Ignorance of God

Ignorance of God

Mark 12:18-27

            I am ignorant of a great many things in this world. I had a teacher tell me one time it is better to keep your mouth shut, and people think you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove it. It is important that we understand the word ignorant is not hyperbolic language for stupid. To be ignorant of something is to lack knowledge of it, or to not understand it, and there are many things in this world I lack knowledge of and do not understand. therefore, I am ignorant of those things.

            For example, I am ignorant of a lot of ways we use modern technology. Last weekend Tammy and I were in Nashville on vacation and Nashville is a very busy place. You don’t want to drive your car there and there is no where to park, so I used an Uber driver for the first time. I downloaded the app on my phone, I touched the screen and in five minutes Justin pulled up and gave us a ride downtown to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

            We spent the whole afternoon walking around shopping, listening to Country music and taking in the sights. When we were ready to leave, I told Tammy we better start heading back because we were about ten blocks from the Country Music Hall of Fame. She started laughing and took my phone, hit the button and two minutes later Joe pulled up and picked us up right in the middle of Downtown Nashville. I was completely ignorant about how Uber worked.

            I can’t help but think to myself, I can live my whole life and be ignorant of many things that don’t even matter. (Who cares about Uber). But I don’t want to die being ignorant of God. What we learn from this passage is if we leave this world ignorant of God it will not be anyone’s fault but our own. Knowledge and understanding of God are available to us. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God the skies proclaim the works of His hands.” Romans 1:20 says, “His eternal power and divine attributes have been clearly seen being understood by what has been made so that we are without excuse.” There is nothing that prevents us from knowing God except ourselves. So, I have a simple message for you today; Do not die in ignorance of God!!!!

  18      SomeSadducees (who say that there is no resurrection) came to Jesus, and began questioning Him, saying,

  19      “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother diesand leaves behind a wife and leaves no child, his brother should marry the wife and raise up children to his brother.

  20      “There were seven brothers; and the first took a wife, and died leaving no children.

  21      “The second one married her, and died leaving behind no children; and the third likewise;

  22      and so all seven left no children. Last of all the woman died also.

  23      “In the resurrection, when they rise again, which one’s wife will she be? For all seven had married her.”

  24      Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand 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.

  26      “But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?

  27      “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken” (Pray)

            In our passage this morning Jesus is on His way to the cross and it is important we understand that the cross was not an accident. It wasn’t a coincidence. The cross was the divine plan of God for the salvation of the world. God was not up in heaven caught off guard by the wickedness of men. He wasn’t scrambling around trying to figure this thing out. Every detail in the life of Christ, His death, His resurrection, His suffering was all laid out for Him from the foundation of the world. There was no plan B, this was God’s hand at work to bring about the redemption of man.

            This is the Passover week, and Jesus and His disciples have come to Jerusalem with hundreds of thousands of other Jewish worshippers from all over the world. This is a historic event that is taking place and it takes place every year at the same time, only this year it will be different. While the people are preparing their Passover lamb, Jesus will be hanging on the cross as the perfect, spotless, sinless lamb of God. The one-time sacrifice for the sin of the world.

But, before He gets there, He is teaching in the temple. On the day before this story began, Jesus came to the temple, and He drove out the money changers. He flipped over their tables and chased them away and said “this is my Father’s house and it will be a house of prayer but you are making it a den of thieves.” That made the chief Priests, the scribes, and the elders blood boil They were angry because He was winning the hearts of the people. So, they began to scheme and plot against Him.

That set off a series of planned attacks against Him. First, they attack Him in the temple. They say, “what authority do you have to do these things?” What right do you have? Who do you think you are? Then, they attack Him politically. They send the Pharisees and the Herodians to Him to ask Him about taxes: should they pay them or not? Now, they will attack Him Theologically with a question about the resurrection.

But Jesus will prove to be to much for them at every turn. There is nothing they can do to trap Him and ultimately, they have to kill Him for the truth. He is the Messiah. But they don’t even know it because they are living in opposition to God and are ignorant of the things of God. And I want to plead with you today. Do not make the same mistake as the Sadducees. Do not die in ignorance of God.

I have two headings for you this morning. First, we will see the skeptics and their question in Vs. 18-23 and then we will see the Savior and His Response in Vs. 24-27.

Let’s look at the skeptics and their question because that is what these Sadducees were, they were skeptics. Right away Mark tells us they did not believe in the resurrection. This further proves to us Mark is writing to a Gentile audience that was unfamiliar with the Sadducees and what they believed. Mark’s audience are just like us today.

But who were the Sadducees? They were a small party of people, the socially elite, the wealthy. They had a lot of power and influence. They were the aristocrats of the day. The High Priest and his family were Sadducees. They were in charge of everything that took place at the temple although they did not perform any of the religious rituals, they left that to the Pharisees. They were more concerned with the money the temple produced.

The Sadducees were experts in the Laws of Moses and that is why we see Moses referenced two times in this passage. They believed in the first five books of the Bible. The books written by Moses. The books we call the Pentateuch, or the law. But that was all they accepted. They did not believe in anything supernatural. They didn’t believe in angels, or demons, the soul of a man. They did not believe in the afterlife or the day of judgment, because they did not believe any of those things were taught by Moses.

They choose which parts of scripture they accepted as truth and the read the Bible through that lens. We see the same thing today from Christians. We believe what we want to believe in the Bible. Charismatics read the bible through the lens of a Charismatic. Baptist read the Bible through the lens of a Baptist and what we should do is let the Bible speak for itself. The Sadducees remind me of Thomas Jefferson. If you are familiar with Thomas Jefferson, you know he was the third President of the United States. Most people don’t know he created the Jefferson bible.

He took a pen knife and he carved up the New Testament. He cut out anything that was supernatural, anything about miracles, or angels, or the resurrection. He cut and pasted throughout his bible until the only things left spoke of morality and naturalism. It became known as the Jefferson bible, and you can find it in museums today and see it for yourself. If Thomas Jefferson would have lived in first century Israel, he would have been an honorary member of the Sadducees because they rejected the supernatural.

I want you to notice the law they believed.  Vs. 19 is a summary of Deuteronomy 25:5-10. This is called the law of Levirate marriage, and it describes the responsibility one has to his family and his brother. This sounds like a strange concept to us because we are individualist. Our identity is not tied to our family. I am not responsible for my rother he is responsible for himself. But a first century Jewish person, to them family was everything.

In America if your brother dies and leaves a wife without children you may never see her again. She will go on with her life and probably remarry. But in First Century Israel it was a families responsibility to take care of each other. So, it was not only acceptable to marry your brothers wife it was a legal obligation.

They did this for three reasons. They did it to preserve the brother’s name. They did it to make sure the brothers land stayed in the family, and they did it for the protection of the widow. So, really this law gives us a picture of redemption. We see this principle in the Old Testament in the book of Ruth and how it extends out to distant relatives as well.

Boaz was a distant cousin of Ruth’s dead husband, and he became her kinsman redeemer. Boaz took Ruth as his wife and redeemed her life. She was a gentile widow who became a part of the family of God, and the two of them became a significant part of the ancestry of Jesus.

However, this group a Sadducees who come to Jesus are not concerned about redemption. They don’t even really care about marriage, or the beauty of this law. They are just trying to create a debate. They are hoping He will say something that will make Him look foolish. We see this same thing today. There are people who are more concerned with arguing about the scriptures than living by them. James tells us not to just be hearers of the Word but be doers of the Word. God did not intend His Word to be argued over but to be believed and to be lived.

That is what the Apostle Paul teaches us in 2 Tim. 2:23-24. “But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged.” These Sadducees were ignorant of God and they were trying to make Him and the resurrection look foolish.

So, they create this hypothetical question you see in Vs. 20-23. There are seven brothers, and each brother married this woman and died leaving no children. Finally, the woman dies as well. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? And I can’t help but think to myself a better question is, ‘why did they continue to marry her?” I mean after the second or third time why would you take that chance?

But really this is an absurd question meant to prove the resurrection is ridiculous. They thought they were smarter than Him. I can only imagine they had used this question before to trap people in their belief. In their minds this question proved there could not be a resurrection. Because God would never sponsor polygamy. But they just show how ignorant they are of God.  They believed the afterlife was just a continuation of this life, and Jesus will show them in Vs. 25 they are wrong.

The next thing I want you to see in this passage is the Savior and His response. In Vs. 24 Jesus rebukes them for their unbelief. He says, “Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the scriptures or the power of God.” Jesus answers their question with a question of His own and really this is more of a statement. It is an indictment against them for their ignorance.

He says, “you are wrong, and you don’t know what you are talking about.’ The word “mistaken’ means to go astray, to be misled, or wander away from. In other words, Jesus says, you are self-deceived and you have wandered away from the truth. There were two things they were ignorant of: The scriptures and the power of God.

What’s interesting is He is talking to a group of people who knew the scriptures. They had studied them their entire life. So, what Jesus is saying is you know what the Word says, but you don’t know what the Word means. They had heard the truth, but they didn’t understand the truth.

This passage teaches us how important it is for us to understand the scriptures. If we do not understand the scriptures, we can be easily misled. Our relationship with God begins with the right understanding of the Bible. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Is the Word a light to your path or are you groping around in darkness trying to figure out the will of God for your life?

Think about it, we have access to the Bible in so many ways today. Most of us have Bible apps on our phones. Most of us have multiple Bibles in our homes. Yet if you were to poll many Christians today you would find out they are a lot like the Sadducees, they have no idea what any of it means. Men died for the access we have to the scriptures.

Some of us sitting here today can tell you everything that you would ever want to know about guns, bikes, or cars. We can tell you the best places to go and get your hair done or how to fix you nails and make-up. But why do we know those things? Well because we want to. And we are ignorant of the things we want to be ignorant of. Unfortunately, for most of us that’s the scripture, but what does that tell us about our relationship with God.

The second thing they didn’t believe in was the power of God. Even though they had the writings of Moses and it was Moses (their hero) who wrote to them in Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ That anything was possible because it all began with God.  He spoke the world into existence ‘exnihlo,’ or from nothing. Yet they didn’t believe in that power. They believed in the scriptures, but they didn’t believe in the God of the scriptures. But why?

Because they did not want to. They didn’t want to believe they would stand in judgment one day before an eternal God. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that you will be held accountable one day, and that is terrifying. That’s the same reason we have atheists today. Consider the words of J.I. Packer who wrote, “All of the language that strikes terror in the hearts, weeping, gnashing of teeth, outer darkness, the worm, the fire, all of that is directly taken from the teachings of Jesus. It is from Jesus Christ that we learn the doctrine of eternal punishment.” That is why the Sadducees hated Jesus and that is why people hate Him today.

I want you to see His explanation beginning in Vs. 25, because He answers all of their questions. He says, ‘For when they rise from the dead.’ Notice He doesn’t say “if “ they rise from the dead, but when? They came to Him with a hypothetical question, but Jesus responds by saying this is a fact. There will be a resurrection and there will be a final Judgment where men are held accountable.

Then He goes on and He explains to them where they are wrong. The afterlife is not like this life. There is no marriage in heaven, but they are like the angels. Notice the word “like’ here. We don’t become angels, but we become like the angels. How many times have you heard a preacher say at funeral, ‘God took this brother or sister because He needed another angel?’ Talk about some bad theology. What does that say about God? He doesn’t know how many angels He needed. (Oh no, were one short up here. I better get another one.).

Also, we learn we are not married in the afterlife. Marriage is a temporal blessing given to us by God, for us to enjoy in the world. This turned their way of thinking upside down because they believed if there was an afterlife it would just be a continuation of the life they lived now. This reminds me of the Muslims today who believe if they die the death of a martyr they will have 72 virgins in heaven.

I heard a funny story about a Muslim Martyr who went to heaven, and he was greeted at the pearly gates by George Washington. The Muslim asked where his 72 virgins were and George said, “ oh you must have misunderstood it’s 72 Virginians and they are waiting for you right over there. Talk about misunderstanding the scriptures.

Finally, in Vs. 26-27 He uses the writings of Moses that they believed in, but didn’t think taught of the afterlife, and He proves the afterlife to them. He says, God spoke to Moses from a bush (Exodus 3) and said, “I am (not I was) the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. The point is when God spoke to Moses from the bush, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were still alive even though they had passed away hundreds of years before. “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, you are greatly mistaken.’ You are ignorant.

But I want you to see these Sadducees were ignorant because they chose to be. They were religious, they had the Word of God, but they missed the Mark because of their unbelief. They knew about God, but they didn’t know God and I am afraid our churches are full of people like that today. We know God with our head, but we don’t know God in our heart.

We can be ignorant of a lot of things in this world, and it doesn’t matter. It will never have an impact on our life. But if we choose to be ignorant of God it will affect your life forever. We need to understand that we cannot put our trust in our religion. We cannot put our trust in our baptism, or our church attendance, or the money we gave in an offering.

We can only put our trust in Jesus Christ to save us. He has the power and the authority to give us grace and forgiveness. And He has the power and authority of Judgment. What if today was your final chance. What if today was the final time God extended the opportunity of His grace to you? The truth is none of us are promised tomorrow. Do not die in ignorance of God.