The Resurrection

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. We open up in your Bibles with me to the book of Mark. Mark chapter 12. Mark chapter 12. If you're using the provided New King James Pew Bibles, you'll find that on page 896. Mark chapter 12, beginning at verse 18, and we'll be looking this morning through verse 27. Mark chapter 12, beginning at verse 18. Brothers and sisters, this is God's holy and perfect word. Let's pay careful attention.

Then some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him and they asked him, saying, Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man's brother dies and leaves his wife behind and leaves no children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother. Now, there were seven brothers.

The first took a wife, and dying, he left no offspring. And the second took her and he died, nor did he leave any offspring. And the third likewise. So the seven had her and left no offspring. Last of all, The woman died also. Therefore, in the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be? For all seven had her as a wife.

Jesus answered and said to them, Are you not therefore mistaken? Because you do not know the scriptures, nor the power of God. You can say, ouch. For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven. But concerning the dead that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses? In the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken.

Prayer for Illumination

Well, in the reading of God's word, the grass withers and the flower fades, but brothers and sisters, the word of our God endures forever. Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for your word, objectively true, and it is right. We pray now, Father, that you would please give us believing hearts that we might receive it, accept it, and that your spirit would teach us what it means for us this day. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Sermon

Well, we come to a passage that we get to talk about the resurrection and about marriage. We get to talk about one of the passages where there's a commentator who writes on this and says, this is a frustratingly difficult passage where Jesus doesn't give us enough information. So we have to come to this passage with humility. Because we're talking about things that are going to happen, that Jesus just gives a glimmer of, Jesus just sheds a little bit of light on. And as we look at this, and we have dual topics in front of us that the Sadducees bring to Jesus, marriage and the resurrection, that we're going to see that has profound impacts for our lives, even in the little bit of light Jesus does give us. So first we need to ask ourselves, as we kind of orient ourselves with this passage, who are these people coming to Jesus? Well, we kind of explored that a few weeks ago when we talked about the four different groups.

Remember the zealots? They wanted to overthrow everything of the Romans. The Pharisees, who were like the reformers. And then one of the groups was the Sadducees. These were not a big group of number. There was only a couple thousand of them at most. But they were the aristocrats. They had a lot of power. They ran the sanctuary.

And they were really, really skeptical of all the Pharisees with their oral traditions, and they were, beyond that, they were skeptical even of the minor prophets, and of David, and etc. So they said, let's just stick with the book of Moses. And so they come to Jesus, in verse 18, the Sadducees come to Jesus, and notice that Mark gives us background information to their theology in verse 18. Then some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him. Whenever a biblical author tells you something about the theology of their position, before they even start speaking, it informs us, it perks up our ears that something's going on here, and what do they come and they ask Him? Oh, they're asking Him about the resurrection. And they bring him one of these peculiar things in the ancient Near East that we find really odd and like, what is that?

That's really oriental, that's really odd. I'm glad we don't live in that culture type thing. This is what's called Leverite marriage. And so, I need to give you a little bit of background information here. This is what God himself had said in Deuteronomy chapter 25 verses 5 through 6. I'm going to turn there. You can if you want, but you don't have to. Deuteronomy chapter 25, the last of the five books of Moses. It's the Lord himself who gives.

This, if brothers dwell together and one of them dies and has no son, the widow of the dead man shall not be married to a stranger outside the family. Her husband, her husband's brother, that means this poor widow's brother-in-law now, shall go into her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her. And it shall be that the firstborn son which he bears will succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel." This is a weird, weird passage. This is not one that we would go, oh man, I want to live in Israel during this time, this sounds like such a great way to make sure that somebody's name isn't blotted out of the family tree.

Remember, this is the background story of the Old Testament, that when you came into the Promised Land, you were given an allotted farm. And that land was yours from generation to generation to generation. And if you were a widow, and you didn't have anybody to provide for you, you were going to go poor. And if you didn't have an offspring to come up, you had no one to claim that land for you.

And so this is an old custom. It actually predates even Moses in Deuteronomy. Let me just say, every time that this comes up in a story in the Old Testament, It's not like people are giddy about it either. I actually find this, the first time this is mentioned is actually with the patriarch of Judah.

And I think you'll remember that weird story of Judah and Tamar, right? Judah has a son. His son has a wife, Tamar. His son dies, and so he gives his second son to Tamar, and he dies. And now Judah's kind of worried. He's like, man, what am I going to do? I don't want to give my other son to Tamar. It seems like every son I give to this girl to raise up a name, one of my boys dies. I don't want to do this, right? And Judah is tricked by Tamar into giving her a son. She's not going to let him steal the inheritance from her, security from her. Some of these sons didn't want to do this.

Some of them radically sinned against her and against the Lord and how they treated Tamar. That's a story that we should read with our boys, especially, about how they are to treat their wives, and how they're to treat women. It's one of these stories that's odd to us, but it's one of the stories that God specifically gives us in the Scriptures to show that men, women, are not there just as objects of your desires, but as people to care for, to love, and to make sure you provide for. The other place we find this Leverite marriage is also in Ruth chapter 4.

Naomi doesn't have a husband. She doesn't even have sons anymore. So there's Naomi and Ruth, and there's nobody to care for them, to provide for them. And she goes, Ruth, and she goes and gleans in Boaz's field. You remember that story? But when they find out that, oh, maybe Boaz can redeem her, he says, whoa, Ruth, I can't do this yet.

There's another kinsman redeemer who's closer than myself. Maybe he can redeem you, right? Maybe he can marry you. Maybe he can raise up kids for you first. And they go to the city gate and the guy says, I ain't doing that. And they go through the whole ceremony of the elders saying, no, this isn't going to happen. So Boaz is able to redeem her. This is part of this whole idea of Levrite marriage.

Its purpose is to protect widows and to continue the family line. God continued this through the Old Testament, specifically for the protection of widows and the continuing of the family line, but the Sadducees come to Jesus in this passage, and they've got a trap for Him. Now, we don't know if this is a true story. If there's some poor widow who has been married seven times, and every single time she gets married, her husband dies, we don't know if that's a true story, or if they've made this hypothetical story up. But they're going to get Jesus with this one. Notice they don't actually care if this is a real widow. They don't have any heart for her at all. They just want to trap Jesus. And they come to him and they got a gotcha question. Right? We're going to get him. Right?

Jesus, you say there's a resurrection. And so what if, what if there is a lady? She had a husband, no kids, he dies, she gets married to the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, and finally the seventh, no children, no offspring, no man to carry on the name, and she dies. Here's the question, Jesus, at the resurrection, would you say there is?

We don't actually believe that. Whose wife is she going to be? Talk about an awkward moment in heaven if that's true. That's what they're getting at, right? They're saying, you've got a whole bunch of theological and pastoral problems, Jesus, so explain this to us if the resurrection is true.

And Jesus says, you're wrong. For two reasons. You're wrong on two fronts. The first is, you don't know the scriptures. They came to him and they called him teacher in verse 19. They don't actually want to be taught. But he's going to bring them to school and he says, you don't know the scriptures. And then he brings them to where they should have known.

Brings the Sadducees who are running the temple to the heart of the covenant when God makes himself known to Moses at the burning bush. And God didn't at the burning bush say, I'm the God of all sorts of dead people. No, what did he say? I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.

You may have a little bit of chronology in your brain here, right? Genesis and Exodus seem like they're back-to-back, but this is 400 years apart. Abraham is long gone dead. Isaac's bones have been wasting away in Meccala for centuries. Jacob had died long, long, long before this point. They were dead.

And yet when Moses interacts with the living God, he says, I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. He is the living God. And those whom He is the God over are still living, though they may rest in their graves. Abraham did not lose the covenant somehow because he died, the covenant continued, and Abraham continued to enjoy the covenant God who came into relationship with him. Abraham was awaiting his own resurrection. But see, there's another thing that they don't understand, they don't know, they're mistaken about, and that's the power of God. Not only do they not know their Old Testament well enough, but he says in verse 24, nor the power of God.

The only type of resurrection that the Sadducees knew when they, when they, our translations miss it a little bit here, but it says, none of these brothers were able to raise up for her a son. That's the only resurrection that they had in their minds, was how can she raise up a son? All they could understand was what was right in front of their very eyes. God's power in the Sadducees' mind was restricted to the physical, the here and now. They made a false assumption that if there was a resurrection, that that life would look exactly like this life. They can't get past their own eyeballs. They assume that if there is marriage in heaven, it has to look exactly like it is now.

And notice Jesus, Jesus really digs in on them here. He says, but in verse 26, but concerning the dead that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the burning bush? Oops, sorry, verse 25, not 26. For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. Now, here's another problem.

Pharisees don't believe in angels either. Or Sadducees don't believe in angels either, Luke 23. They don't believe in the resurrection, they don't believe in angels, they don't believe in none of that stuff. That's what Luke tells us in Acts 23. So why does Jesus bring this up to them? Because the point is, they don't have a concept, they don't have a paradigm, they don't have anything beyond what they can see. For them, they're their original empiricists. Angels who are immortal, that just sounds like nonsense to them. But Jesus says it's not true. Now we might say, okay, well, I'm still wrestling with this, right? I don't know.

I'm going to give you the idea of what people even today, who are unbelievers, will argue against Christians for with the resurrection, right? Okay, you believe there's a physical, a bodily resurrection? What about the missionary that was eaten by cannibals? What about the missionary in India who was murdered and then his bones were burnt in a pile and thrown into the Ganges River and the fish ate him? How's that one going to be raised from the dead, huh? Answer that. Or as I was talking on the road, a couple of kids and I were walking here and I asked them about this. I said, what would you think? And one of the kids said, well, I don't know.

I mean, John the Baptist had his head cut off and he's going to come back. The point is, the Sadducees can't imagine anything after death. For them, that's it. But do you see how limiting of scope that is to the power of God? The God who spoke the universe into existence has the power after you die, when the last trumpet blows and our Lord returns in the clouds, that your body in a similar way will come back. The resurrection is true. But that still leaves with two questions. And I think every Christian, as they wrestle faithfully with this passage, I think has two questions.

One, will I still be married to my spouse? I mean, in my notes as I was translating this was literally, am I still going to be married to Olivia? Right? What's going to happen? I mean, especially we were talking at Tuesday Night Bible Study about the deep bonds that form in marriages that are decades and decades and decades old. I remember talking to an old lady who had been married to her husband for over 58 years and she said, I can't imagine. I can't imagine being without my husband. I hope there's still marriage in heaven. And she asked me, am I still going to be married to him at the resurrection? Well, here's where we have to come with humility. I think not in the same way. I think not in the same way.

We're going to have perfect relationships. You're going to love your spouse in heaven more than you've ever loved them in this life. You're going to have a perfect love for them that you've never experienced in this life, that you've only had a taste of in this life. But here's the thing, brothers and sisters, when you go to heaven, that love in which you can only imagine happening between a husband and a wife, that way in which you fully care for and invest in one another, that's the way you're going to love every person who is elect in heaven.

That same emotional intimacy. Now don't go into weird places with this where people go with sexual intimacy and stuff. That's yuck. Don't go there. This is about that true relationship that marriage is supposed to be a picture of. A harmony of souls. Tertullian wrote in the 200s. He's one of the first Latin church fathers. He's writing in about 208. And he writes to his wife who's what she should do after he dies. And so this is, right, we're talking about 1800 years ago. Early Christian writer writes this. He says, after death, my dear beloved servant in Christ, after death, there is no more promise of marriage. We will be translated into the condition and the sanctity of angels.

No more concern will come up from carnal jealousy. The woman who had seven husbands will not wound any one of them in heaven, nor is any husband waiting for her in heaven going to be put to confusion. But Tertullian anticipated his wife's concerns about this, right? And she really loved him, and he could imagine her saying, well, then should I just stay a widow after you die, right? Should I not get married? If there's a resurrection, then will you not be jealous in heaven if I get married to another man and we're all there in our resurrected state? And Tertullian responded to his wife, he said, At the resurrection there will be no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us, no such frivolities, no such impurities does God promise his servants. Translate that into modern day language. Honey, when we get in heaven there's going to be far better things for us to worry about. I'm not going to be jealous. You can remarry. It's okay.

Because at the resurrection, there's one groom, his name is Jesus Christ, and we're invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb. I think there will be bigger and better things we'll be concerned about. And so I don't want to discourage you with this in your marriage, right? Your marriage is meant to be a temporal picture of the beautiful grace of Jesus Christ and his church, of God loving people and us loving one another. Your marriage is rich with all the fullness of that meaning. But when we get to heaven, when there's a resurrected state, brothers and sisters, it will be far better than anything that has been the sweetest moment of your marriage in this life. But then the next question that we wrestle with is, will we be angels?

My grandma used to collect these little dreamsicle angels. Have you seen these little blasphemous things? They were real funny. She liked it. But they were like little fat babies with wings and they had different things that they were playing with and whatever. And I always kind of used to laugh at them as I saw them up on her mantel and I thought, That can't be what angels are like. One, those are not what angels are like.

We look at the Seraphim, the burning ones in Isaiah, or if you want to really give your kids nightmares, go read to them the first couple of chapters of Ezekiel before they go to bed. With wheels and eyes and eyes and faces. I mean, it's weird stuff. It's scary stuff to think about.

There's no wonder why when an angel appears often to God's people, the first thing out of their mouth is, do not be afraid. No, we're not going to be angels. You're not going to sprout wings out of your back. Just basic grammar here, what does it say? No, but are like the angels in heaven, or the Greek I would translate as angels in heaven.

We will have resurrected bodies, 1 Corinthians 15, 42 through 44. I would really encourage you this afternoon to go meditate, go read the great resurrection chapter of 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And God makes clear to us some promises. What has been sown perishable, our bodies will be raised imperishable. Right? Your body... I was just talking to a guy this morning who said, getting old is no fun. Right? The aches and pains that you feel in your body right now is because you are perishing at this moment.

But what was sown perishable will be raised imperishable. What was sown in dishonor will be raised in glory. What was sown in weakness will be raised in power. What was sown in a natural body will be raised in a spiritual body. There will be a continuity, but there will also be a change.

Right, when we see Jesus' resurrected body, He has a real body. He's able to tell Thomas, go ahead, put your finger in it. You want to see my side? You want to thrust your hand into it? Go ahead. He's got a physical body. They're so afraid of Jesus at one point, He says, guys, make some breakfast. I'm going to eat. Do spirits eat? No. Ghosts don't eat, right? I'm going to eat some food so you're able to see I have a physical body.

And yet somehow Jesus is able to walk into a locked room. I don't know how that works. I don't think any of us understand how that works. Somehow Jesus still has a physical body, but with different properties. Somehow Jesus is still physical, there's continuity, but there's change. And His word to the Sadducees are, you're mistaken because you know not the scriptures nor the power of God. He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken. And they don't know how mistaken they are.

Because see, the person who's standing in front of the Sadducees had just previously said in the book of John to Martha, I am the resurrection and the life. The resurrection is standing right in front of them. The very incarnation of the power of God is standing right in front of them and they are blind to it. With their love of power, with their love of rule, with their love of what they have right now in this life.

And Jesus is telling them, you're greatly mistaken. I don't think you understand. All will be raised again, some under everlasting glory and some under everlasting punishment. The Christ who was standing before them was the only way, the truth, and the life. No one would come to the Father except through Him.

So the question I have to ask you this morning is, as Jesus told Martha, I am the resurrection and the life, do you believe this? Do you believe that there is going to be A second coming of Jesus Christ. That He is going to, our resurrected Lord and Savior is going to come back to judge the living and the dead. Do you believe that there is a wedding supper of the Lamb? And that this same Jesus who is telling them the resurrection is real. Do you understand that you someday will answer before Him, and you will answer like a spirit called Christian saying, yes, I believe. Or will you be like one of these Pharisees who would later say, crucify Him. I don't believe it. I want nothing to do with it. You guys are quack. You got to make up your mind.

Do you believe that even at the resurrection He has great plans for your marriage, for your life, for your unity with Him? Or will you be like one of the fallen angels, even these angels of the Sadducees don't believe in, who wanted their own way and their own kingdom and were doomed to everlasting punishment? The resurrection is real because our Savior said it was. So choose to stay what you're going to believe. Will you believe the resurrection and the life? Or will you walk out of here with the same stone-cold heart as the Sadducee?

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. Lord, we do pray for your Holy Spirit. These are not easy things that we have looked at this morning. Father, we trust you that all your plans for us are for our good and not for our bad. That even in death, there is hope. That a closed coffin is not the end of the story. Lord, we pray that you would please work in our hearts that we would know who you are. and that we would entrust our souls to you, our only hope in the life to come and in our life today.

We pray these things in Jesus' name. Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.