Accepting Invitation
Because the end of all things is coming
In my last essay, I proposed the idea that we are living in the epoch of history in which God is issuing invitation—the period between Jesus’s incarnation and His second coming. The church age. In this time, Jesus is inviting us into the Kingdom, readying His bride for eternity. Christ is building His church and His main concern is rescue. The invitation has gone out, and this essay will be concerned with how we answer that invitation. How will we identify ourselves when we hear it?
Identifying Ourselves
When I am inspired to write, it is usually because I am struck by a scripture and then simultaneously come across an idea in a book or sermon, then do my best to follow the thread that connects the two. This particular thread began as I was reading Acts 13 and observed two very different responses to the gospel by Jews and then by the gentile outsiders. For context, Paul and Barnabas are in Pisidian Antioch, sharing the good news of Jesus in the local synagogue. The Jewish leaders were less than receptive of Paul and Barnabas. The apostles responded:
Acts 13:46 “But now, since you are rejecting our message and identifying yourselves as unworthy of eternal life, we are turning to the outsiders.”
As Paul and Barnabas shared God’s message with the outsiders, the good news was received with joy:
Acts 13:48 “The outsiders were thrilled and praised God’s message, and all those who had been appointed for eternal life became believers.”
There are two important concepts here: accepting or rejecting the gospel invitation as a personal identification of your eternal destiny, and accepting or rejecting the gospel invitation as a confirmation of your appointment to eternal life. The Jews rejected the message, therefore identifying themselves as unworthy of eternal life. The outsiders accepted the message, confirming their appointment to eternal life.
Now, I dare not attempt to delve too deeply into predestination. Firstly and frankly, I do not fully understand it. Secondly, many wiser minds have gone before me and I will happily defer to their convictions. And yet, these scriptures sent me down a curious trail worth exploring. There is response involved to the invitation, and there is appointment involved in the invitation. Follow the thread with me, if you will.
The Eternity of God
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God who is the All Powerful, who was, and who is, and who is to come.” Revelation 4:8
In A.W. Tozer’s book The Knowledge of the Holy, Tozer writes about the attributes of God, and specific to this thread I’m following, he expounds on the eternity of God. I believe it is wise for us to think on eternity and to consider ourselves in relation to the One who is without beginning or end. For we ourselves live in time but are destined for eternity.
Tozer writes that, “God has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays”, and that for Him, “everything that will happen has already happened.” God sees the end and the beginning simultaneously, which means that He knows how we will respond to His invitation, and He has always known. There is nothing new to Him. He cannot be surprised, for He knows all that can be known in its fullest measure.
We are often tempted to imagine a God of predestination as being cruel to some and favorable to others. This is outside of God’s character. Let us instead consider the idea of appointment in light of God’s eternity, and I believe our response will be quite different. For He sees our lives not as a series of events, but as one valuable yet fleeting event. In His eternity, He sees our lives in their entirety. He is outside of time, and yet God has so joined Himself to our eternal destiny that this eternal being descended through time and space to rescue us. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) Our souls are infinitely precious to God. When scripture tells us that He loves us with an everlasting love, it is because He himself is love, and He himself is everlasting. He cannot love any other way.
It is because of His eternity, his everlasting-ness, that we can know His intentions of goodness for us. He does not flippantly appoint some to eternal life and others to eternal damnation. That is counter to His nature. It is His eternity that causes us to trust this mystery: He knows how we will respond to His invitation, and He appoints those for eternity based on this knowledge. “You see, He knew those who would be His one day, and He chose them beforehand to be conformed into the image of His son…” (Romans 8:29) Because He sees all our days, and therefor all of our choices, simultaneously, He has known from the foundations of the world who would be His one day.
God’s heart that none would perish in on display as we read in the scriptures how He is inviting all men unto Himself. One example is in the gospel of Matthew. Jesus tells his disciples a parable of a king who throws a wedding feast for his son. After his first invitation was ignored, he persists in the search for wedding guests. “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited didn’t rise to the occasion. So go into the streets and invite anyone you see; invite everyone you meet.” (Matthew 22:4) Many are called to the wedding feast, but those who came were the ones who acted in obedience and faith. These, Matthew tells us, were the “chosen” (v. 14) In His goodness He calls many, but being chosen involves a response on our part. It goes beyond a call and requires movement in the direction of the banquet hall. A yes to Jesus. A hallelujah to eternal life. A life of repentance and sanctification. A hope for the coming glory.
Time to RSVP
“We are made for eternity as certain as we are made for time, and as responsible moral beings we must deal with both.” AW Tozer
From the beginning of time, God has been issuing invitation for relationship and redemption, and He has not and will not yield. He has set eternity in our hearts, and our very being echoes with the eternity of God, for it is in His image that we were made. Creation is itself an invitation. This invitation is the theme of the Bible. His heart for rescue is in every page. He is so bent on it that the world as we know it will not end until all its citizens from every ethnicity, nation, language, and people group have heard the everlasting gospel (Revelation 14:6). All will hear, and there will be no excuses. The invitation has gone out and our response is either one of obedience, or one of eternal tragedy.
Harkening back to the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew, we read that as the servants carried the King’s invitation to the guests, “they (the guests) paid not a whit of attention. One guest headed into his field to work; another sat at his desk to attend to his accounts…” (v. 5) Inaction is a rejection of the gospel, a polite decline with eternal consequences. A heartbreaking reality is that upon hearing the gospel, some will resume business as usual, building an earthly portfolio destined for fire. Yet there are those of us who acknowledge our hunger. The sound of an invitation is a balm to our weary souls. We run into the King’s presence, enter a banquet hall we only have access to through the cross, and sit before a feast we do not deserve yet will delight in after time itself has come to an end.
Beloved, our time is limited. This time that we are presently constrained by is but a breath. It is a coat that is wearing thin, and our eternal selves are beginning to show. May we learn “to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12) It is imperative that we stop being distracted by the temporal. Let us instead be captivated by God’s salvation plan throughout the earth, and as servants of the king, go out into the world with the good news on our lips. The beauty of the church age is that we have the privilege of witnessing those who were perishing, who have lived outside of God’s kingdom, identifying themselves as worthy of eternal life. We see it and rejoice because we, too, have been those guests outside of the King’s gates, outside of the favor and safety of the banquet hall, brought into the light of an everlasting kingdom.
“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come!’ Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.”
Revelation 22:17