Many never came to Christ.

Jesus uses a children’s game played in the marketplace to describe the people of his generation and many others wherever the word of God comes. They are like these children in the marketplace who pipe a glad song to their fellows, but their fellows do not dance. They have an excuse: “We do not feel like dancing. Sing us a sad song.” And so their fellows sing a sad song to them, but they do not mourn. They have an excuse: “We do not want to mourn. Sing us a glad song.” When the word comes and many do not come to Christ, there are always excuses.

John the Baptist came, austere and different. He thundered repentance because the kingdom of heaven was at hand. “Repent, repent, repent” was the message of John. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand; the axe is laid to the root of the tree; make straight the way of the Lord!” John labored in the desert, an odd and strange man, a coat of camel’s hair on his back and a leather girdle around his waist, eating locusts and wild honey and preaching the word of the Lord. And the people said, “John has a devil and is a crazy man.”

Then Christ came. Beauty and loveliness came in Jesus Christ. The power of the Lord was present to heal the people! No mere man came, but God himself came; and with authority and power, he spoke the word full of grace and truth. Christ came into the very stream of their society and life. He lived and walked among the people, grew up with them, ate in their homes, went to their wedding feasts, appeared in their towns and villages, and preached the kingdom of heaven in their synagogues and houses. And they said, “He is a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.”

Always the people had excuses for their unbelief and rejection of the word of God. Always they found fault with the messenger in order to free themselves from the blame for their failure to repent at John’s message and to come to Christ at his command.

“But wisdom is justified of her children” (Matt. 11:19)! Wisdom commends herself to her own children. Of course, it is true then that many excused their unbelief. Not all were the children of wisdom. Thus wisdom did not commend herself to those unbelievers, and they passed on in their folly and perished.

How those who were in such need of salvation could reject salvation come in the flesh!

So Christ upbraids the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done because the people there repented not. The fault was not John’s. The fault was surely not the Son of man’s. It was not the fault of the gospel or of Christ, who was declared in the gospel. The blame for the rejection of Christ was the people’s, despite their excuses and faultfinding. Woe unto you, Chorazin! Woe unto you, Bethsaida! Woe unto you, Capernaum! You had the Son of God come to you and to honor you with his presence, word, and miracles, and you refused him who spoke. How terrible was their unbelief! If Christ had gone to Tyre and Sidon and done among those cities all his mighty works, the people there would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. If Christ had gone to Sodom and declared himself with his wonderful works, that city would remain unto this day.

Yet Christ calls. He calls with urgency, with authority, and with grace. He calls, “Come to me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.”

Who are called to come?

This question does not mean, who are responsible to come? It does not mean, who will be judged if they do not come? This question does not mean, who hears the call to come? Surely, all who hear are responsible to come, and those who do not come will be judged for their failures to come.

But whom does Christ address in the calling with his powerful and efficacious voice in the depth of men’s beings so that many are called, but few are chosen? Many hear the words but are not called. Many hear the words but are not chosen. So many who hear do not come, and they perish.

In the text there is no general invitation or general offer of salvation and rest. There is also no election-less call, which results in the possibility that some come and some do not come. How do not many so preach the calls of scripture! Never teaching the invitation or mentioning the offer, but their teaching is election-less. Their explanations of the command do not proceed from God’s decree! And so their preaching and teaching, not proceeding from election, leave the coming as a contingency that man must fulfill. God calls! Jesus Christ died! But—terrible but—you must also come to Christ! Your coming does not seamlessly flow out of the calling of God and the work of Jesus Christ, but your coming is the activity of man placed alongside the sovereignty and work of God, and thus that coming is the activity of man upon which the calling of God waits and without which his calling is of none effect! Double-track theology! So they hawk Christ: “It is not enough that God elected you; it is not enough that Christ died and arose. But”—terrible but—“you must also come to him.” The call is presented as an offer, a condition, and a prerequisite, although the words are never used! It is election-less and thus burdensome preaching that does not give rest.

How different is Christ! He calls the laboring and heavy laden, and they all must come! They all will come! Every one without fail will come!

So in the context Christ explains the fact that few came unto him. Did the word of God have no effect? Was the word of God without power to gather more? No, no, a thousand times no!

Christ explains: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matt. 11:25). According to God’s sovereign counsel of election and reprobation, he reveals secret, spiritual truths. No man can come unto Christ except the Father who sent Christ draw that man; no man knows the Father, save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal the Father.

According to his perfect will, the Father hides the truth from those who are the wise and the prudent according to their own estimation of themselves. Do not suppose that their being wise and prudent is the reason that the Father does not reveal the truth to them. No, no. Their remaining wise and prudent in their own eyes, and so remaining ignorant of the truth in their minds, is the revelation that God did not will their salvation. So they never labor or are heavy laden. Apart from the secret work of the Spirit, man cannot evaluate himself properly. Man deceives himself with his own goodness. He says in his damnable self-delusion, “I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing.” He does not know that he is wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. And God, according to his counsel appointing them to destruction, leaves them in the ignorance of their sin, their guilt, and the impossibility of their own salvation apart from Jesus Christ.

It is not merely that man does not attain to the truth because of some moral or spiritual fault of his own. The truth must be hidden because the truth is so plain that when it comes it would impress itself upon the hearts of every man. The Father hides the truth! He makes the ears of some fat and their hearts dull, lest they be converted, and he heal them. For so it seems good in his sight.

And God reveals the truth unto babes. According to his sovereign and eternal good pleasure, he opens men’s spiritual eyes, ears, and hearts, and they become babes. A babe can do nothing but is dependent upon another for everything. What condition can a baby fulfill for salvation? What work can a baby do for salvation? What obedience can a babe perform for a blessing? Absolutely none. In this way God describes his own children! Great men and rich men, obscure men and poor men, and women and children become nothing. When God reveals himself to them, they become nothing, and they labor and are heavy laden.

The spiritual reality of Christ’s audience, as that reality flowed from election and reprobation, was that everyone standing there that day, hearing the voice of Jesus Christ, was not laboring and heavy laden. So it is wherever the gospel is preached—also in the church and on the mission field.

The wise and prudent are never laboring and heavy laden. Oh, perhaps they are bothered by the cares of this world. They are wearied with surfeiting and cares! The afflictions that are common to man and that make this world a valley of tears and sorrows also afflict them. They have troubles with their money, with their children, with their health, and with their futures. But labor they do not.

The laboring to which Christ refers is not like the toiling of the working man, who goes to his chores every day and sweats in his work. At the end of his day, he lays aside his labors for a time, conscious that he has accomplished something, no matter how small. And he lays his head upon his pillow at night in order to take up his labors again in the morning in the expectation that again he will make headway in his task.

To labor and be heavy laden is to toil under the unbearable and hopeless burden of a Sisyphean task. In these words there is no hope; there is no accomplishment; there is only going backward, a greater burden, a bigger debt. You must conceive of the man who labors and strives, who exerts himself in body and mind, who labors day and night without rest, whose ambition is to accomplish his task but who always fails. And he not only fails, but also the goal that he sets for himself recedes ever farther away from him for all his efforts.

And the Lord calls the laboring and heavy laden not in any earthly sense but in the spiritual sense. Laboring is toiling that in its deepest sense is rooted in the desire of the heart to be right with God, to have peace with the Almighty, to understand and know the favor of the living God. Those who labor and are heavy laden have already been awakened to God, to the understanding that fellowship with God is the highest good and that to live apart from God is death.

To labor and to be heavy laden is to understand that a man cannot be right with God except on the basis of a perfect righteousness because God will not acquit the guilty. To labor and to be heavy laden is to be awakened to the lively sense of God’s perfect holiness and to know that all who come to him must likewise be perfectly holy.

To labor and to be heavy laden is to understand at once that this righteousness of God is expressed in the law and that unless the demand of the law is fulfilled by God himself, one cannot have fellowship with God. Under that law there is only impossible labor and unbearable burdens. The law demands and is only satisfied with perfection. To labor under that law is to labor to fulfill it; to do it; to keep it; and with every day, with every moment, and with every effort to hear only, “Cursed, cursed, cursed is every one who does not continue in all things that are written in the law to do them.” Oh, yes, if one labors under the law and supposes that the law is satisfied and thus God is satisfied, then he has never labored! If he labors under the law and never experiences the damnation of all his efforts, he has never been heavy laden. For the burden of the law is God himself in his perfect justice, and laboring under that law is the impossible task of bearing that divine weight. As one toils and labors under the law to satisfy the law, he daily only increases his debt. Every day the burden becomes greater; every day the debt increases; every day, longing to hear from the law that he has done enough, he hears instead that he is only an unprofitable and a miserable servant.

Christ made this call to the laboring and heavy laden in the context of the church of his day and its doctrine of the law. The scribes did not labor! They bound heavy burdens, grievous to be borne, and laid them on men’s shoulders, but the scribes did not move a finger to lighten the loads. To the weary and heavy laden, they provided no relief! When the weary came to the synagogue laden with sin and guilt and the hopelessness of their tasks under the law, they heard only, “Do this, and you shall live; do that, and you can have fellowship with God; do more and more, and you can have more fellowship with God.” And the burdens became monstrous indeed, the labors hopeless, and their toiling pressed them down yet further into debt.

Burdensome teachers!

“Come to me, all ye that labor!”

Laboring with the burden of sin and guilt.

Laboring and finding the burden of the law too great to bear.

Laboring under the oppressive teacher who substitutes Moses for Christ.

Have you toiled with that law, and have you found its burden crushing?

Do you know with grief the greatness of your sins, miseries, and guilt?

“I will give you rest, blessed rest!”

Rest is not merely to cease from toil, to stop work, or to have the burden lifted. Then that burden can come back! Rest does not mean that having been given rest by Jesus, now that terrible task of working to receive God’s blessing can begin again but only this time under God’s grace. The contrast is not between working for rest apart from grace and working for rest under grace! This is a corruption of the rest!

Rest is to live in the conscious experience that all the work is done, the laboring is finished, the task is accomplished, and the burden is lifted never to return. Rest is to live in the enjoyment of finished work.

So it is naturally. The man who builds his house finishes his house, and he enters into the enjoyment of living in that house. The man who has planted fruit trees enters into the rest of enjoying the fruits of his labors.

And so is rest spiritually. Rest is the conscious enjoyment of the finished work of Jesus Christ, standing before God in perfect innocence and walking before him at liberty all our days.

The burden of sin and guilt must be removed in the most comprehensive sense of the word. The work to bring peace is the task of taking away that burden forever.

There is a mountain of sin and guilt in our actual walk. Sin with all the members of the body: sin in our thoughts, in our planning, and in our desiring; sin in what we say; sin in what we do; sin in what we wish. There is even sin in what we do not do, do not say, do not wish. There is sin in all of our existences here on the earth. Sin is in our pasts. Sins of youth, O Lord, remember not! Sin is now in the present! Everywhere we look in our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies, in all our walk. In every aspect of our existences, there is only sin, sin, sin. The more that you examine yourself, the more thoroughly you expose yourself to the searching light of the law of God. So the more you search, the more you will see sin. The law will scream at you that you have not kept the commandments of God and that you have broken every one of them. And from that testimony of the law, you cannot escape.

Weary and heavy laden you will be!

If you are not wise and prudent!

If God has revealed these things to you!

But we must understand that looking only at our deeds is a superficial view of sin. Then it is easy for the wise and prudent to convince themselves that they have no sin. Where do all those sins come from? Sin in us is not merely a matter of the deed, but sin is also a matter of the nature. Sin issues from man’s nature like waters from a corrupt fountain. By nature man is so corrupt and vile that there is in him no good thing, and the loathsome stench of death and corruption hangs all around him.

And still more, our labor and burden are that we inherited these natures. We received them from our parents, so that we were conceived and born in sin and thus belong to a mighty stream of foul transgression that runs all the way back to its source in our first parents, Adam and Eve. We are guilty for their transgression in the garden. We are worthy of death because of that transgression. And unless that stream can be cleansed, we cannot be cleansed.

What an utterly impossible task. How hopeless to know that there is no rest, no peace, no relief, no comfort, and no joy for the troubled soul unless the task is finished. A perfectly clean nature must be brought out of that foul stream of transgression and iniquity. In that nature the law must be perfectly obeyed, not only outwardly but also with a perfect nature. The stain of guilt must be removed completely by the satisfaction of the justice of God. Perfect righteousness, holiness, and satisfaction must be accomplished, and that fountain of iniquity must be changed into a pure and perfect stream of love for God and love for the neighbor.

Hopeless!

Only a heavier burden comes!

Only more guilt is incurred, no matter how hard the labor!

“Come, and I will give you rest.”

This means that the impossible is finished. This means that clean has been brought from unclean, that all guilt has been washed away, that all obedience has been performed, that perfect righteousness and holiness and satisfaction has been made. This means that there is no more burden and no more labor and that they can never return.

“Come, and I will give you rest” means that perfect fellowship, peace, joy, comfort, and eternal life with God has been made a reality and that there is blessed communion with the living God, so that we may stand before him and live with him and walk before him without fear and in love all the days of our lives and to all the endless eons of the new heaven and earth.

The work is finished. Salvation is accomplished. There is rest now and rest for all eternity.

“Come to me,” Jesus, the only giver of rest.

He has rest stored up in himself, and he gives that rest because he accomplished the impossible task. He did that because he took our labors and our burdens on himself. The Father gave to Jesus a people from before the foundation of the world, for so it seemed good in God’s sight.

When God gave to Christ that people, he gave to Christ the responsibility for all their sins, guilt, and iniquity; he gave to Christ the responsibility for all that mighty stream of foul transgression that was theirs and under which they should have perished everlastingly.

When God gave that people to Christ, then God made Christ their head and their redeemer; God put them in connection with Christ so that Christ might stand in their place and represent them, so that he might take that terrible burden of theirs on his shoulders. He carried those burdens all his life long in this sin-cursed world. He bore those sins all the way to the cross of Calvary and from there all the way down into hell to bury those sins forever.

And what mighty shoulders those were!

God in the flesh! What a mystery. Who can know it? Immanuel. The Word made flesh. Truly of our flesh and one with us, he is the seed of the woman, of Abraham and of David, and Mary’s son. He was a man tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. Without sin! He is the perfectly righteous man. The man who could come out of Adam’s stock but who came out having cleansed the terrible fountain of sin in man’s nature. Who came out of Adam’s stock without Adam’s guilt for his transgression in the garden on account of which all the other children of Adam are worthy only of death. Because Christ was not guilty of Adam’s sin, Christ was worthy of a perfectly clean human nature. Thus he came out of the foul womb of Mary as one taken from the corrupt nature of Mary, perfectly clean, perfectly righteous, and wholly without sin.

All of Christ’s life was perfect obedience, perfect obedience out of his perfect nature. He loved the Lord his God, and his zeal for God and for God’s glory abounded. The law had nothing against Christ, but he fulfilled the law in its inward and outward demands. And in perfect love for God and in perfect love for his people, Christ laid down his life as a sacrifice for them.

Because Christ is God in the flesh. This Christ must be, or he cannot redeem us. God was the subject of all Christ’s actions. As God in the flesh, Christ was able to shoulder our sins and guilt, to accomplish our impossible tasks for us, to make himself the object of the wrath of God, to be made sin and a curse for us, to enter into the dark and terrible abyss of the wrath of God, and there to toil and labor until the whole burden of sin and guilt was gone. And conscious that he had accomplished the impossible task, Christ shouted from the accursed tree, “It is finished!”

And ratifying Christ’s perfect work, God raised Christ from the dead. It was impossible that death should hold him. He had taken away the cause of death. He had satisfied the justice of God. He had accomplished perfect righteousness and brought rest in the enjoyment of his finished work.

The rest-giver he is too because he lives. He ascended into heaven and received of God the promise of the Spirit. By the power of his Spirit, Christ enters into his people; and by the operations of the Spirit, Christ causes his people sovereignly and irresistibly to enter into his rest according to God’s will for their peace. They would never seek it. They would never desire it. They would never know that it existed and that it was for them. They would never know except he had revealed it to them and brought them into it.

Christ enters their hearts by his Spirit and joins them to Christ as his members; and in living connection with the living Christ, he makes them weary and heavy laden. Suddenly, when he speaks there is unrest in them. Before, they were wise and prudent, satisfied with themselves, and comfortable in their vain self-righteousness. Suddenly and mysteriously, they understand the greatness of their sins, the abomination of all their own righteousness, and the absolute impossibility that by any obedience they might come to God, stand before God, and fellowship with God. And that great question arises in each soul: How shall a man be right with God? Christ speaks and tears away every confidence that the sinner has in himself; and in their weariness and under that terrible burden, Christ causes each one of his elect to cry out, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner! Lord, enter not into judgment with thy servant!”

“Weary toiler, come to me! I have finished the task; the work is done; the labor is completed. I will give you rest!”

“Come to me,” and they come. Surely, infallibly, according to the will of God the Father. You have to understand this coming properly. This coming is not a means to the end. This coming is not the means to the rest. This coming is salvation, and this coming is the rest. To come to Christ is to be with Christ, to have Christ, to be one with Christ, and to enjoy all his blessedness.

“Come to me,” and they come. Surely, infallibly, according to the Father’s drawing because no man can come to Christ unless the Father who has sent Christ draw that man, that woman, or that child to Christ. That drawing is the love of the Father, and the fruit and consequence of the drawing is the coming in faith that relies on that love of the Father revealed in Christ.

“Come to me,” and they come. Surely, infallibly, according to the work of the Spirit of Christ in them, so that they cast away all confidence in themselves and in their empty righteousness. They come as those who are utterly empty, who are poor, wretched, and naked to be enriched, enlivened, and clothed with Christ.

“Come to me,” and they come. Surely, infallibly, to enjoy Jesus Christ as their all in all, as the fullness of wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption; to have Jesus Christ as their rest and their peace, their joy and their happiness above all the joys and pleasures of this world.

“Come to me,” and they come. Surely, infallibly, to have Christ and to know that in him all their burdens are lifted, all their guilt is gone, the whole law has been kept, and God has forgiven them all their trespasses, so that they rest in him completely for all their salvation now and forever.

“Come to me,” and they come, and Christ gives them rest. He sheds abroad in their hearts the love of God in which there is no fear but confidence in God as their God. Coming to Christ, they come to God as their God. In Christ they stand before God as perfect in his sight. In Christ they walk before God as innocent. Infallibly, he realizes in their hearts the rest that he promises. All through their lives he constantly gives them rest. When they return to their burdens and exhaust themselves in their labors under sin and then the excruciating toil of being right with God by works, then always Christ addresses them as the weary and draws them to himself and speaks to them again the words of comfort: “I have finished it; I have completed the task; I have accomplished your salvation. Come to me, toiler, and I will give you rest.” In the midst of the storms and battles, the troubles and afflictions of life, this word Christ constantly speaks to them: “I have finished the task. I have accomplished your salvation, and your sins are forgiven.” And he gives them rest, a peace that passes all understanding.

And when they lie at death’s door, when they face the last enemy, Christ calls them to himself, “Come to me, and I will give you rest,” and he draws them infallibly and irresistibly heavenward to their eternal home.

And still more, at the last day when Christ appears, while his people lie prostrate and dead in the grave, still yet he will say to them, “Come to me.” Surely and infallibly, they will come to him, and he will give them the fullness of their rest, with body and soul in the presence of God, world without end in a new heaven and earth free forever from the groaning and laboring of this age.