Going Out to Meet the Bridegroom - All The LORD is near Daily Devotionals for 2025

Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom … But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.
Matthew 25:1, 5

Going Out to Meet the Bridegroom
Those who are best acquainted with Near Eastern life tell us that the parable of the virgins exactly represents marriage customs that prevail to this day. The ten virgins “went out to meet the bridegroom.” Such is their profession, the part they play in the ceremonies. Assembling at the bride’s house they await the bridegroom, who does not appear before midnight. Overcome with drowsiness they all slumber and sleep. At midnight the cry is raised, “Behold the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!” (Mt. 25:6).

The virgins of the parable represent not the Church in its corporate capacity but the saints in their individual capacity as disciples of an absent Lord. Their original place and profession was this: they went out to meet the Bridegroom. They were God’s called out ones. Out of Judaism, out of heathenism, they went into the Church’s separate place: “to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven” (1 Th. 1:9–10).

As time wore on, they declined from this, however, and in the shelter of the house they lapsed into the unconscious and lifeless condition indicated by sleep. The midnight cry and the words “go out to meet Him” are a call to us to not only awake to the original hope of the Church—the coming of the Lord—but to revert to the original position of the Church: outside the world, whether viewed in its carnality or its religions.

F. B. Hole

That bright and blessed morn is near
When He, the Bridegroom, shall appear, and call His bride away.
Her blessing then shall be complete,
When with her Lord she takes her seat in everlasting day.

G. W. Frazer