Parable of the ten virgins

“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

— Matthew 25:13 (ESV)

The parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:1-13) tells of ten young women who take lamps to meet a bridegroom. Five are “wise” and bring extra oil; five are “foolish” and bring none. When the bridegroom is delayed, all ten fall asleep; at midnight he arrives, and the wise go in with him to the wedding feast, while the foolish, who run out of oil and go to buy more, return too late and find the door shut against them. The parable’s own conclusion states its point: “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Matt. 25:13).

Biblical Basis

Matthew places the parable within the Olivet Discourse, immediately after Jesus’s warning that his coming will be sudden and unannounced, “as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west” (Matt. 24:27), and immediately before the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30). “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom” (Matt. 25:1). Five are called wise because they “took flasks of oil with their lamps,” and five foolish because they “took no oil with them” (Matt. 25:3-4). “As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept” (Matt. 25:5).

At midnight a cry goes out, “Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him” (Matt. 25:6), and the virgins rise to trim their lamps. The foolish, finding their lamps going out, ask the wise for oil; the wise refuse, “since there will not be enough for us and for you,” and send them to buy their own (Matt. 25:8-9). While the foolish are away buying oil, the bridegroom arrives, and those who are ready “went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut” (Matt. 25:10). When the foolish virgins return and knock, pleading, “Lord, lord, open to us,” the answer is a flat refusal: “I do not know you” (Matt. 25:11-12). Jesus states the parable’s own moral without further figure: “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Matt. 25:13). The parable belongs to the wider body of Jesus’s parabolic teaching treated at parables of Jesus.

Confessional Witness

The parable’s own point, stated in Matt. 25:13, is watchfulness for an hour no one can predict. The confession states the same rationale for why God has withheld that day: he has kept “the day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful,” a point developed at length in its own chapter, “Of the Last Judgment.”¹ The wider doctrine of that day belongs to final judgment; this parable’s distinctive contribution is narrower, and lies elsewhere in the confession.

What separates the wise virgins from the foolish is not that the foolish lacked any lamp at all, but that they lacked oil to keep it burning, and their claim on the bridegroom at the door is refused. The confession’s chapter “Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation” names exactly this possibility: “temporary believers, and other unregenerate men, may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favour of God and state of salvation, which hope of theirs shall perish.”² Against this false hope, the confession sets the ground of genuine assurance: “not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith founded on the blood and righteousness of Christ… and also upon the inward evidence of those graces of the Spirit unto which promises are made.”³ The wise virgins’ oil, on this reading, corresponds to that inward possession; the foolish virgins’ unfed lamp, to its absence.

Doctrinal Significance

Thomas Goodwin reads the oil itself as the parable’s key doctrinal term. Surveying several scriptural pictures of counterfeit faith, he places the foolish virgins alongside the stony-ground hearers of the parable of the sower: “concerning the foolish virgins, the difference put between them and the wise is, that the wise had ‘oil in the vessel,’ habitual grace, which those other wanted, though they were acted for present performances… having oil in their lamps for present acts.”⁴ On this reading, the foolish virgins are not without religion altogether; they can carry a lit lamp for a time, just as a person can perform genuine-looking acts of devotion without an indwelling, sustaining principle of grace behind them. Thomas Boston applies the same detail more briefly, treating the foolish virgins’ plea, “Give us of your oil… for our lamps are gone out” (Matt. 25:8), as an example of desiring what Christ supplies without desiring Christ himself, an “unholy desire” that seeks him “not from any love to him, but merely out of love to themselves.”⁵

Opposing Views

Reformed expositors have disagreed both about whom the parable describes and about how much of its detail is meant to carry doctrine.

Gill: a parable about the visible church, not all humanity

John Gill reads the parable as a picture of “the state of the church under the gospel dispensation, as consisting of true believers, and formal professors,” not a scene involving the whole human race. On his reading, Christ throughout is “represented as a bridegroom,” coming for a church made ready as a bride, while the shared sleep of all ten virgins pictures the church’s own “carnal security” before that coming, “off of their watch and guard, and in no expectation of it.”⁶ Elsewhere, arguing that the sheep-and-goats scene that follows in the same chapter is simply an explanation of the two parables before it, Gill states the same point by name: the parable of the virgins “only concerns the wise and foolish virgins, professors of both characters, in the kingdom of heaven, or gospel church state.”⁷ On this view, the parable’s subject is the mixed, visible church itself, not humanity in general.

Barrows: caution against reading doctrine into the parable’s details

Elijah Porter Barrows argues that the parable was never meant to carry that much interpretive weight in the first place. Contrasting it with the parable of the sower, where “our Lord himself interpreted” every element, Barrows notes that for the ten virgins “our Lord himself has given the scope, and, so far as we can see, the only scope: ‘Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.’” Pressing further, to ask “what is the spiritual meaning of the lamps and oil-vessels, of the equal division of the virgins into five wise and five foolish, of the request of the foolish virgins that the wise would give them oil,” runs, in his judgment, into “useless speculations”: these particulars are “the drapery of the parable,” included to make the story natural and probable, not independent doctrinal data.⁸ On this account, readings that build doctrine on the oil specifically, such as Goodwin’s, extend the parable past the one point Jesus himself named.

Objections and Responses

The wise virgins refuse to share their oil (“since there will not be enough for us and for you,” Matt. 25:9); does this contradict the command to love one’s neighbor? The parable’s stated point is watchfulness for an unknown hour, not a teaching about charity between neighbors;⁸ read as a lesson about readiness rather than almsgiving, the refusal simply marks something no one can lend another person at the last moment. The confession locates true assurance in “the inward evidence of those graces of the Spirit” belonging to each believer personally,³ which is exactly the kind of thing one cannot hand across at the door: Goodwin’s “oil in the vessel” is “habitual grace,” a settled possession, not a supply that can be transferred at the moment it is needed.⁴

The foolish virgins confidently approach the bridegroom expecting entry (“Lord, lord, open to us,” Matt. 25:11); doesn’t their confident, sincere-seeming religious profession, if it can still be refused, cut against the assurance of salvation? The confession draws exactly this distinction: “temporary believers, and other unregenerate men, may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favour of God and state of salvation, which hope of theirs shall perish.”² The foolish virgins’ lamp shows they were capable of real religious activity, “acted for present performances,” but Goodwin distinguishes that activity from “habitual grace” itself, which they lacked;⁴ what fails at the bridegroom’s coming is a false hope built on that activity alone, not the infallible assurance the confession grounds in the Spirit’s own inward evidence.³

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 3. ↩
2LBCF, chap. 18, “Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
2LBCF, chap. 18, para. 2. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 324-358, at 352. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (1720; repr., 1787), 141. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 7, chap. 5, “Of the Second Coming of Christ, and His Personal Appearance.” ↩
Gill, Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 7, chap. 9, “Of the Last and General Judgment.” ↩
Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 561-562. ↩ ↩²