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THE BANQUET
Copyright ©2018 Ronald J. Mahler
All rights reserved
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-988928-03-6 Soft Cover
ISBN 978-1-988928-04-3 E-book
Published by: Castle Quay Books
Burlington, Ontario
Tel: (416) 573-3249
E-mail: [email protected] | www.castlequaybooks.com
Edited by Marina Hofman Willard and Lori Mackay
Cover design and book interior by Burst Impressions
Printed at Essence Publishing, Belleville, Ontario
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission of the publishers.
Unless otherwise marked, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.• Scriptures marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. • Scriptures marked (ESV) are taken from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®). ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. The ESV® text has been reproduced in cooperation with and by permission of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved. • Scripture quotations marked (MSG) are taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mahler, Ron, 1967-, author
The Banquet : exploring the greatest invitation extended
to humanity / Ronald James Mahler.
ISBN 978-1-988928-03-6 (softcover)
1. Lord’s Supper. I. Title.
BV825.3.M34 2018 234’.163 C2018-901602-7
To my sister Linda, who has always had food on the table,
room around it, and a house filled with love
for anyone who enters.
A Chair
—Ronald j. Mahler
Tables’ mantling unequalled fair
Their settings sprawling, remarkable
Upright and wanting, is a single, vacant chair
Its placement among rows of the thankful
In a room majestic and perceptively endless
Voices meld together in wonderful flight
Love, like a prism, magnified and tremendous
Embodied in the One who sits in perfect light
Curtains rise, exposing a Banquet Divine
Dishes plentiful and elevating appetites
Senses delight in working overtime
Yet a single chair remains, void of its invite.
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.
If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,
I will come in and eat with that person,
and they with me.”
—Jesus Christ
(Revelation 3:20)
_________ Introduction _________
People are naturally curious about the afterlife. During our childhood years, many of us are taught that there is a blissful place that “good” people go to after they die: heaven. However, many of our cultural conceptions about the reality of heaven and how one gets there are either askew of the Bible’s teaching or estranged from it.
Many parables of Jesus Christ underscore the reality of hell while highlighting how one can avoid going there or how one can enter the kingdom of God and experience its heavenly rewards for eternity. Jesus’s parable of the great banquet—a foreshadowing of what the Bible refers to as the marriage feast of the Lamb—addresses this all-important subject with sobriety.
In the parable (Luke 14:15–24), the Lord relays how a servant is sent by his wealthy and benevolent master to tell those he has already invited to a celebratory feast that the banquet is now ready. Incredibly, everyone who has been invited doesn’t actually want to attend. Their decision infuriates the goodly master, and so he directs his servant to invite others outside of the privileged crowd the master had at the top of his invitation list. The servant obeys, and the doors of the banquet are held open for people whom the initial invitees wouldn’t think to invite to their own feasts and banquets. So heartbroken and angered is the master as a result of the initial invitees’ ungrateful attitude towards his kindness that he declares that none of this crowd will be permitted to snatch even a morsel from the bounty of his banquet’s table.
As we’ll see, the parable of the great banquet’s characters indeed have “real-life” identities attached to them, just as the parable’s punchline points to the eternal rewards in heaven that await those who believe in the Son of God, as contrasted with the equally eternal (yet tragic) consequences that accompany others’ unbelief and ultimate rejection of God’s Son. The parable invites the reader to contemplate its narrative as motivation for one to do everything necessary in order to get on this banquet’s list of invitees!
By all biblical accounts, this event will be unlike anything we could possibly experience in the here and now. Imagine walking into an elaborately decorated regal hall resembling the length of countless football fields buttressed together. Imagine how overwhelmed you feel as your eye scans an enormous exhibition of faces, voices, ethnic groups, colours, and excitement. You are speechless because no words can fill in the blanks of what you could never have known about heaven. It’s impossible to process all you can see or to appreciate the layers of lavish fare that extend throughout and adorn the space’s hemispheric sightlines.
Such are the optical titillations inherent within the biblical imagery of God uniting around His heavenly banquet table with all the redeemed of every age and of every racial background, language, social status, and nation the world has known. In “the New Jerusalem,” the house of God and the family of faith are joined together in what Matthew Henry referred to as “a reception for repentant sinners.”
For purely speculative purposes, there are questions pertaining to the logistics surrounding a banquet of such magnitude that will accommodate several billion people in attendance. The Bible does not address the extraneous details relating to the heavenly banquet, the “marriage feast of the Lamb.” We can only employ conjecture on a subject such as this and muse about what it will feel like to be a part of such a magnificent event. Will the feast be held in multiple areas within the new heavens and the new earth? We could speculate as well on who will serve the food. Will it be representatives of God’s people from every generation during the human age? Will the innumerable angels get tagged for this duty? If so, how many angels will be required to serve the food, and just how much food, for that matter, will be required to feed billions of guests?
We could ponder how the menu will be decided and how many cooks will be needed to prepare the hors d’oeuvres, not to mention an unfathomable meal featuring perhaps multiple courses! Who will be doing all the cooking? How many tables and sittings will be required, and who might we sit next to? Can you foresee