Without a Wedding Garment
199
God it would ever have continued to enshroud them. But when sin
entered, they severed their connection with God, and the light that had
encircled them departed. Naked and ashamed, they tried to supply
the place of the heavenly garments by sewing together fig leaves for a
covering.
This is what the transgressors of God’s law have done ever since
the day of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. They have sewed together
fig leaves to cover the nakedness caused by transgression. They have
worn the garments of their own devising, by works of their own they
have tried to cover their sins, and make themselves acceptable with
God.
But this they can never do. Nothing can man devise to supply the
place of his lost robe of innocence. No fig-leaf garment, no worldly
citizen dress, can be worn by those who sit down with Christ and
angels at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Only the covering which Christ Himself has provided can make us
meet to appear in God’s presence. This covering, the robe of His own
righteousness, Christ will put upon every repenting, believing soul.
“I counsel thee,” He says, “to buy of Me ... white raiment, that thou
mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear.”
Revelation 3:18
.
This robe, woven in the loom of heaven, has in it not one thread of
human devising. Christ in His humanity wrought out a perfect charac-
ter, and this character He offers to impart to us. “All our righteousness
are as filthy rags.”
Isaiah 64:6
. Everything that we of ourselves can do
is defiled by sin. But the Son of God “was manifested to take away our
sins; and in Him is no sin.” Sin is defined to be “the transgression of the
law.”
1 John 3:5, 4
. But Christ was obedient to every requirement of
[312]
the law. He said of Himself, “I delight to do Thy will, O My God; yea,
Thy law is within My heart.”
Psalm 40:8
. When on earth, He said to
His disciples, “I have kept My Father’s commandments.”
John 15:10
.
By His perfect obedience He has made it possible for every human
being to obey God’s commandments. When we submit ourselves to
Christ, the heart is united with His heart, the will is merged in His will,
the mind becomes one with His mind, the thoughts are brought into
captivity to Him; we live His life. This is what it means to be clothed
with the garment of His righteousness. Then as the Lord looks upon
us He sees, not the fig-leaf garment, not the nakedness and deformity