We come to this meal in grateful anticipation of what God has in store for all those who love Him, and who love His appearing. In this meal, God gives us Himself, but He does it by giving us tokens of what shall be.
The marriage supper of the Lamb, at the great consummation of all things, will be a meal that we will experience with all five senses, and probably some other senses we didn’t know we had. God is giving us Himself here, and we rejoice in it, but in another important sense, He is just tiding us over. The meal that is to come will be staggering beyond anything we could hope to comprehend now.
God doesn’t give that to us now, because if He did, the weight would crush us. But He offers enough of it here to prepare us, to help us get accustomed to the way He works. God feeds us, and He is doing this because He has a larger end in view.
The Old Testament is an anticipatory book, looking and longing for the day when the Messiah would come, the day of the New Testament. But the New Testament is an anticipatory book also—its pages are rustling, as C.S. Lewis once put it, with the idea that we shall one day get in. All the way in.
So these tokens are not the wages of a day laborer, a poor man who has to be paid daily. No, these are signs to us of a monumental grace, a grace so great that when we finally see how much God is giving to us, all thoughts of deserving any of it will be banished finally, and completely, forever and ever.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.