The Fate of the Unprepared
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2015 · 1 March 2015
Matthew 25:1-13, “Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. 2 Now five of them were wise, and five were foolish. 3 Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, 4 but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. 5 But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. 6 “And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ 7 Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps.”
“8 And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ 10 And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut. 11 “Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ 12 But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ 13 “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.”
Four times already the Lord has said He is coming in an unknown moment. And now He gives a parable and concludes the parable by saying, "You know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming." This parable is to teach us the suddenness and the unexpectedness of the coming of the Lord which therefore should call us to be prepared for His coming.
Notice verse 1 starts with the word "then" which takes us to the time when the Lord comes that He has just been speaking of at the closing of Matthew 24. The time when He comes to reward the faithful servant and to punish the unfaithful servant. At that time the Kingdom of heaven, will be like this. So here is a parable to illustrate the time period of the Second Coming to the time of the coming of the Lord which calls for alertness and readiness on the part of all of us for that time will come suddenly.
And this parable warns the world not to let that happen again. For there will be no recourse in the future. Now the theme of the parable is very simple. The parable is meant to teach us that Jesus is coming to judge sinners and to reward the righteous. And He is coming in an unexpected moment and everyone should be prepared. And there will be no second chance. People may knock, but the door will be shut. The day of opportunity will be gone forever.
Now the parable is simple. As you read the many commentaries that have been written about this parable, it can get very confusing. There are the allegorists who want to turn it into an allegory and give every single thing in it a mystical meaning so that you get lost in a mass of verbiage of hidden secret spiritual ideas. That is not the intent of a parable. And then there are the ones who want to see in everything something applicable to the Christian life. And that is wrong as well.
Let's look first, at the wedding. And only that which is significant to the application is drawn from the wedding scene. It would be a typical wedding in an Israel town at the time of our Lord. A wedding was the greatest social celebration that those people knew anything about. Everybody got involved, friends, family, everybody. It was a time of happiness. It was a time of celebration.
But it's essential for us to know that in a Jewish marriage, there were three elements. Long before the scene here there was an engagement. And the engagement was an official contract between the two fathers who were giving their daughter and their son to each other. So engagements weren't really made with the couple, they were made between the fathers.
After that, there would be the second phase of the wedding and that was a betrothal. Now the betrothal was the official ceremony. The couple would come together before friends and family and they would make vows and binding covenants. Thirdly, they had an official wedding and they were then married. And any breaking of a betrothal period was a divorce. And if the husband happens to die during that period, the wife was considered a widow even though the marriage had not been consummated.
So the fathers made an initial engagement for the children to be married. The children then made their vows to each other which were binding. And then there was up to a year for the young man to get things ready to provide a place for her, perhaps to build an addition on his father's house, or a house of his own, or to purchase land and cultivate a field and show that he could care for her. At the end of the time that he would take her and they would live together. There was no ceremony, just the official wedding celebration. And that is the third phase and that is what we see here.
So just imagine the anticipation of the bride and bridegroom having to go through the process of finally coming to the place where the marriage was going to be consummated. And the parable here describes phase 3, the actual the wedding feast, where he comes to her house and she's waiting there with all of her bridesmaids and he arrives with all of the men and he collects his bride and her maids and they all go with torches, parading through the night and through the village in a celebration unequalled in their social life.
Everything is ready. Then the wedding party would go into the house and celebrate as long as seven days. At the end of that period of celebration, the friend of the bridegroom, who was like the best man, would take the hand of the bride, place it in the hand of the bridegroom and after that everyone would leave. And so it would be a marvelous beginning to a glorious life together for this bride and bridegroom.
A second thing we need to know to understand from this parable is the ten bridesmaids. Notice verse 1, "Ten virgins took their lamps," actually the Greek word means torch. There was a long wooden pole and on the top of the pole would be a kind of a wire mesh attached, filled with cloth. That cloth would be soaked in oil and then lit to give a flaming torch. They would carry with them a little flask of oil so that they could keep that lit for as long as necessary.
So here are ten virgins who take their torches and go to the house of the bride, waiting to meet the bridegroom. They are the young girls who will attend to her. They are called virgins. They were young in those days when they married and these were her friends who as yet were not married, chosen because they were sisters or close friends. And there was no special spiritual meaning attached to being a virgin.
Now they take their torches. They bring it because that is a sign they are invited. Just like perhaps at a wedding today where bridesmaids carry flowers as a symbol that they belonged to the wedding party. And they brought their torches along to light the night sky in the wonderful procession that they would all celebrate when the bridegroom finally came.
It says they went to meet him. Now who are these girls? They are professed Christians. They are those who claim to belong to Christ. They are those who have gathered with other Christian people to await the coming of the Lord. They are those who say they know Christ and they anticipate His coming. Who say they believe and they know about the wedding and they know the time is near and they even say they have made their preparation.
They have on their wedding garment and they have their torch. Their presence symbolizes their interest and their torch symbolizes their profession of faith in Christ. They show outward marks of watching for the coming of the bridegroom. They show outward marks of readiness. They show outward marks of commitment to Jesus Christ. There are part of the believing community. They profess to hear the gospel and believe. They profess to be disciples waiting for the Son of God, the Kingdom.
And, when you just see the ten of them, they look all the same. They all have on their wedding garments. They are all chosen bridesmaids. They all attend to the bride. They all have their torches. And they are at first indistinguishable but they are not alike. And this is the message of the parable. Verse 2, “five of them were wise and five were foolish.” The searcher of the heart knows.
And there is a characterization in verse 2, as Jesus looks into the heart of these ten. Five were sensible and wise and five were stupid. So they are very different. Not outwardly distinguishable, but inwardly very different. As different as you can be, wise and stupid. The Lord reads our character and marks our place. The Lord knows them that are His and them that are not His in every assembly of worshipers.
We may not, but He knows. And the differentiation here is preparedness. Here is where their wisdom and foolishness manifests itself. Verse 3 and 4, “Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, 4 but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.” The wise, they carried the flask with the extra oil, the fools had no extra oil. They all made profession but only five had the genuine oil of preparedness.
Now what is that oil? It is the reality of saving grace that distinguishes people. There is a crowd of people all of whom outwardly apparently honor Jesus Christ, but there will be different hearts, some prepared and some unprepared. The oil is like the garment of Matthew 22:11, you remember that the wedding feast there, the king calls a wedding for his son and he sees the guests and he finds a man without a wedding garment. He is also unprepared. He tries to crash the Kingdom, without a prepared heart.
This is a repeated message of our Lord and this needs to be emphasized in every church across this world because the church is filled with people who are unredeemed and unprepared for the coming of the Lord. The Lord didn't say one of them didn't have any oil, He said five of them didn't. God sees a large number of people like this. They will be at that moment unprepared though they have been religious and though they have nice feelings toward Christ, many people are self-deceived into thinking that all is well.
Look at verse 5, "But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.” In this analogy from our Lord, the bridegroom doesn't come when they expect him. This is a hint to the disciples that it is going to be longer than they think before Jesus returns. In Matthew 24 and 25 the Lord is saying even when you have seen the signs given in Matthew 24:4-31, even when you've seen the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, it's still going to be a time before He finally comes.
So people are seen waiting and waiting and then going back to the normal things of life, they doze off and go to sleep. They can't keep themselves awake and they fall asleep. Nothing wrong with sleep. But there is something wrong with it if you are not prepared for what is going to waken you out of your sleep. And so you settle back in to doing what you normally do, that is to eat and sleep and work. And so, the groom tarries and the girls fall asleep. Their false sense of security let them sleep in their day of opportunity.
Let's look at the bridegroom in verse 6, "And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!” Our Lord is simply saying it is an unexpected time. Exodus 12:29 tells us that the deliverance of Israel from Egypt began at midnight, also in an unexpected time. Maybe that is why the rabbis used to say that the Messiah would come at midnight.
And this is the glorious moment that begins the wedding. And even though it is late, it will go on for seven days anyway. The procession is collected as the bridegroom comes with his ten attending men, perhaps. He then meets the bride with her ten bridesmaids together with their lamps, they are ready to light them and proceed to his prepared home for her. This is the analogy of the Second Coming, the very moment of it.
Verse 7 says, "Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps.” And the ones with the oil poured the oil on ready to go and lit the torch and it flamed in the night sky. Those who had no oil, they knew it now. Maybe they thought they could just buy it down the street just before he got there. Maybe they hadn't even bothered to think about that, maybe they thought they could just sort of borrow that, they were just unprepared.
And verse 8, "And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But if the call to be at the judgment seat of God came to you whether in death or in the Second Coming of Christ, and when you were not ready, all the saints in heaven and all the people on earth could never save you. Salvation is non-transferable. It is not that the wise were selfish, that's not the point. The parable is intended to teach the non-transferable nature of salvation. The saved cannot save the lost.
So, the wise answer in verse 9, "No, lest there be not enough and you. Go rather to them that sell and buy for yourselves." The idea here is to teach that you have to procure your own, you personally have to have a relationship with Jesus. The buying does not mean that you have to pay a price for salvation, no, it is a free gift. But you pay the price of giving up your whole self, right? Like the man who sold everything he had to buy the treasure hidden in the field and the other man who sold everything he had to buy the pearl of great price.
People, this is the most fearful teaching the Bible gives! And Jesus gave it over and over again. In the church are myriads of people who are unprepared to face God. And they are deceived about that. And in the moment when they face the reality of their unpreparedness, it will too late. That reality of imputed righteousness is not there. That transformed character is not there. Oh, they may belong to the community of believers but they are not prepared.
Verse 10, "And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut.” What a thought. There are those moments of sheer terror immediately after the awareness that you have met holy God and are unprepared. The lesson is the same for us. Every one meets God at the moment of death if we are not alive in that time of His great coming. Matthew 7:23 says, "Then will I profess to them, depart from Me, I never knew you, you workers of iniquity."
Notice verse 11 and 12, “Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ 12 But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.” There is no second chance. The only sure way to be ready on the unexpected day is to be ready every day. Verse 13, “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.” You don't know that exact moment of the Second Coming, so be ready all the time. You see, to be a little late is to be late forever.
In Luke 21:34 we hear it again, “But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly.” In other words, you live for this world and if you are caught in the moment of confronting God, you will know, verse 35, “For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth.” Let's bow in prayer.