God of the Living Mark 12: 18-27
Notes
Transcript
Have you ever thought about how, since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that all living things are made up of billions of cells that had their constituent parts once part of some other living being.
What happens when you die? you body decomposes into the earth, which recycles the matter into other forms of energy and nutrients that nourish plant life, which is then consumed by animals or perhaps by you directly and the cycle goes round and round.
The cells that make up your body have very likely be fed by nutrients that were were recycled through the decomposition and growth cycles but were once nourishing other people’s bodies in days gone by.
Bit of a strange thought, but stick with me here, I’m going somewhere with this.
What happens when a body is burned as ashes are scattered? Where does that body go? it’s spread throughout the world. The nutrients in the ash go into the ground and feed the plant life.
Now. Let’s say this cycle has been occuring for thousands of years. May of those individuals who have been burned, or even have suffered other deaths like drowning in the ocean, eaten by wild animals, etc. many were believers.
Have you ever wondered, or has anyone ever ask you:
When the rapture happens. and the dead in Christ are raised first. What does that look like? The ashes of burned believers. Those were fed to wild beasts. Those who were just plain old buried, but without embalming or a casket, and so their bodies were absorbed into the earth....
What happens at the rapture? How can it be that they are resurrected?
I hope this introduction isn’t too morbid for you, but the topic of the day is death and resurrection, as that’s what in our text.
Questions like these are often interesting and fun to speculate about, but in the end, we simply shrug our shoulders and conclude “I’m sure God is big enough to handle it” and that is good enough for me.
But sometimes it is questions like those that are big time stumbling blocks to skeptics of the faith.
Recently there was a minor dust in the world of Christian twitter because a pastor posted a video arguing that the flood of Noah’s day was likely a local flood rather than a a global flood.
One point of his argumentation was that in order to believe in a global flood you have supply miracles to the story that aren’t in the text. How did the animals come? How did the waters really recede? How could just 8 people care for that many animals? etc.
My response to many of these kinds of questions has always been something along the lines of “You know, I already believe in a God powerful enough to created the entire universe from nothing, who is able to part the red sea, able to confuse language, able to make city walls fall down, and so on. Somehow, I think God just might be powerful enough to do all the things that aren’t mentioned specifically in the account about the flood!”
And I would say something similar about the mechanics of the rapture. I don’t know what that looks like. But I think God is powerful enough to figure it out. I already believe he is powerful enough to raise the dead to life. I already believe that he created the world out of nothing. If He needs to do even more miracles to rapture the dead in Christ, I think he can handle it.
And such a response is not anti-intellectual. Such a response is not a cop out. There is a simplicity of faith in magnitude of the power of God.
It was just such faith that was lacking in the lives of the Sadducees in our text today.
A group of Sadducees are going to approach Jesus and ask him a question about the resurrection. Due to their own lack of understanding and faith, Jesus calls them out as being badly mistaken.
And Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection. And they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no offspring. And the second took her, and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. And the seven left no offspring. Last of all the woman also died. In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.” Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
As we consider this text its always important to remind ourselves of a few details.
Who are these Sadducees?
This is the only time they show up in the Gospel of Mark. That is partly why Mark reminds his readers that they don’t believe in a resurrection.
Sadducees were the biggest rivals to the Pharisees in the world of religious politicking. Those who parties would argue about various theological matters pertaining to the Law. We also learn in the book of Acts that they also don’t believe in angels.
As far as the OT was concerned, they may have seen value in other books, the only books they held to be authoritative were the first five book, the Books of Moses. That detail will be important momentarily.
These individuals, much like the Herodians in the previous section, were not friendly with the Pharisees, and yet they had a common enemy: Jesus Christ.
So they come to ask a question.
Now this is a different tactic than before. In the last section, the goal was to trap him so that he would lose popularity with the people or fall into trouble with the government.
Here it seems the goal is to put him in a position where he will lose credibility as a teacher.
This is a theological question with a logical quandary.
Mark notes how these Sadducees already don’t believe in a resurrection. This was almost certainly a common logical problem they raised when debating the Pharisees on this point.
You say there is a resurrection, but think about the absurdity of that!
How do they frame the question?
Vs 19
“Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.
Alright let’s understand what is happening here. This was a practice called Levarite Marriage.
What is Levarite marriage?
When God gave the land of Israel to the people, he gave instructions about how individuals who owned property would pass that on down to their children. The purpose of this was to keep the land in the family in order to preserve the people’s place in the land. It ensured the people would be there a very long time.
But what happens if a man dies and has no children? Who gets that property?
God gave the provision of the Levarite marriage to address this. The man’s brother was to marry his deceased brother’s wife, and the first son born to them would be considered his brother’s son and would inherit the land, and the children born after that would be considered his own.
This is a practice that is pretty foreign to us, but it served a particular purpose for the people of Israel to preserve family lines and family property.
But this leads to the question that the Sadducees have.
Now remember, the Sadducees they don’t believe in the resurrection.
And as a side note, do you know how they felt about that? It made them so Sad you see… yeah I know…it’s bad.
They don’t believe in a resurrection. When engaging with people who do, I’d be willing to bet that this is the problem they would raise to show, in their opinion, the absurdity of the concept of the resurrection.
Seven brothers. The first gets married. He dies, so the brother marries her but then he dies, and so on down the line and they all eventually die with no children.
In the resurrection, who gets the woman as a wife??
This is a kind of argument called “Reductio ad absurdum” latin for reduction to absurdity. It attempts to demonstrate the truth of one claim, in this case “There is no resurrection” by demonstrating the absurdity of the opposite. If there was a resurrection, we would end up with this ridiculous problem in the resurrection!
So what these Sadducees are doing is not just ask Jesus a question. They are what we would call scoffers. They scoff at the idea of a resurrection. They likely scoff at the idea that Jesus could be the Christ.
Scoffers Love Absurd Hypotheticals
Scoffers Love Absurd Hypotheticals
It’s been my experience that scoffers love these absurd hypotheticals.
“Can God make a rock so big he cannot lift it?”
I once had an atheistic man ask me “you believe God created everything, right?” Yes. “Okay then, who created God??”
And he really thought he had me on that question. Everything had a creator So if God exists, then he must have been created do. And whatever created him needed to be created so who created that? And so on so forth. Reductio ad Absurdum.
But this question really isn’t that hard for believers. We believe in an eternal God. The uncaused cause. The uncreated creator.
Most of the time people who use these kinds of objections to the Christian faith have two primary flaws in their reasoning, and it’s the same two flaws that Jesus is going to expose here:
They don’t understand what the Scriptures actually teach.
And they underestimate the power of God.
Look at verse 24:
Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?
Jesus is going to answer those flaws in reverse order, starting with the power of God in the resurrection.
For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
Scoffers Lack Belief in the Power of God
Scoffers Lack Belief in the Power of God
This answers the question of the power of God.
Jesus sets them straight. First of all. There is no marriage in the afterlife. So all those LDS and Islamic people who teach that you will have all these wives in the afterlife, sorry, not sorry. Not how its going to be.
The who purpose of levarite marriage was to produce offspring. There is no need for procreation in glory, so there is no marriage relationship.
Now, some people have taken Jesus’ words beyond what he has said and made erroneous conclusions. This doesn’t mean that if your spouse was also a believer that you won’t know them. You will still be you, I will still be me. While there is no need for procreation and therefore the sexual component of marriage, that does not mean that there will not be relational intimacy. We don’t need to take Jesus’ words and carry them too far.
Likewise, Jesus was not teaching that we become angels, as so many in popular culture seem to think. I saw a post not long about about someone passing away and thus “gaining their angel wings”
Sorry. We don’t become angels. That’s not what Jesus said. He said we become like angels in the sense that there is no marriage or procreation in glory. But we do not become angels.
And this is such a great answer to the Sadducees because there is a sense in which Jesus’ answer is basically “You don’t think God can figure that part out?”
God is so powerful that in the resurrection, life is so perfect and so wonderful, and relational intimacy and the glory of God is so great that marriage relationships aren’t even necessary.
He is so able to so perfect the human body and so remove all effects of aging and decay that our current bodies experience that there is no need to reproduce ourselves to keep humanity alive.
He is so able to sustain, fulfill and care for us that the longings that we experience in this life for a godly spouse will be completed satisfied in our great God!
God’s got this. He’s powerful enough to handle it.
I opened with the question about the rapture and all the bodies of the dead in Christ. God’s got that too. He’s powerful enough to figure it out.
So often these questions underestimate God’s absolute power.
This was the Sadducees most fundamental problem. This is what everything comes back to. They fail to grasp the power of God.
I want to point something out about the structure of Jesus answer to the Sadducees,
This is what is called a Chiasm, or a Chiastic structure. We have seen this before in the book of Mark. It is a literary device to frame content in such a way that creates a natural focal point in the text.
The power of God is central to Jesus response, highlighting the importance of this point.
That is central to Jesus’ response, but He is also going to address their lack of knowledge of the Scriptures as well.
Scoffers Lack a Knowledge of God’s Word
Scoffers Lack a Knowledge of God’s Word
The Scriptures speak of the resurrection of the dead in several places.
Daniel speaks of the resurrection in Daniel 12:2
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
But those are texts that the Sadducees don’t accept as being authoritative. They only believe in the first five books, the Torah, the Pentateuch.
So Jesus appeals to a passage from the Scriptures that they do believe in order to demonstrate that there is really is a resurrection from the dead!
And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
When God revealed himself to Moses he said “I am the God Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”
But at the time that God talks with Moses, those guys are already dead! How then can it be that he can say I am their God?
There has to be some form of resurrection life already experienced by these patriarchs or else why would God say “I am their God”?
God is a God, not of the dead, but of the living!
They thought they knew the Scriptures, they even thought that there was no proof of the resurrection in the Scriptures they embrace, the Torah, but Jesus demonstrates that they were unable to make a key deduction from the words of God to Moses: I am the God of Abraham. Though Abraham is dead, he yet lives.
Scoffers often lack a knowledge of what the word of God actually says and teaches. So many make charactures of the Word of God in an attempt to raise themselves up against God and His Word.
But God will not be mocked. His word is true. His Word supplies to the necessary answers to dealing with skeptics and scoffers alike.
From an apologetic standpoint, Jesus used the Scriptures that the Sadducees embraced to show them their error. This is a powerful approach that can be used with Jews to show them that Jesus is the Messiah from the OT. It can be used with Muslims who’s holy book affirms the truth of the Bible, even though their book contradicts the bible. It can be used with LDS, who embrace the bible alongside the book of mormon.
There are many who claim lip service to at least portions of the Bible, and we can show them from the Scriptures that they embrace what is true and right.
Now, I want to note something about the overall structure in the book of Mark. I’ve already mentioned the chiastic structure of Jesus’ reply, but this is also found in a larger Chiasm that demosntrates that this is the focal point for all of Jesus encounters with the religious leaders in chapter twelve.
They are debating him about the law and asking him questions and they think they are cornering Jesus so that they can get him, but as Mark demonstrates with the structure everything hinges on Jesus words “You neither know the Scriptures nor the power of God!” They do not undersdtand the Scriptures, and this is the real reason why they have rejected Him as messiah. This is the real reason they are seeking to kill him. This is the real reason that they will receive judgment.
They do not know the Word of God, nor the Power of God.
What’s the solution to this?
Get into the Word, and trust in almgihty God!
Many times there are examples in Scripture for us to follow or for us to learn from, and this is one of those times where we need to learn from the error of the Sadducees.
We sang a song earlier. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. We can be tempted and tried by our own sin. That can lead to breeding doubt within our hearts as the enemy attacks and tries to lead us away from the truth.
Get to know your God. Bask in his power and glory.
Get to know His word. delve into the richness of what He has said.
In many ways, the indictment against the Sadducees here is one of the more damning indictments. They failed to understand the Word. They underestimated God’s power.
I pray that we would never make the same mistake.
There may be times when we are tempted to doubt God’s power. We may doubt that he is able to accomplish His purposes.
In such cases we either fail to know the word of God or else fail to believe what it says.
In either case it comes back to the same thing that the Sadducees struggle with: Do you know the power of God? Do you know what He has said in his word?
This is one of the reasons why we encourage Scripture engagement!
Know the Word! Believe His Power!
Know the Word! Believe His Power!
Do you know that is speaks of His great love you? Do you know what Jesus did upon that cross? Do you know what happens to a person when they trust in Christ?
Do you know what it means to be adopted into God’s family?
Do you know that you are an co-heir to the kingdom of God with Christ?
Do you know that the spirit of God dwells in those who believe?
Do you believe in the power of God to accomplish all His good purposes in and through you?
that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20 which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; 22 and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all.
That’s the power of God toward you!
Know it! Believe it!
Let’s pray