The King Is Coming

Jesus will return once again on the clouds.

When the Spirit Keeps Saying the Same Thing

I want to start here, before we get into the text, because I think some of you will recognize this experience.

There are seasons when the Holy Spirit seems to be pointing to the same thing from multiple directions at once — through your study, through something you create, through a book someone else writes, through a retreat you didn't plan around a particular theme. You weren't trying to build a thread. You were just following where you were led. And then one day you look back and realize: He was weaving something all along.

That is what happened with this study.

A few weeks ago I published a post here called The Covenant of the Beloved, which grew out of our time at The Quiet Table. That study moved through Deuteronomy 16, Matthew 26, and Revelation 19, tracing the covenantal thread from the Passover to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. At its heart was the image of the Bride making herself ready — and Matthew 25 was woven into it, the wise virgins and their oil a picture of what that readiness looks like in the waiting.

Not long after that post, John Bevere released his book The King is Coming — a study covering much of the same ground. I hadn't known it was coming. My husband read it and agreed to teach the series for our community this May and June.

Around the same time, I was in a creative session with Suno working on something entirely different, and out of it came a song — The King Is Coming Soon — written from the perspective of the wise virgins, from the heart of a woman who has always wanted to be among those who were ready. I didn't sit down to write that song. It found me.

Then came the next part of our reading plan. I listened through the assigned passages — Deuteronomy 23–24, Psalm 15, 1 Thessalonians 4–5 — and when Matthew 25 came up I had to stop. I hadn't planned that. It was simply the next passage in the cycle. But there it was again.

I went to a retreat this past weekend. The theme, as it turned out, centered on Revelation 19 — the Spirit and the Bride say, Come.

I share all of this not to make it sound more dramatic than it is. The Spirit does not need our help being dramatic. I share it because I think it is worth paying attention to when God keeps returning to the same theme in your life through unrelated streams. It is worth slowing down and asking: what is He trying to show me here?

What He was showing me — and what I want to share with you — is this:

Matthew 25 is not just a warning about the future. It is a description of a life being built right now — and it has been described since Deuteronomy.

Let me show you what I mean.

What the Covenant Said Long Before the Parables

Deuteronomy 23 and 24 are not the most obvious starting point for a study of Matthew 25. But they are the right one.

In these chapters, Moses is delivering the covenant's blueprint for daily community life to a generation standing on the edge of the Promised Land. And what he describes — in laws about wages, gleaning, vows, debtors, strangers, widows, and the holiness of the camp — is the very shape of the life that Matthew 25 will later call faithful.

The Holy Camp

God tells Israel: keep the camp holy, because I walk in the midst of it. The requirement is not reserved for the tabernacle or the visible moments of corporate worship. It involves the hidden places, the daily things, the ground under their feet.

'For the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.' (Deuteronomy 23:14)

God's presence makes ordinary space holy space. This is not ceremonial religion — it is daily life, bodily life, the literal ground where you stand. The principle embedded here is foundational: holiness is a response to divine presence, and it must be sustained in the ordinary, unseen, daily places — not manufactured under pressure or performed for an audience.

This is important because it tells us something about the nature of readiness. The holiness God required in the camp could not be scrambled together the moment He appeared. It had to already be there — cultivated quietly, consistently, in the places no one else was watching. This is the oil in the lamp of the wise virgins. We will come back to it.

The word at the heart of this passage is the Hebrew qadosh — holy, set apart. It traces a line from this physical, practical law all the way to
1 Thessalonians 4:3, where Paul writes: 'This is the will of God, your sanctification.' The same concept. A new covenant. The same God walking in the midst of His people, now by His Spirit rather than in a pillar of cloud. The standard has not changed. If anything, it has become more intimate.

The Vow That Must Be Kept

Moses establishes the integrity of speech as a covenant value. Vows are not required — but if you make one, it is binding before God. No revision, no delay, no spiritual loophole. Your word is your word.

'If you make a vow to the LORD your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the LORD your God will surely require it of you... But if you refrain from vowing, it will not be sin in you.' (Deuteronomy 23:21–22)

The Hebrew neder — vow — traces a line from this legal requirement through Ecclesiastes 5, where the wisdom writer warns against letting your mouth lead you into sin before God, and arrives in Matthew 5:33–37, where Jesus presses the whole tradition to its root: become the kind of person whose ordinary yes is so reliable that formal oaths become unnecessary.

Jesus is not contradicting Moses here. He is pressing Moses's logic all the way to its destination. The problem with oaths is that they only exist because ordinary speech has become untrustworthy. The goal of holy community is a people whose daily word is as binding as any legal declaration. That is what it looks like to follow the Father's ways in the small, hidden, everyday places.

Protecting the Vulnerable

This is where the corridor from Deuteronomy to Matthew 25 opens widest. Moses establishes law after law for those who have no power — the day laborer, the widow, the sojourner, the fatherless. And three times in these chapters, he gives the same theological anchor:

'You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you; therefore I command you to do this.' (Deuteronomy 24:18)

The ethics of covenant community toward the vulnerable are not grounded in abstract principle. They are grounded in memory and gratitude. You know what it is to be powerless. God rescued you from that place. Now you are the one with power. Act accordingly.

The gleaning laws are perhaps the clearest expression of this: when you harvest your wheat, your olives, your grapes — don't go back for what you missed. Don't shake the olive tree twice. Leave the corner of the field. Leave the forgotten sheaves. That provision belongs to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

What makes this remarkable is that it is legally guaranteed. The vulnerable person's access to provision was not dependent on the generosity of the landowner's mood. It was built into the structure of the law. The edge of the field was never really yours. It belonged to the one who had nothing.

Ruth 2 is the living illustration of this law in action. Boaz does not merely comply with the gleaning law — he goes beyond it. He instructs his workers to leave extra on purpose, to let Ruth drink from their water jars, to invite her to eat at mealtime. He takes the floor of the law and raises it to a ceiling of grace. The legal obligation becomes an overflow of generosity. That is what it looks like when the covenant has moved from a person's head into their heart.

And Isaiah 58 names this kind of life 'the fast that I choose': 'to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him.' True worship, according to the prophets, has always looked like Deuteronomy 24 lived out.

This is the foundation of everything Matthew 25:31–46 will later say. We are not finished with it yet.

The Person the Law Was Always Trying to Form

'O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill?' (Psalm 15:1)

Psalm 15 is the portrait that Deuteronomy 23–24 was painting all along. The psalmist asks the question the law was always answering: what does the person look like who can dwell in God's presence?

The answer is striking for what it does not include. There is no mention of sacrifice. No ceremony. No religious observance. The portrait is assembled entirely from daily, relational, economic, and verbal faithfulness:

He speaks truth in his heart — not just externally, but internally. He does not slander with his tongue. He does not take up a reproach against his neighbor. He keeps his oath even when it costs him. He does not put out his money at interest. He does not take a bribe against the innocent. He does good to his neighbor.

Read this beside Deuteronomy 23–24 and the overlap is not coincidental. The vow-keeper of Psalm 15:4 is the person who took Deuteronomy 23:21–23 seriously. The one who does not lend at interest (Psalm 15:5) has internalized Deuteronomy 23:19–20. The one who does not pervert justice is living Deuteronomy 24:17. These are not two separate portraits. They are the law, fully absorbed, written on a heart rather than on stone.

And then the psalm closes with this: 'He who does these things shall never be moved.' (v.5)

That steadfastness — that unshakeable groundedness — is the oil. It is the accumulated character of a person whose daily life has been shaped by covenant faithfulness over time. It does not run dry at midnight because it has been filled daily, quietly, in the hidden places that only God sees.

The wise virgins had Psalm 15 character. They simply didn't know that's what it was called.

The Same Call, Now in the Shadow of the Coming Day

Paul writes to the Thessalonian church — a community wrestling with grief over those who had died before Christ's return, with moral temptation in a pagan city, and with deep uncertainty about what the Lord's coming would mean for them. His answer to all of it is the same covenant ethic that Deuteronomy described and Psalm 15 portrayed, now placed in the context of the new covenant and the urgency of the King's return.

'For this is the will of God, your sanctification.' (1 Thessalonians 4:3)

The word hagiasmos — sanctification — is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew qadosh. Same call. New covenant. The holiness that governed the physical camp in Deuteronomy 23 now governs the believer's body and daily life. And Paul is careful to frame it communally: 'that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter' (4:6). Even the most personal areas of life are placed within the neighbor ethic. Holiness is never only vertical. It always has a horizontal face.

In 4:9–12, Paul turns to the texture of daily community life — and it sounds remarkably like the gleaning fields of Deuteronomy:

'But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.' (1 Thessalonians 4:10–12)

This is not a command to be passive or withdrawn. It is a call to ordinary, daily, unspectacular faithfulness — the kind that pays its own way, loves its neighbors, and builds the kind of community that can be trusted. It is Deuteronomy 24's active, responsible, neighbor-oriented ethic translated into the life of a first-century church in a Greek city.

And then Paul places all of this in the light of what is coming:

'But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day.' (1 Thessalonians 5:4–5)

Children of the day. That is the parable language before the parable is told. The wise virgins were children of the day — they were not caught off guard because they had been living in the light all along. The foolish virgins were not wicked; they were simply unprepared. And the preparation that runs out cannot be borrowed from someone else. Paul says: be awake, be sober, keep your lamp burning — because the Day is coming and the shape of your daily life right now is what determines your readiness when it arrives.

Three Parables. One Person. One Question.

Jesus tells three parables back to back in Matthew 25. They share a single structure — an authority figure absent, a period of waiting, a sudden return, a reckoning that separates — and they answer one question three different ways:

What does the person who is truly ready for the King's return actually look like?

The common thread I kept returning to as we studied was this: those who were faithful in seeking the Father's will and following His ways — in the ordinary, daily, unseen places — were the ones who were ready. And those who were not, regardless of their outward proximity to the things of God, were not.

Three parables. Three layers of one person.

The Wise Virgins: The Inner Life

Ten virgins wait for the bridegroom. Five carry extra oil. Five carry only what is already in their lamps. When the bridegroom is delayed and the lamps burn low, the five without extra oil discover what cannot be borrowed: readiness.

'While they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut.' (Matthew 25:10)

When the five foolish virgins return and knock, the answer is devastating: 'I do not know you.'

The oil is not defined by Jesus in this parable. I think that is intentional. It represents the inner life of faith — the accumulated, sustained preparation of a person who has been walking with God in the ordinary, daily, hidden places. The kind of inner formation that cannot be manufactured at midnight and cannot be transferred from one soul to another. You cannot borrow another person's prayer life. You cannot import someone else's years of faithfulness into your lamp at the eleventh hour.

This is Deuteronomy 23:9–14 in the New Testament. The holiness required in the camp could not be produced at the moment of God's appearing — it had to already be there, cultivated quietly in the places no one else was watching. The wise virgins were those who had been living with that kind of awareness all along. Their inner life matched their outward presence at the wedding.

The door was not shut because the foolish virgins were wicked. It was shut because they were unprepared. And unprepared, in the kingdom of God, is not a circumstance. It is a condition — formed or not formed over time, by how faithfully you have been following the Father's ways in the small, daily, unseen places. The parable does not teach us to be anxious. It teaches us to be attentive — now, in the ordinary, before the midnight cry comes.

The Faithful Servants: The Active Life

A master distributes significant resources — a talent represented approximately twenty years of wages, so this is no small trust — to three servants according to their ability, and departs. Two invest and double what they were given. One buries his talent in the ground. He calls the master hard. He plays it safe. He protects himself from risk.

When the master returns, the faithful servants are commended in identical language:

'Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.' (Matthew 25:21, 23)

And the servant who buried his talent? He is not called cautious. He is not called misguided. He is called wicked. Fear-based inaction is not neutral in the kingdom of God. Passive self-protection is a failure of stewardship.

This connects directly to the economic ethic of Deuteronomy 24. Every single law in that chapter requires active engagement. You do not passively fail to harm your worker — you proactively pay him before sunset because he is counting on it. You do not passively ignore the fallen grain — you intentionally leave the corner of the field because the widow has a legal claim on it. The covenant ethic has never been 'simply do not harm.' It has always been 'actively do good.'

The two faithful servants were not doing anything spectacular. They were doing the ordinary thing, faithfully, every day. Investing what they'd been given. Staying engaged. Trusting the master even in his absence. Faithful over a little. That is the commendation. That is the shape of a life that follows the Father's ways when no one is watching — including the Master.

The Sheep and the Goats: The Outward Life

The third parable is where everything converges. The Son of Man comes in glory. The nations are gathered. And the separation happens — not on the basis of religious credential or doctrinal correctness or visible ministry, but on the basis of what people did with the person in front of them who had nothing.

'I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' (Matthew 25:35–36)

Both the righteous and the unrighteous are surprised. The righteous: 'Lord, when did we see you?' The unrighteous: 'Lord, when did we see you and did not serve you?' Neither group was performing for an audience. Both are genuinely stunned. The righteous were simply living a life oriented toward the people around them — especially the ones with no power, no voice, no resources. And the unrighteous were simply not.

'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.' (Matthew 25:40)

This is the gleaning law of Deuteronomy 24 revealed in its ultimate, eternal light. The sojourner who came to glean at the edge of the field, the fatherless child, the widow with nothing — they were always, in the deepest sense, an encounter with the King. Boaz understood something of this when he left extra grain on purpose for Ruth. Isaiah named it when he called care for the vulnerable 'the fast that I choose.' Now Jesus makes it explicit and eschatological: every time you served the least of these, you were serving Him.

The corridor that runs from Deuteronomy 24's gleaning laws through Ruth 2's overflowing generosity, through Isaiah 58's vision of true worship, through 1 Thessalonians 4's daily neighbor-love — arrives here, at the throne of the Son of Man, where the ordinary act of feeding a hungry person is revealed to have always been an audience with the King.

The faithful person treats every neighbor as a potential encounter with the King — because that is exactly what every neighbor is.

One Person. Across All Three Parables. Across All Four Passages.

When you read all three parables as one sermon — which Jesus intended — the common thread becomes unmistakable.

The sheep, the faithful servants, the wise virgins are the same person. The one who has been seeking the Father's will and following His ways in the ordinary, daily, unseen places. Not in grand religious gestures. Not in dramatic, visible ministry. In the daily ground of covenant faithfulness that Deuteronomy described, that Psalm 15 portrayed, that Paul renewed for the new covenant community, and that Jesus reveals as the measure of the kingdom.

They had oil in their lamps — because they had been tending their inner life in the hidden places. They had fruit from their investment — because they had been actively faithful with what they were given, even when the master was not watching. They had fed the hungry and welcomed the stranger — because they had been living with their eyes open to the people in front of them, treating every ordinary encounter as if it mattered — because it did.

And the goats, the wicked servant, the foolish virgins are also the same person. Present without being prepared. In proximity to the things of God without being formed by them. Outwardly in the right place. Inwardly unready. They knew the right language, kept the right schedule, stood in the right lines — and were still turned away. Because readiness is not a location. It is a condition. And conditions are formed over time, in the small things, by how faithfully you have been following the Father's ways in the places no one else was watching.

Psalm 15 asked: 'Who shall dwell on your holy hill?' The answer it gave was not a list of religious accomplishments. It was a portrait of a person whose speech is trustworthy, whose promises are kept, whose neighbor is protected, whose money is handled with integrity. That portrait — built from the ordinary materials of daily covenant life — is the person who will enter the joy of the Master. It is the person Jesus is describing in all three parables at once.

The question is not how visible your faith is. The question is how deep it goes — how sustained, how faithful in the little, how oriented toward the person in front of you.

Because when the King arrives, that is what He will be looking for. 

On the Spirit's Consistency

I started this post by talking about how the Spirit sometimes confirms a theme from multiple directions at once — through study, through creativity, through a book you didn't know was coming, through a retreat centered on something you had just written about.

I don't think it is our job to read too much into those moments or make more of them than they are. But I do think it is our job to pay attention. To ask: what is God drawing my attention toward? What is He trying to form in me through this repeated invitation?

For me, in this season, the answer has been clear. He keeps returning me to the question of readiness. To the ordinary, daily, quiet faithfulness of a life that is being shaped — slowly, consistently, in the small things — into someone who will be ready when the King arrives.

Not someone who performed impressively on the big occasions. Someone who was faithful in the little.

That is Matthew 25. That is Deuteronomy 24. That is Psalm 15. That is 1 Thessalonians 4.

And if you have been feeling that same pull in your own life — that same return to the question of what faithfulness really looks like in the everyday — I want you to know: that is not accidental either.

The King is coming soon. He is looking for those who were faithful in the little — the daily, the ordinary, the unseen.

'Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.' — Matthew 25:21

This post is a continuation of The Covenant of the Beloved and grew out of our Community Study Plan. The song referenced, The King Is Coming Soon, is available on all streaming platforms. Come study with us at The Quiet Table.