“Enough is as good as a feast,” says the world, and as to that which perishes with the using, it is true in its way. Yet even here the world convicts itself; for it acknowledges that by enough every man means something more than he has; so that practically he never reaches his “enough,” and how much less the feast? This only makes good the conclusion of the preacher, “the eyes of man are never satisfied.” Proverbs 27:2020Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied. (Proverbs 27:20). And again, Ecclesiastes 12:88Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 12:8), “Vanity of vanities, ... all is vanity.” The human heart is too large for any terrestrial thing to fill it!
But all is different when we come to the things that “God has prepared.” I begin with God’s feast; I find “all things are ready,” and I prove that “all things are of God,” as He says, “My dinner; My oxen and My fatlings” —all is of Him; I have come to a marriage feast; it is the initial thing in “the creation of God.” We read in Luke 15 that as soon as they entered the house, “they began to be merry”; and since that joy met no reverse, we may conclude it is without a break and without a bound; assuredly then that newborn joy ought to go on characterizing all who know that they are within that festive scene, and as truly now as by-and-by in the glory, though then, of course, circumstantially and manifestly.
“He spread the banquet, made me eat,
Bid all my fears remove;
Yea, o’er my guilty, rebel head,
He placed His banner—Love!”
Is it not a seasonable inquiry, whether as vessels—emptied of care and every ill, and filled as He who has formed us for Himself, loves to fill us—we do in any adequate way experience and express the blessedness which we are not only aware of being ours, but are familiar with as such? I may know even to familiarity what God has given me, but I have never known it in power and consequently have never truly made it mine, much less can I be the expression of it, if I do not practically and positively enjoy it, and, as it were, jubilantly, it being the habitual delight of my soul.