Revelation 19:6-10 (The Marriage Supper of the Lamb)

If you would please turn to chapter Revelation chapter 19.

Revelation 19 · chapter mention

We're going to be in verses 6 through 10 as we continue our study of Revelation this morning.

Revelation chapter 19, verses 6 through 10.

Revelation 19:6–10

Oh, in life, there are sounds that you never forget.

The cry of a newborn child, especially your own, the explosion of a crowd when a long-awaited victory finally arrives.

You get that end zone catch, or you hit that buzzer beater three-pointer, just those this the sounding roar of the crowd.

I remember one time when uh Courtney and I were younger, we went on a mission trip to Alaska, and we took a day off, and we took a day cruise to go see some wildlife in a in a natural uh uh area of Alaska.

And we got close to this glacier.

Um, and there is just when you when you're at a glacier, it's just this wall of ice, and you would see like chunks of ice from the top of the glacier break apart and they would fall off this wall of ice.

And we we were still far enough away where it didn't look like it, but these chunks of ice were like bigger than cars.

It was just these huge chunks of ice, and they would fall down and hit the water, and we were not close enough where the sound would be immediate.

You would see them hit the water, and then a couple of seconds would pass, and you would just hear this roar of crashing water that this large block of ice made as it fell into the ocean.

Some sounds are just so significant in our lives that they get burned into our memories.

And some sounds are simply too large for ordinary life to contain or to comprehend.

John, exiled on the island of Patmos, hears a sound like that in our text this morning.

He has already endured visions of the seals broken, the trumpets sounded, the bowls of wrath poured out.

He's watched Babylon the Great, the great city drunk on the blood of the saints, fall within a single hour.

And now at the precipices of everything, as we're getting to the close, heaven opens uh its sounds to a level far above what the earth can comprehend or even imagine or produce or contain?

What John hears is not a voice, it's not a choir, it is a multitude beyond numbering, roaring like a catastrophic waterfall, crackling like simultaneous peals of thunder across an open sky.

And what does this multitude say with such a sound?

It is one word, hallelujah.

We are in the final movement of the book of Revelation's great symphony, and we've seen Revelation as this series of parallel visions, each recapitulating the whole history from the first coming of Christ to the last day, each one pressing deeper and pressing higher to the final consummation of God's people to himself.

And now we are arriving at that consummation.

The harlot has fallen, the beast and the false prophet will be thrown into the lake of fire, the dragon will be bound, and before any of that plays out on this stage of vision, heaven pauses to worship.

Heaven cannot wait.

The celebration has already begun.

And this passage this morning gives us three anchoring realities that we as the church must hold on to in the present moment.

It's encouraging to us as a people of God.

What we must preach to ourselves in a season of suffering, confusion, and temptation to despair, a temptation to not trust God is good, to not trust that God is in control, to not trust that God has it all planned out.

And those three anchor points are first, that the reign of God is settled and it's a cause for praise.

Secondly, the marriage supper of the Lamb has come and the bride is clothed in grace.

And third, the blessing of the invitation must not be confused with the worship of the messenger.

So follow along with me as we read Revelation chapter 19, verses 6 through 10.

Revelation 19:6–10

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters, like the sound of many pills of mighty pills of thunder, crying out, Hallelujah, for the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory.

For the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his bride has made herself ready.

It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure.

For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

And the angel said to me, Write this, Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

And he said to me, These are the true words of God.

Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, You must not do that.

I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus, worship God.

For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

So we work our way through the text this morning.

Firstly, the reign of God is settled.

We see that in verse six, for the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

That one sentence is the theological spine of the entire Christian life.

It is the answer to every anxious question.

It's the floor beneath every dark night of the soul, and the corrective for every idol that promises to give us only what God can give us.

Now notice the tense here.

He says reigns, not will reign.

Although that is true, not reigned, though the past is full of his sovereign grace and reigning.

Scripture says he reigns.

It is present, it is continuous, it is active.

The Almighty is on his throne, and he has never vacated it for a moment.

The roar of this multitude of heaven is not the roar of a surprise.

They are not watching God ascend to his throne and cheering that he got the victory.

They are not stunned that God is in complete control.

They are celebrating a truth that they know has always existed, continues to exist, and will exist for all eternity with 100% absolute certainty.

It's now made visible to all who have ever doubted it.

God the Almighty sits on his throne and all is under his command.

Now remember what the believe that the believers that John was writing to were living under the shadow of the Roman imperial power.

And that power demanded their worship.

It branded its own sovereignty onto coins and inscriptions and statues all across the Roman Empire.

Caesar is Lord was not just a political claim, it was a liturgical one.

They were enforced, they were demanded to cry out, Caesar is Lord.

To refuse, to say Caesar is Lord was to court arrest, exile, and in some cases even death.

John's congregation knew what it cost to confess Jesus Christ as King.

Now, into that pressure of those early churches that the book of Revelation was written to, the vision thunders to these early readers, the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.

Now the Greek word for Almighty means the one who holds all things in his grip.

Caesar holds the sword, Rome holds the treasury.

But God the Almighty holds Caesar.

He holds Rome.

He holds history itself.

He holds the present itself.

He holds the future.

Nothing is outside of the grips of God Almighty.

The empire that exiled John to Patmos existed only because it was permitted by the one that John is writing about.

Now, this is not a political sermon.

This is a political reality.

Every empire and every age that has demanded ultimate allegiance from human beings, every system that has said, you belong to us before you belong to God, has been speaking a lie.

And the lie always collapses in the end.

Babylon fell in an hour.

It always does, because the Lord God Almighty reigns.

Now let me press this where it may hurt a little bit, because doctrine always presses us.

And if it doesn't hurt us to help us and it's not helping us, we have to do some introspection.

The question I have is: are you living your life out in a manner that reflects that you truly believe that God reigns?

Or are you living as though the outcome of your circumstances determines the character of God?

Meaning that whatever happens in my life determines how I feel about God.

How gracious or merciful or kind He is is determined by what I think I deserve.

We are terribly prone to measuring God's sovereignty by our own comfort.

When life is manageable, we confess his reign very easily.

When the diagnosis comes, when the marriage fractures, when the finances collapse, when the culture seems to be swallowing everything we love, when trials are many and suffering seems unbearable, do you still sing?

Do you still praise?

Do you still hold to the truth that the Lord God Almighty reigns?

The multitude in heaven here have seen what we have not yet fully seen.

They see the whole board.

They see the whole universe.

They see the whole timeline.

They see the throne.

My older kids have learned how to play chess over the past year.

And so we've periodically been playing chess together.

Now, chess is a very interesting game because every type of chess piece has its own move that it can contribute to your thought process as you seek to be the victor against your enemy across the board from you.

I read something the other day about someone being asked if you could add a piece to the chess board, what would it be called and what would it be able to do?

Like what would it, what move could it make?

The response was the bureaucrat.

And it could move to any unoccupied space, but couldn't capture any other piece, and its job was to just get in the way of everything.

And we read about God's sovereignty and final victory.

We say these truths, we sing these truths, but our natural inclination in the flesh is to live as though God is making moves against evil, trying to have victory.

But God is not making moves to achieve victory.

God already has the victory.

It is 100% assured.

And the multitude of heaven knows this.

God is not playing chess with Satan or his demons.

They are under his complete reign and sovereign authority.

And when he says it's time to go, it's time to be locked up forever, they go.

They go away.

This is why early on in the Gospel of Mark, we see the demon-possessed man come to Christ, or Christ comes to him, and the demon says, What are you to do with us, O holy one of God?

If only the church would say the same thing that demons can say.

What are you to do with me, O holy one of God?

The multitude in heaven sees it.

They have this view that we do not have.

But we need to see it today in Scripture, and we need to be sanctified by it.

Too oftentimes we want to sit on the throne of our heart.

We want to be in control.

We want to be in authority.

We want to have power.

We need to give it all to God.

We need to trust in the sovereign rule of Almighty God.

The multitude, they know how every move resolves.

And from that vantage point, they cannot contain themselves.

The proper response to the sovereign reign of the Lord God Almighty is not a composed nod of intellectual assent.

It's a roar of praise.

It's a hallelujah.

Let that word land on you.

It's an imperative.

You all praise the Lord.

They see God on his throne where he's always been and he always will be.

And the response is you all praise the Lord.

It's not a liturgical decoration, it is a declaration of war against all despair.

Secondly, the marriage has come and the bride is ready.

We see this in verses 7 through 9.

The marriage of the Lamb has come.

The bride has made herself ready.

It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure, and the fine linen is the righteous deeds of saints.

Now the language shifts now from that of political to personal, from a throne room to a wedding hall, and this is intentional.

This is a reminder to us that Jesus Christ is not a savior that saves us from merely a political defeat.

He is a husband.

And the church is not merely a subject nation, she is a bride.

The marriage metaphor runs like a golden thread throughout scripture.

Isaiah 54 speaks of the Lord as being the husband of Israel.

Jeremiah 2 mourns Israel's spiritual adultery.

The song of Solomon pulses with the love between the beloved and her king.

Hosea is commanded to take back an unfaithful wife as a living parable of God's covenant faithfulness.

Jesus calls himself the bridegroom in the Gospels.

Paul in Ephesians 5 calls marriage a mystery that points to Christ and the church.

And now, at the end of all things, the metaphor that we've been reading about all throughout Scripture reaches its final fulfillment.

What we are waiting on, that we see glimpses of in Scripture, has now come.

The wedding day has arrived.

Now, the wedding is not the beginning of the relationship between Christ and his church, it is the consummation of it.

Everything that came before, every faithful thing that the church has done throughout all time.

Every faithful sermon preached, every faithful prayer prayed, every faithful observance observed, every faithful act of repentance and faith.

It's all preparation for this moment.

The betrothal is over.

The waiting is finished.

The bridegroom has called his bride.

Now we see in scripture the bride has made herself ready.

And then we see it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure.

For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

Now here is something that can easily trip us up if we're not paying careful attention.

The bride is clothed in what?

In her own righteous deeds.

But the clothing is granted to her.

Both things are true simultaneously.

And a biblical understanding of salvation requires us to hold them together without flinching.

The bride did not weave this garment from her own righteousness.

It is given to her.

It was granted.

Grace is the source of the garment for the bride, but the garment is genuinely hers.

It belongs to the bride.

The righteous deeds of the saints are real deeds, real acts of love, real sacrifices, real perseverance under trial, real holiness pursued in a life devoted to Christ.

And this is not a contradiction.

This is the paradox of sanctification.

As the Westminster Confession puts it, God works in his people both to will and to do according to his good pleasure.

And yet those acts of willing and doing are genuinely ours.

The bride's wedding dress is a collection of fabric of a life lived in faith and obedience, and every thread of fabric was first given by grace.

She does not wear borrowed clothes.

She wears her own garments.

Garments she could not have made without the giver of all good things.

This ought to produce something in us as we read this and as we kind of pull this apart.

Not pride, but it ought to produce a sober and joyful intentionality about the life that we are living today.

Every single act of faithfulness matters, and therefore every act of disobedience matters.

Every time that you choose honesty over falsehood or convenience, every time you choose service over comfort, every time you choose forgiveness over bitterness, every time you choose trust over anxiety, every time you choose kindness over gossip, you are by grace weaving threads into the garment.

This life of faith that you and I are living now, this is not filler time between conversion and glory.

It is preparation for the bride.

The wedding day is coming.

Now is the time to prepare prepare.

And what a bride she will be.

It may sound familiar.

It means brilliant, dazzling, or radiant.

You know, it's fun whenever I get to do weddings.

I've had two recently.

And when you talk about a wedding and and the planning of the wedding and how that all comes about, the the the foundation of the wedding is this is the bride's day.

And so everything that we do revolves around honoring the bride.

The groom, he just comes out with me at the beginning.

No pomp and circumstance, just the groom, nobody standing up, just the groom.

And then what happens?

You know, the wedding party comes down, and then it's time for the bride to come, and we all stand.

We all stand for the bride, and then the bride comes down and then stays here, and we still have a little business to take care of.

You have to stay standing.

You can't sit down until I get the bride in place.

And so I've I've got to do a little bit of business with the bride and her father, you know, who gives this woman to be married?

Stay standing.

The bride's not in place yet.

And then we we do the little handoff, and the bride comes up to the groom, and we get her in place, and when she's ready and she's comfortable and we're ready to move on, then you may be seated.

This pomp and circumstance uh around the bride.

This is a foretaste of what we see here in heaven.

This is a reminder of how much God loves you, how much God loves the church.

He doesn't call us the red headed sixth cousin once removed.

It's a step cousin.

We're the bride of Christ.

The church that limped through history, that was scorned and marginalized, the church that buried her martyrs and wiped the tears away from their widows, the church that over two thousand years has sometimes been held together only by a thin skin of her faith in seasons of great darkness.

That church will stand before the Lord in a garment of blinding beauty.

The waiting will have been worth it.

Now, verse 9 introduces one of the most stunning beatitudes outside of Jesus' preaching on the Sermon of the Mount.

Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

And the angel commands John to write it down.

These are the true words of God.

We need to mark that.

These are the true words of God.

This is truth.

There's nothing more true than what God says, not a metaphor to be explained away, not a symbol to be admired from a safe intellectual distance.

This is a promise, binding, certain, unbreakable.

Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Now the supper language connects us deliberately to the Lord's Supper.

The meal that Christ instituted on the night of his betrayal, that we have a command to, as an ordinance to participate in as a church.

Every time, once a month, when we gather together and we break bread and we drink the cup, we are not merely remembering a past event.

And I know the table here says this do in remembrance of me.

That's right.

That's what Christ said.

But that's not all we're doing.

We're not simply remembering a past event.

We are doing what we say at the end of every Lord's Supper.

We are proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes.

Come, Lord Jesus.

We are rehearsing in the present the feast that awaits for us in the future.

The table is a foretaste.

The marriage supper is the fullness of that foretaste.

Every Lord's Day communion is a preview of Revelation 19 9.

Thirdly, this morning, the invitation must not become an idol.

Worship God alone.

So this vision has swept John into the heights of glory.

He's heard the thunderous roar of the heavenly multitude.

He's received the beatitude of invitation.

And now, overwhelmed, he falls at the feet of the angel who's been guiding him through these visions.

And the angel stops him cold.

And I just want to pause here for a moment.

We kind of, if you think that you would respond to differently, remember, John is an old apostle.

Um, we are no better than John.

This is how overwhelming the situation is.

And the angel says, You must not do that.

I'm a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus.

Worship God.

This command is blunt and immediate.

It's not even peaceful.

The angel says, Stop.

Do not worship me.

I'm a servant, just like you and your brothers.

The boundary is clear.

Worship belongs to God alone.

And there's a parallel scene in Revelation 22, verses 8 and 9, that we'll get to shortly, where John falls at the angel's feet again and receives the identical correction.

Revelation 22:8

The repetition is deliberate.

John the apostle, the beloved the disciple, the man who leaned on Jesus at the Last Supper, falls twice.

And this is not a portrayal of John as unusually weak or foolish.

It is a portrayal of human beings as they actually are, prone to worship the nearest visible representation of the holy rather than the holy one himself.

We are deeply idolatrous.

Calvin was right when he described the human heart as a perpetual factory of idols.

We will take the gift and worship it rather than the giver.

We will take the experience of glory and cling to it rather than the God who is the source of glory.

We will take the pastor who proclaimed the good news and now put him on a pedestal.

We will take the theological system that showed us the truth and begin to worship that instead of God.

We take heaven and celebrate that it's a family union where we see loved ones gone before us more than we celebrate union with Christ.

We will even take the very words of this passage, the imagery of the marriage supper of the Lamb, and begin to love the imagery more than the bridegroom.

Worship God, bow down to God, direct your reverence, your devotion, your awe, your full praise to God and to God alone.

Then he closes by saying, For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

What does that mean?

It's a very rich and compact statement.

At minimum, it means that all true prophecy, all genuine spirit-inspired speech about what God is doing in history, what he's done, what he will do at the end, has Jesus Christ at its center and its substance.

The entire prophetic word from Moses to Malachi, from John the Baptist through Revelation itself, is a testimony about and for Jesus Christ.

He is the content of the message, the fulfillment of the prophecy and the promise, and the object of all true worship.

This entire scripture points us to Jesus Christ.

Now, this corrects a subtle but dangerous temptation in how some approach the book of Revelation.

Revelation can become a book about timelines, charts, and geopolitical speculation.

It can become more about identifying the beast than adoring the Lamb.

And we are nearly done with our study of Revelation.

And some of you may have expected more timelines, interpretations, what to expect.

But if I may, I would gently push back against that idea.

Because Jesus addressed this exact attitude when the disciples asked him after his resurrection in the book of Acts, are you now going to fulfill the promises?

And what did Jesus say to them in Acts 1, 7, and 8?

He said, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.

And then what's he turned their attention to?

Gospel work.

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

The angel's correction here serves as a hermeneutical key to the whole book.

The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

If your reading of Revelation does not increase your love for Jesus Christ, your awe of his person and your longing for his return, then you've missed the point.

The main point and message of revelation is not the symbols.

The message and end goal and main point of revelation is the Savior.

We see the Savior, we point people to the Savior, we remain faithful, we endure, we persevere, we pray for more wisdom until we reach glorification, we resist the world, and then in a time fixed by the Father that we are not privy to, he will bring an end to this world as we know it and bring all that we see here in Revelation to pass.

So I would encourage us to not focus on what we cannot see, but focus on what we can see in the Scripture, and that's the adoration of the Lamb.

So to conclude this morning, I want to ask you a question.

What do you do while you wait?

Three realities have met us in this passage.

God reigns, and that is the truth.

It's the floor that's under our feet when every other floor has given way.

The marriage has come, and that means that your life of faithfulness will not be wasted.

It is preparation, and the invitation to the supper has been given.

And the only appropriate response is undivided worship of God.

Now, the question I want to leave you with is the practical one.

What do you do while you're waiting for the marriage supper of the Lamb?

Number one, you praise.

When you cannot see the outcome, you praise God.

When the heavens seem silent, you praise God.

When the enemies of God seem to prosper and the people of God seem to suffer, you praise God.

When trials come, you praise God.

When suffering is deep, you praise God.

When the powers of hell work against you, you praise God.

When the diagnoses come, you praise God.

When everything around you seems to give away and fold in on you, and you are tempted to question God's faithfulness, you remember He is always faithful and you praise God.

You open your mouth and say, along with the multitude, the Lord God the Almighty reigns.

Hallelujah.

You choose to praise before all of the evidence is in, because you know the one who holds all the evidence.

We're such a fickle-minded people.

You hear me say that all the time?

Because we are.

God, I need to see how you're going to do it before I praise you, as if he owes us anything.

He's proven his steadfast love.

His word is true.

We can know that he's working for our good.

We refuse to be products of our circumstances because we cannot control our circumstances, but we know the one who does control them.

And we trust and know that he is for us and not against us, and you praise God.

And we trust him when his word says, He is working all things for your good.

Secondly, you prepare.

The bride made herself ready.

And she was granted grace to do it, but she did it.

She did not coast into the marriage supper of the Lamb in the rags of a spiritually careless life.

She wore the garments of righteousness.

Brothers and sisters, the life you are living right now is preparation for the bride.

Take it seriously.

Pursue holiness, not because holiness earned you the invitation.

Christ earned us the invitation.

You've already received the invitation if you are in Christ and you love the one who gave it.

But what are you doing to pursue sanctification?

So many who claim Christ quenched the spirit.

Maybe some of you sitting in this room.

If Jesus really is who he says he is, if he's coming back, we see this scene and it's really going to happen.

It's not going to matter what our 401k looks like, how popular we were, how high up in the corporate ladder we rose, what possessions that we amassed.

The only thing that matters is Christ.

So I implore you that Christ must be the priority of your life.

Everything else flows out of that.

Only one life will soon be passed.

Only what's done for Christ will last.

What do you need to do to follow Christ more closely today?

Read and study his word.

Pray without ceasing.

Bathe in the Psalms regularly.

Meet Jesus in the gospels regularly.

Follow the commandments of the New Testament epistles regularly.

Commit to be a part of a local congregation and living out what it means to mirror the New Testament church.

Encourage one another regularly.

That's what we do.

That's what we're supposed to do as the body of Christ is to encourage one another.

I'm supposed to help make your garments look better as you are to mine.

So oftentimes we do the opposite.

There are many in this room that sacrifice and prioritize their lives in a manner where they're regularly together with the church.

Is it inconvenient?

At times it is.

Do we have to sacrifice some things?

Yes, we do.

Would they trade anything for it?

Not the world.

The pleasures and the sanctification that we have as a people of God from regularly being together with our local body, uh attending Sunday services, being part of whether it's a community group or just impromptu, getting together in each other's homes, meeting at the park so your kids can play, coming here for our midweek activities.

Guys, this place is booming on Wednesday evenings.

And if you're not here, you're missing out.

We don't prepare something on Wednesday night that that you can just foo-foo on.

We've got some good stuff.

And we spend good time together.

We love one another and we fellowship together.

And when you do these things, when you gather, invite people to your home.

Look at somebody in this room that hasn't been to your home and invite them to your home.

Have dinner together.

And when you meet together, talk about the Lord and the good things he's done.

Bear your burdens, you know, share your burdens with one another.

How can I pray for you?

Or please pray for me in this manner.

Share scripture with one another.

This is the example.

I'm not making this up.

This is the example that the book of Acts gives us.

They were regularly meeting together in each other's homes.

And it would be nothing but foolish to think that we don't need the same thing that the early church needed.

How are you being sanctified?

Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5 19, do not quench the spirit.

And lastly, a good segue.

You participate.

Every month when we participate in communion, we gather around this table.

We are invited guests rehearsing the marriage supper.

And we do not come here, we do not approach this table merely as tradition or out of religious duty.

We come as the people of God who have been invited by the true words of God to sit with the Lamb.

Come to this table hungry.

Come expectant.

Come as people who believe that the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of everything that we do here in this church.

And you worship, not the angel, not the preacher, not the experience, not the church, not the theology, not yourself, but God.

You worship God.

You bow down to Him, direct every act of reverence, every moment of awe, every prayer, every song, every sacrifice of obedience to the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

The roar of heaven is coming.

Nothing can stop it.

The wedding feast is set.

There will be no rain delays.

The bridegroom has gone to prepare a place for us, and he is coming back to get us.

Until then, we hold to the testimony of Jesus.

We wash our robes in his blood.

And what I would say this morning, if you are here this morning and you're an unbeliever, this entire message has been for the church.

You are excluded.

But you don't have to be.

What I would say to you very briefly is the gospel: that Jesus Christ came as the Son of God, as God, lived a perfect life, a sinless life, was crucified on the cross, took the wrath of God upon himself, shed his blood so that he could wash the church in his blood and make her righteous so that our sins are forgiven and we get to spend eternity with God.

How do you join this group of people?

Scripture tells us if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

And if you want to join that group of people, if you want to be invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb, my prayer is that the Holy Spirit is breaking your heart even now to where you see your sin and your need of Christ, you repent of your sin and you turn to Christ.

But I would love to talk to you about it after the service.

Blessed is the one who is invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

My prayer is that all who are in this room who hear this message are a part of that group.

We wear the righteousness that He grants us, and we say, with everything that we have here preparing for then, hallelujah, for the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.

Let's pray together.