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18 Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him and questioned Him:
These are one of the 3 main Jewish schools of thought from the time. Just like today we have different groups of Christians who can be very different from each other, like Pentecostals, Catholics, and Reformed churches,
They had similar divisions, all under the overarching label Jewish, you had Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees.
All with different perspectives of what faithfulness looked like.
Pharisees sought to obey the law of God and bring about the age of the Messiah by adding extra to the law in order to not break it, oddly missing the point and disobeying the law all the same.
The Essenes sought to restore true Israel by becoming like monks that withdrew from society. Failing the imperatives to be a light to the nations all the same.
The Sadducees were the most conservative of all these groups because unlike the Pharisees who had added a massive oral tradition to the Scriptures, the Sadducees stuck to the written scriptures, in particular the Pentateuch, which is the first 5 books of the Bible.
Some of their notable teachings is that the soul ceased to exist after death,
they also rejected the idea of fate, with a huge emphasis on human responsibility and free will.
So their view saw God as this relatively distant figure who didn’t have an active involvement in His creation, including not restoring them after death.
I find the Sadducees to be less than Hebrew in this regard.
Their view is a stunted reading of the scriptures that completely neuters the power of God,
which is exactly how Jesus will clap back at them.
Out of all the people who ever approached Jesus to challenge him, these Sadducees come across as the boldest idiots.
They construct a mocking concept of some insane situation in order to challenge Jesus on the basis of the resurrection.
I’m not sure how this like the traps that had been laid for Jesus by the previous two groups.
As we will see, for Jesus to affirm the resurrection won’t get him in trouble.
Rather what’s probably going on here is these men are trying to use Jesus to play into their own little theological war they were having with the Pharisees.
Something we should beware of doing ourselves.
Jesus is the object of our faith, not a crowbar for bludgeoning others.
We are tools in the hands of Jesus, not the other way around.
The Sadducees, who were the deists of that age, here attack our Lord Jesus, it should seem, not as the scribes, and Pharisees, and chief-priests, with any malicious design upon his person; they were not bigots and persecutors, but sceptics and infidels, and their design was upon his doctrine, to hinder the spreading of that: they denied that there was any resurrection, and world of spirits, any state of rewards and punishments on the other side of death: now those great and fundamental truths which they denied, Christ had made it his business to establish and prove, and had carried the notion of them much further that ever it was before carried; and therefore they set themselves to perplex his doctrine.
So here’s their theology dork scenario they paint for Jesus:
19 “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaves his wife behind, and leaves no child, his brother should take the wife and produce offspring for his brother. 20 There were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and dying, left no offspring. 21 The second also took her, and he died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. 22 So the seven left no offspring. Last of all, the woman died too. 23 In the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be, since the seven had married her?”
This is like asking the question can God create a rock too big for Him to pick up?
It’s the wrong question so it can’t be answered.
A misunderstanding of the character of God will result in a profound misunderstanding of His world.
And not only this world but the world to come.
That’s why Jesus responds this way
24 Jesus told them, “Are you not deceived because you don’t know the Scriptures or the power of God?
Here we have a group of people who had deceived themselves and saw reality in a broken way because they saw God in a broken way.
The only way we can understand ourselves and the world we live in is through right understanding of God.
When we lose sight of God, we become badly addled.
Remember the concept we’ve talked about that James Jordan does so well to illustrate with the idea of covenants being like cords.
Have you ever thought about having a covenant with yourself?
In order to truly know our own selves we must first know God.
Herman Bavinck speaks well to this:
“What the Scriptures require is a knowledge which has the fear of God as its beginning (Prov1:7). When it severs its connection with that principle it may still, under false pretenses, bear the name of knowledge, but it will gradually degenerate into a worldly wisdom which is foolishness with God. Any science, philosophy, or knowledge which supposes that it can stand on its own pretensions, and can leave God out of its assumptions, becomes its own opposite, and disillusions everyone who builds his expectations on it.” -Herman Bavinck
In this case, the Sadducees had lost sight of one of the primary characteristics of the Israelite faith, which is that God loves His creation and keeps His promises.
Every part of the Hebrew Scriptures speaks of the hope that God will restore those lost in death.
Most notably the Psalms.
Listen to the words of Psalm 16
8 I keep the Lord in mind always. Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. 9 Therefore my heart is glad and my spirit rejoices; my body also rests securely. 10 For You will not abandon me to Sheol; You will not allow Your Faithful One to see decay. 11 You reveal the path of life to me; in Your presence is abundant joy; in Your right hand are eternal pleasures.
But the Sadducees might not have put stock in the words of David as scripture (like Jesus does.)
So Jesus will beat them using their own tools.
They quoted Moses to him so he’ll do them one better and quote the words of God spoken directly to Moses.
I had a youth pastor who choked out a youth leader with His own underwear waistband once.
That’s the kind of humiliation he’s about to dish out to these foolish men.
First he corrects a misconception about the resurrection
24 Jesus said to them, “Are you not deceived because of this, because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God? 25 For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
This question about marriage misses the point of the resurrection and what a restored creation will look like.
More on that later.
The second thing he addresses is the concept of the resurrection period.
26 Now concerning the dead being raised—haven’t you read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him: I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? 27 He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are badly deceived.”
To the Hebrew mind, for God to say this to Moses and be simply speaking of their past existence which is how we normally view this verse, would be inconceivable.
Hebrews didn’t struggle with the dualism we do.
Their word for soul was naphesh which communicated breath.
To be a human was to be body and soul.
and it’s important to note that bodies and souls are SUPPOSED to go together.
That’s why when God forms Adam out of clay He breathes life into him.
That’s what a human is.
A body with the breath of God in it.
Death ruins that doesn’t it?
The body part of us is subject to decay.
Our souls do separate from our bodies at death, but that’s not how it’s supposed to be.
What is the Spirit of God saying to the 21st century church?
In what ways are we deceived because we don’t know the scriptures or the power of God?
Formation by the scriptures will save you from many errors and broken visions.
The resurrection is missing from our explanation of the gospel.
We tell the story like,
Creation, Sin, Cross, Heaven
The resurrection is vital because our final destination is not heaven, some spiritual place in the sky, rather, the kingdom of heaven which is on this earth.
There’s a time between now and then when you will have died, but we can trust the words of Jesus that you will be alive in him, waiting for the resurrection,
because God is the God of the living, not the dead.
But what about after the resurrection?
The biblical story makes it clear that we will be living on this earth,
washed clean finally from the curse of sin and its affects.
What does that look like?
The nature of angels and humans:
“God gained another angel.”
Physicality and gender don’t go away in the kingdom of heaven.
Look at Jesus’ resurrected body.
He’s a human male that walks, talks, eats food.
He doesn’t stop existing in time and space.
“Like the angels” Doesn’t mean you become an ontologically fundamentally different thing.
You are made in the image of God.
Irenaeus, the church’s first theologian famously stated,
“The glory of God is a man, fully alive.”
You won’t cease to be a human in the resurrection,
you’ll be more human than you ever were.
Our jokes will be better.
Our eating will be better.
Because our cooking will be better.
Our thinking will be better.
Our working will be better.
Our playing will be better.
Our resting will be better.
Our friendships will be better.
Our love will be better.
The question is what sort of fellowship will you have with other human beings?
This is where it is helpful to look to the angels.
Angels are living out their purpose free from sin.
What is the purpose that God gave humans?
Dominion.
Cultivating the creation and filling the earth with the glory of God.
The Sadducees assumed that God was disinterested in His creation and wasn’t going to resolve evil.
In order for evil to be resolved, good must triumph.
And in order for good to triumph, life must have victory over death.
The resurrection is life having victory over death.
To me it seems that the Sadducees are making deductions about the kingdom of heaven based off of a broken sin world.
The presence of sin in this age actually points to the absence of it in the future.
In a world free from sin, there would be no widows, for there will be no death.
In a world free from sin there would be no injustice towards women that requires a system of law to protect them from evil men.
The crucifixion shows us that in Jesus’ very own body he takes on the punishment for our many sins,
and the resurrection shows us that their is life on the other side of death.
So for some, the question may remain, if sexuality is a good part of creation, does sexuality go away in the new creation?
Here we have to draw the same simple line that Jesus does.
The errors here are to say what some cults like Mormonism and Islam have done which seems to make the next age all about sex and the possession of women as property. That’s one error.
The other error would be to imagine the new creation as a bunch of genderless asexual humanoids walking around.
If we came to Jesus and asked the question, “Will there be sex in kingdom of heaven?”
He would answer us the same way.
You’re asking the wrong question.
Sexuality is a gift that God has given for unity.
A husband and wife who are bound together in marriage experience a relational unity that is unmatched.
The promise of the new creation is that this relational unity will now be restored between God, and betwen man.
Sexuality has been abused more than any other good gift of God’s creation.
In the Kingdom of heaven, we will be healed from the ways that others have harmed us in regards to our gender and sexuality.
We will be healed from the way we have harmed ourselves.
And we will be forgiven and healed of the ways we have harmed others.
And ALL of this is WHY the New Testament gives us such a high sexual ethic.
We are living a picture of the resurrected life NOW!
How could the people of God be a sexually impure people?
Sexual impurity isn’t just about what it does to our relationship with God, it damages the good covenant bonds we should have with other people and ourselves!
This is what Paul is getting at in 1 Corinthians when he is winnowing a church in Corinth that had lost all sight of how they should have been protecting each other.
1 Corinthians 6:12–20 (HCSB)
The body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. 15 Don’t you know that your bodies are a part of Christ’s body? So should I take a part of Christ’s body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not! 16 Don’t you know that anyone joined to a prostitute is one body with her? For Scripture says, The two will become one flesh. 17 But anyone joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. 18 Run from sexual immorality! “Every sin a person can commit is outside the body.” On the contrary, the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body. 19 Don’t you know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.
For Paul, sexual purity is set firmly in the context of mission.
The people of God are the body of Christ.
The Kingdom of heaven has broken into the middle of history!
The church is a vision of the restored humanity where now all people will enjoy the unity with God and man that we only get a glimpse of in this age through marriage.
This is why sexual immorality in the church is so damaging.
Because it mars the image of God, and clouds our vision of God’s mission to restore the creation.
I hope that this has helped re-frame obeying God with our bodies for you.
If you’re married, sexuality is God’s gift not only for you, but for everyone around you.
As you obey God with your body, you will be blessed as your covenant with your spouse is strengthened, and as God wills you fill the earth with little Christians.
And for everyone, whether you’re married or not, your obedience to God with your body will be a great sign to the watching world that we are a people who do not abuse ourselves and others for the sake of our own gratification.
BECAUSE our lives are already overflowing with the gratification, fulfillment, and blessing that can only come from being in covenant with the God who made us.