearing, the previous chapter, which declares the overwhelming destruction which will fall upon that evil system. Any Church which puts in the place of justification by faith in Christ another method of salvation, is a harlot Church. The doctrine of justification by faith in Christ is the article of a standing or a falling Church.
Where the blood is precious, there is life. Where atonement by the sacrifice is preached and loved, there will the Spirit of God bear effectual testimony. But where human priests are put in the place of Jesus, where pardons can be purchased, where there is an unbloody sacrifice instead of the great propitiation, and sacraments are exalted as the means of regeneration—there the Church is no longer a chaste virgin unto Christ—she has turned aside from her purity.
The Antichristian system is to be utterly extirpated and burnt with fire. For you will perceive, in the fourteenth verse of the seventeenth chapter, that those who were associated with this false Church, “shall make war with the Lamb and the
Lamb shall overcome them—for He is Lord of lords and King of kings.” And there has been no more wicked nor more determined war with the Lamb than that which has been waged by superstition supported by unbelief. The harlot Church and the beast of infidelity are in real league against the simple faith of Christ.
If you point men, no matter where—if you point them away from Christ, you point them to Antichrist. If you teach them what you may, no matter how philosophical it may seem—if in any way it takes them off from building upon the one foundation of Christ’s glorious and finished work, you have laid an Antichristian foundation and all that is built thereon will be destroyed. Everything which sets up itself in opposition to the sacrifice of Christ is to be hurled down and made to sink like a millstone in the flood. I would God the hour were come! Oh, that the Lord’s own right arm were bare and that we heard the cry, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen.”