Just as truly as Jesus comes down in spirit to sup with those who fully admit Him into their hearts, so they will be taken up at His second coming, and sup with Him in that banquet, of which He has told us in His parables and through the lips of His apostles. The special promise connected with the seventh overcometh is that of sitting with Jesus in His millennial throne; but before that throne is actually set up on this earth there must intervene that great crisis which is referred to in the 20th verse of this third chapter of Revelation, namely: that of sitting with Jesus at the marriage supper of the Lamb. If we compile all the various events which will be concomitant with the coming of Christ in the clouds of heaven we find them to comprise the following items: The Lord Jesus will descend from the right hand of the Father, accompanied by tens of thousands of angels and saints. He will be preceded by the archangel, who will blow the trumpet of God for the first resurrection. Those sainted dead who during their life in the flesh were regenerated, and sanctified, and sufficiently tried to constitute them martyrs in spirit will be raised from the dead, and glorified, and taken up in the air to meet Jesus. Also those Christians on earth who are entirely yielded to God, and whose hearts have been purified and filled with the Holy Spirit, constituting them the five wise virgins, who have oil in their vessels, will be suddenly glorified and caught up in the clouds with those of the first resurrection to meet the Lord. (Compare I. Thess. 4, and Revelation 20.) When Jesus thus appears in the clouds of glory, He will not put His foot on this earth at that time, for He tells us He will come as a flash of lightning from the east to the west, and encircle the entire globe, and gather out His elect ones from the four winds of heaven, or as it is distinctly prophecied in Psalms 50: "Our God shall come, and He shall call to the heavens, and the earth, that He may judge His people." The word "judge" here does not mean to condemn, but to discriminate, or discern who His people are, and He will then say: "Gather my saints together unto me, those who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice." This is an express declaration that only those who are really saints, and who have made a covenant by the complete sacrifice of themselves to God, shall be- gathered up. At the same time we are told that all nations and kindred shall wail because of Him, and again, that people will run in perfect consternation to hide themselves in dens and caves of the earth.

After Jesus has taken away His elect ones, God the Father, as the Ancient of Days in Daniel, will institute the great judgment tribulations on the world for having rejected Jesus, and on the fallen churches for having rejected the baptism of the Holy Ghost, Those awful tribulations are described by Jeremiah, 25th chapter, and by Ezekiel in the 38th chapter, and by St. John in Revelation, chapter 18 and chapter 19:17 to 21, and in a great many other places in Scripture. While these tribulations are taking place in all the earth, Jesus and His elect saints, who have been resurrected or translated, will be in some heavenly place, which is described in Psalms 15 as "ivory palaces," and partake of that divine banquet, which is prophesied in the parable of the king's wedding, and in the Song of Solomon and in Revelation 19. Concerning this supper we will notice:

1. That it is emphatically a supper of the perfected and then glorified believers with Jesus. Now just as truly, and perfectly, and minutely as Jesus comes down in spirit to sup with His saints here, and enters into all the details and experiences of their lives, so, on the other hand, the glorified saints, in supping with Jesus, will ascend up into His glory, and be admitted into every secret of His glorious personality, and life, and kingdom, and joy, and honor, and be made to participate in every variety of His bliss, and every detail of His glory, and every majesty of His kingdom. What little we have learned of Jesus is simply of His humiliation, and suffering, and death; that is, Jesus in His prophetic and priestly offices, but we have scarcely begun to learn anything of Him as a king in the royalty of His royal majesty and those manifold and uncreated glories that the Father has given to Him. Just so truly as Jesus now comes to us in spirit, so truly will we who are prepared go to Him in a body. Just as truly as He comes to us now invisibly, we shall go to Him visibly. Just as truly as He now consciously feels our sorrows and pains, just so truly we shall then consciously enter into His bliss and the manifold departments of His joy and glory. Just as truly as He now identifies Himself with His suffering saints, speaking of them as a part of Himself, so truly at that day the saints will realize that Jesus is one with them, that His glory is their glory, His bliss their bliss, His real majesty their own majesty, His rights as the ruler of the world their own rights. We have no thoughts to think these things, and no words adequate to express them. What will it be to enter into the joy of our Lord, and yet that is the exact promise. The joys of Jesus are manifold. It is an eternal joy for Him to be the only begotten Son of the Father. It is another joy to be the second Adam, the only pure man that never had sin. It is another joy to be the redeemer of sinful men, and to love them to the death. It is another joy to be the head of the church, the shepherd of God's sheep. It is another joy to be the giver of the blessed Holy Ghost, to sanctify and fill the breast of His mystical body. It is another joy to be the Creator of all worlds and all beings, to be the architect of every grain of sand, every insect, every living creature, and every bright star that glitters in its orbit. It is another joy to be the only person in the universe who is the revealer of the Eternal Father, and the outspoken word from the bosom of that Father. It is another joy for Him to sit in judgment on the human race, and deal out to each creature his exact reward with perfect justice. It is another joy that He wears upon His head many crowns as the appointed and only sovereign of the three empires of nature, grace, and glory, and to govern the worlds, and all angels, and all men in absolute goodness and equity. It is another joy that He is to come back to this earth, where He had His human birth, and from whose dust His precious body was formed, and where He shed His precious blood, and to govern this earth in His humanity as the Son of Man. These are only a few of the many joys that concenter and unite in the soul of Jesus, and make that soul to be a white furnace of inexpressible bliss. And yet into all these joys which we can feebly think of, and others that we cannot imagine, we are to enter if we are prepared.

This is what it will be to sup with Jesus, to share all His fullness and estates just as fully, beautifully, tenderly, and consciously as a bride can share the joys and estates and sovereignty of her husband, who is the king over a great empire. Could we but get a glimpse of heaven, a small fraction of what it will be to sup with Jesus, we should almost be beside ourselves with holy love and flaming zeal in His service here.

2. We are fully warranted from many passages in Scripture in believing that in heaven, in the glorified state, we shall still have some kind of created nourishment. Many persons have formed unnatural and unscriptural notions of the heavenly state as being diametrically opposed to everything in the present stale of existence. But such should not be the case. Those persons who deny the literal resurrection of the body, do so from a foolish and unscriptural fancy that matter in and of itself, is too degraded to exist in a glorified manner. But matter of itself is not sinful, and the three persons of the Godhead walked and communed with Adam and Eve before their fall in a literal and material world, and their literal bodies of flesh and blood, and their feeding literally on the fruit of the trees, did not in the least hinder this world from being at that time a part of heaven, nor hindered in the least their fellowship with angels and with God, and to suppose that after we are glorified we shall no longer need any form of created nourishment is both unphilosophical and unscriptural. The Lord Jesus and two angels visited Abraham just before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the patriarch entertained them, and cooked for them a dinner, of which they partook. It is expressly declared in Scripture that when God fed the Israelites with manna from heaven that "He gave them angels' food to eat." If this Scripture does not mean exactly what it says, what can it mean? God does not mock us with hypocritical language, and to whittle such Scriptures away into a mere ghostly metaphor is the very essence of unbelief, which sets up the human reason as being wiser than the infallible statements of the Holy Spirit. The angels live on some kind of created diet like the manna.

After Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to Mt. Sinai, we are told that he and the seventy elders went up into Mt. Horeb, and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under His feet a paved work of the sapphire stone, and also they saw God, and did eat and drink. (Ex. 24.) This is a prophetic type of the glorified saints, after being taken out of the world, as the Jews were taken out of Egypt, going up into the Mountains of the Lord, and having the beatific vision of God, and eating and drinking with the Lord Jesus in His heavenly kingdom.

"When Jesus instituted the Lord's supper, after eating the roast lamb and bread, He took the cup and gave it to the eleven disciples (for Judas had left), and said, "This is my blood of the New Testament, but I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.'' It is worse than trifling to twist these words of Jesus into a mere mythical meaning. We see here that Judas left before this cup was passed around, and only those were present who were the real elect. So only those will sup with Jesus in His coming banquet, who are the real holy and tried ones. The cup of wine that Jesus gave to His disciples was not mythical, nor imaginary wine, but the real fruit of the vine; and, just as literally as that was the fruit of the vine, Jesus affirms that He will drink of the real fruit of the vine with His saints in that day in His Father's kingdom. Hence the one wine is just as real as the other. (Matt. 26.) Again, St. Luke reports the words of Jesus, that those disciples who continue with Christ in His temptations, He says to such, "I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father has appointed unto me, that ye may eat and drink at my table, in my kingdom, and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (Luke 22.) These words mean exactly what they say. That just as really as God the Father has appointed Jesus to the kingdom, Jesus in turn appoints His elect saints to be every one of them princes and princesses, and to have rulership in a real literal government. And He says, without any equivocation, that these elect ones shall eat and drink at His table. These words will be fulfilled at the marriage supper of the Lamb, and then this supper will be followed by these elect saints sitting on thrones and judging and governing the twelve tribes of Israel; that is, the apostles will come back from the wedding, and all the twelve tribes will be restored to Palestine in the millennial age, and accept the Christ as their Messiah, and these twelve tribes will be governed by the glorified apostles and saints. And so the promise made in the first overcometh concerning the eating of the tree of life will have just as real a fulfillment as Adam and Eve partook of the fruit in the garden of Eden. Because the Scripture has a spiritual application that does not hinder it from having an outward and a literal fulfillment.

3. Another class of events which will transpire at the marriage supper of the Lamb will be the judging of the members who comprise the bridehood, and the giving to each one of them their rewards, and assigning to each one of those glorified millions, who are typified by the hundred and forty-four thousand, their respective places in that glorious army, that living city. That will be the time when all the living stones which have been quarried from the mines of earth, and fashioned by divine grace, will be silently and sweetly knit together, to make up the radiant whole, of which the building of the temple by King Solomon was a prophetic emblem. King David is a type of Jesus in His humiliation and suffering, and King Solomon is a type of Jesus in His millennial reign on earth. And as King David, before his death, prepared the material for the building of the temple, and then Solomon took the material and built the structure, so in like manner Jesus, in His humiliation, sufferings and death, and through the patient operation of the Holy Ghost in this present age, has been preparing the material for the structure of the New Jerusalem, then Jesus in His second coming, and at His marriage banquet, will carry out the typology of King Solomon, and there form into a gorgeous structure the living souls that make the city, which is like pure gold and shining with the glory of God. We have another type of this city formation in the acts of Moses, who, after bringing the Israelites out of Egypt to Mt. Sinai, there formed them into a living city, and arranged them according to a divine pattern, putting three tribes on the north, three on the east, three on the south, and three on the west, giving to each tribe, and family, and individual, his exact place in that beautiful portable city, according to the mind of God, and in the hollow square he placed the glorious tabernacle, upon which rested the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. That transaction, we are told, was according to the pattern of things in heaven, and it had a meaning infinitely beyond the time then present; and stretched away across the centuries to that crowning historical event of the gathering out of the true Israel from the Egypt of this present world, and forming them each one from the different nations and the different centuries in his exact place in the divine city, where each of God's saints will find his proper place as accurately as each bone in the body has its appropriate fitting of bone with bone, and part with part. It is a vision of that living city of glorified saints that John described in Revelation 21. Each of those twelve precious stones will have their counterpart in a twelvefold variety of holy character.

If the reader will turn to the 19th chapter of Revelation, he will notice in the first part of the chapter an account of this marriage supper of the Lamb, and while that is taking place up in the heavenly places, in the latter part of the chapter will be found the description of the great supper of the wrath of God which is taking place among the nations on the earth. The word "sun," in verse 17, symbolizes royalty, or heads of government, and an angel will move all the kings and heads of government into a declaration of war. The "fowls" referred to always signify demons, and these demons take delight in bloodshed and war. A battlefield is the devil's revival, and his supper table, and so, when captains, and kings, and horses, and soldiers are being slaughtered in war, the devils have their banquet. Thus we see clearly that while in verse 9 Jesus and His saints are having the wedding supper in the air, the whole earth is in a state of carnage and suffering in the great tribulations as described in verses 17 to 20.

If we expect to be admitted to the marriage of the Lamb we must be arrayed in fine linen, clean and glistening, as the Greek puts it, for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints, and blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.

As to the length of time which the great tribulations will last, and the coetaneous time occupied by the marriage supper, from all the best data we can gather, it will be about forty years. Some have supposed that two and one-half years, and others have thought that seven years, will be the length of time for these events, but I am convinced that they will occupy about the period of forty years. If we examine the time set forth in the last chapter of Daniel, and deduct the prophetic day ‒ year — of the time for the treading down of Jerusalem to the opening of the new age, it leaves between thirty-five and forty years for the great tribulations and the heavenly banquet.

Noah's flood is a perfect type of the second coming of Christ and concomitant events. We are told that after Noah and his family went up into the ark, ''that it rained forty days and nights." The ascent of Noah in the ark represents the ascent of the translated ones in the air, and the forty days of rain represent the forty years of tribulation, as we are told, both by Moses and Ezekiel, that a day in prophecy stands for a year. And then when the flood began to subside, we are told, that from the time the ark rested on Mt. Ararat, that Noah waited forty days, and then sent forth the dove. So both at the beginning of the flood, and at its drying up, we have a forty year emblem. As far as we can cipher out the time of the ten plagues, which were sent on the Egyptians, they covered the space of forty days. That is another emblem of the forty years of tribulation on the whole earth. In the 29th chapter of Ezekiel, he prophesies the utter desolation of the land of Egypt, and says the land should "not be inhabited forty years," which is another prophetic type of the desolations in all the earth, after the saints are taken out. We know that the number forty in Scripture always signifies the period for punishing, proving, trying, and testing a person, or nation, or thing. Prom the time Jesus was born until He ascended to heaven, covered the duration of one generation of thirty-three years. During that time there was the winding up of the Jewish age, and the opening up of the Christian Gentile age; and so it would seem, that in the transition period, from the close of the present Gentile age to the opening of the new millennial age, there will again be about the space of one generation.

After the Hebrews left Egypt, and 'reached Mt, Horeb, Moses went up into the mountain and spent forty days and nights with God, which is a clear and beautiful type, that after the saints leave this earth they will spend forty years with God in the upper regions of the air. As Moses after forty days descended from the mountain top with his face radiant with the glory of God, to be the lawgiver and leader of the armies of God, in like manner, the elect saints, after spending forty years with Jesus at His heavenly banquet, will return back to this earth filled with the radiant glory of God; and, as Jesus says, they will shine like the sun in His kingdom, and at that time they will, under Christ, take charge as judges, leaders, rulers, and teachers, of all the nations of the earth. Hence it would seem, from all these analogies, that the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the great tribulations, will extend through the period of forty years.