Mark 12:18-27 Resurrection Hope
Good morning! Have you ever hear the expression that a person is so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good? Have you ever met anybody like that? I haven’t.
CS Lewis said just the opposite; that the reason that people are so ineffective in this world is precisely because they think so little of the next world.
To be effective in this world is to be about the business of inviting people to join us in the next.
It’s the question of this next world that our text from the Gospel of Mark is all about this morning.
Let’s look at Mark 12:18-27, page 848 in the pew Bibles.
You may remember from last week that Jesus had been confronted by the Pharisees and the Herodians. This week He is confronted by yet another group called the Sadducees. This account is Mark’s only mention of this group by name. Let’s read the text together.
18 And Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection. And they asked him a question, saying, 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. 20 There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no offspring. 21 And the second took her, and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. 22 And the seven left no offspring. Last of all the woman also died. 23 In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.”
24 Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor 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 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’? 27 He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
Let’s pray.
So the Sadducees came to Him, who say there is no resurrection. Acts 23:8 says that the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection, nor angels, nor spirit. This wasn’t a secret, it was well known that this group of religious aristocrats believed this way, that they rejected anything that wasn’t expressly mentioned in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses.
So when they asked Jesus a question about the resurrection, it was no secret that they were trying to trap Him in His talk just like the Pharisees and Herodians tried to do in our text from last week.
Now, before we get to their question for Jesus, I want to examine the reality of the teaching of the Sadducees. Their unofficial position was that they rejected any of the other writings in what we call the Old Testament as the Word of God. Psalms, Proverbs, the Prophets, they rejected them all. They took away any expectation of future life. Reward for the godly and punishment for the wicked were limited only to this life and that was it.
Good people get good things, bad people get bad things. That’s it. This is clearly proven false by both the Scripture and history, it’s ridiculous. However, it’s no more ridiculous than the false idea that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. (Or at least people we don’t like go to hell.)
They are both wrong.
Paul wrote about some people who were coming from this school of thought and denied the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19:
12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
I share that just so you can have a little context when thinking about the reality of denying the resurrection of the dead.
So here come the Sadducees, notorious resurrection deniers, to question Jesus.
In their deception they quote Deuteronomy 25:5-7. The heading reads “Laws concerning Levirate Marriage,” levirate is a Latin word that means brother-in-law.
5 “If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. 6 And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.
So based on that, they ask Jesus about this fantastic hypothetical lady.
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. 20 There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no offspring. 21 And the second took her, and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. 22 And the seven left no offspring. Last of all the woman also died. 23 In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.”
Ladies, I’m sure you can attest that this lady’s cause of death was exhaustion, and perhaps her resurrection would be one of punishment having to deal with all seven husbands for eternity!
But that wasn’t Jesus’ response.
What do you think that they were hoping for from Jesus? That He would deny the resurrection, or that He wouldn’t be able to come up with an answer at all? They thought they had the perfect hypothetical to expose Him as a fraud.
Boy, were they wrong!
Jesus responds in a marvelously politically-incorrect way: you’re wrong, and here’s why…
24 Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?
You neither know the Scriptures nor the power of God.
Now remember, in those days, nobody carried around a Bible, there wasn’t an app for that yet. The Bible that they had at that time was huge scrolls that were kept in the synagogues and the Temple, they actually had to memorize the Scriptures because they couldn’t just look it up real quick whenever they wanted to. (A practice that I highly recommend.)
They knew the Scriptures, but they didn’t know the Scriptures. They had them memorized but they didn’t truly comprehend their meaning, and they did understand God’s power to do more than they had experienced. Their unbelief came from a lack of historical faith from understanding the Scriptures and a lack of personal faith that came from experiencing the power of God in their own lives.
And though they came at Jesus with this ridiculous hypothetical, their question really had to do with whether or not there really would be a resurrection from the dead. In their school of thought they were guilty of at least two errors: one, they denied any kind of spiritual realm by denying the resurrection along with angels and demons, and two, they defined eternity by their present understanding.
People today are often guilty of both of these errors, by living as if there will be no final judgment, that faith in Christ doesn’t matter because, if there really is a heaven, all the good people will go there, and if there is a hell, I’ll be too busy shaking hands with all my friends there to care.
Every time I hear someone say that our loved ones are up in heaven looking down on us that conjures more thoughts about what hell would be like than heaven.
But eternity will not be defined by our understanding and our present experience.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:6, quoting Isaiah, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.”
So when Jesus says, 25 For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. That shouldn’t be a bummer to us, that somehow I won’t know my wife or you won’t know your husband, our personhood and personality won’t be removed, but things will be far beyond anything we could ever conceive of, far better than we could ever imagine!
Those who believe will not become angels, another popular error, but we will be like the angels, deathless, free from sin and the corruption of the flesh that comes with it. We will be totally centered around fellowship with God.
God will establish a whole new order of life after death and will resolve any difficulties with that that we might perceive from our limited perspective now.
The Sadducees questioned Jesus with a quote from the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, and so Jesus responds to their question with a quote from the same source.
26 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’? 27 He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
The Bible Knowledge Commentary says, “[God] is still the Patriarch’s God which would not be true had they ceased to exist at death, that is, if death ends it all. And His covenant faithfulness implicitly guarantees their bodily resurrection.”
The souls of believers that have died, including the Old Testament saints who were looking forward to the coming of Christ, still exist separate from their bodies, and those souls will, at some future time, like us, be united with a new glorified body, like Jesus has, at the resurrection when He returns.
Warren Wiersbe wrote, “The resurrection is not the restoration of life as we know it; it is the entrance into a new life that is different.”
20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. Philippians 3:20-21
Amen.
Baptism Romans 6:3-11
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.