Do You Know the Scriptures and the Power of God?

“I Have a Question about the Resurrection”

(Matthew 22:23-33, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, April 6, 2008)

Matthew 22:23-33 ²³ The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, ²⁴ saying, "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.' ²⁵ Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. ²⁶ So too the second and third, down to the seventh. ²⁷ After them all, the woman died. ²⁸ In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her." ²⁹ But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. ³⁰ For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. ³¹ And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ³² '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." ³³ And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

Introduction – The Benefit of an Honest Question

A good teacher appreciates an honest question. If someone is confused about something they are hearing, if he is able to state his question well, the answer may be very helpful. Not every question is an honest question. A person may ask a question in order to expose the teacher as a fool or his teaching as impossible. The Sadducees were so sure of themselves and of their superiority to the Messiah, that they decided to use a ridiculous question to expose what they thought was the obvious foolishness of the doctrine of the general resurrection.

By “general” resurrection, I mean the teaching of Christ and of the Bible, that at the end of this age every human being who has ever lived and died on this earth since the creation of the first man will be raised back to bodily life, some to eternal judgment, and others to an eternally blessed condition. When a Christian dies, his body rests in the grave until this general resurrection. His spirit is with the Lord, and he may have some kind of physical appearance in the presence of God according to the Lord’s pleasure, but when Christ returns, we will all have resurrection bodies that shall never die. The best understanding of this condition that we have comes from the resurrection of Jesus, for we are told that as He is, so shall we be. We shall be like Him. As we read in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” This is the Christian hope. If you are missing the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead, you are missing something essential to Christianity. We are talking about something that we have not yet seen with our own eyes, so an honest question from the Sadducees could have been very helpful. This, however, was not an honest question, for the Sadducees did not believe in a resurrection, and they considered themselves above the Pharisees, and even above Jesus, who had already proven Himself in many ways.

More on the Sadducees (23)

The Sadducees were an important ruling religious party of the Jews in the days of Jesus. They were associated with the priests and the temple. They paid more attention to the first five books of the Bible, the Torah or Law, then to the Prophets, or to other Biblical writings. They did not subscribe to all of the oral traditions that the Pharisees claimed to have received through Moses. They were looser in their practice of Judaism than the Pharisees, and tended to be wealthier and better connected.

Representatives of the Sadducees came to Jesus that day, after Jesus had upset the plot of the Pharisees to trip Him up with a question about taxes. You may remember that the Apostle Paul found it a very easy thing to set the Pharisees against the Sadducees. On one level they had very different religious beliefs. On the other hand they were united in their opposition to Jesus, and in their rejection of the true relationship between Law and Grace. Jesus, as our substitute, perfectly kept the true Law of God without any defect, and then He died for our sins, so that the grace of God could be known by faith in Him. In this Biblical system, Christ is at the very center of our understanding of both Law and grace. Without His obedience to God’s Law and His suffering the full penalty of the Law for us, there could be no grace. Without the Messiah, the system of eternal salvation taught in the Scriptures would have to be completely abandoned. Both the Pharisees and the Sadducees were man-centered. One focused on their own law-keeping and ceremonial purity to recommend themselves to God for salvation as the purity group within Judaism. The other simply believed that there was no life beyond the grave at all, and they focused on the power and rituals that they controlled in this life. They did not believe in spirits, angels, or the resurrection.

Whose wife will she be? (24-28)

With a great sense of superiority over the Lord, who made and sustains both men and angels, one of their number posed a question based on a story. The story is based on a law for Israel under the Old Testament. It came from the last book of Moses, Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 25:5-10 "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. ⁷ And if the man does not wish to take his brother's wife, then his brother's wife shall go up to the gate to the elders and say, 'My husband's brother refuses to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of a husband's brother to me.' ⁸ Then the elders of his city shall call him and speak to him, and if he persists, saying, 'I do not wish to take her,' ⁹ then his brother's wife shall go up to him in the presence of the elders and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face. And she shall answer and say, 'So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother's house.' ¹⁰ And the name of his house shall be called in Israel, 'The house of him who had his sandal pulled off.'

While such a practice seems very strange to us, it was part of God’s Law for His people in building them up as a nation, and was a matter of charity towards the surviving woman and the memory of her husband. Of course, the Sadducees didn’t have a question about this practice at all. It simply was useful rhetorical tool in order to scoff about the life to come. Combined with the account of seven childless brothers, they thought it exposed the concept of the resurrection as ridiculous. All seven brothers died one by one, followed by the death of the one woman whom they all had as a wife. She never conceived a child. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

The Scriptures (29a)

There IS a problem. Someone is thinking about something wrong. While people were used to the idea of one man having more than one woman, the thought of one woman having more than one husband was theoretically out of accord with the way things should have been. Obviously it happened. A man might die, and his wife would remarry. There would be other scenarios that surely were common enough which led to a situation that would make a person wonder what would happen in the resurrection with one wife, and more than one husband. This story just extends the number to seven, all simply trying to obey Deuteronomy 25. Well, what does happen in the resurrection? Someone is thinking about something wrong here…

Jesus has the answer. Lest we be held in suspense, he starts by saying, “You are wrong.” Ouch. That hurts. Watch out. Here come two reasons, both of them exposing the ignorance of people that were very smart. First, He says, “You do not know the Scriptures.” By the way, Jesus knows the Scriptures. Have you noticed that? Do you know the Scriptures? We have lots of help for you on this point. One bit of advice. Don’t make your investigation of the Bible a strictly personal matter. Get involved with other people, and develop daily habits that You keep up as a matter of principle. Make sure you not only read them. Make sure you think about them, especially with other people. The Sadducees did not know the Scriptures, and it led them to reject the resurrection, and to misunderstand what the resurrection was like. Understanding life after death is not an easy matter. We need to ask the Bible honest questions about that topic. What answers are you looking for from the Bible? If You have no questions, I don’t think that you will find many answers. The Sadducees were ignorant about the Scriptures.

The Power of God (29b)

There was a second thing that they were ignorant about. They were wrong because they did not know the power of God. If you do not know the power of God making You a new person in Jesus Christ, if you do not know that the cross took away your sins, if you do not think much about the resurrection power of Jesus, then how can you have a right belief and understanding about the coming resurrection of the dead. There’s more to this. If you have not thought about creation, how will you understand anything of the power of God to make a new creation? If you have not found the power to turn away from sin by the Holy Spirit, how will you know and believe in the power of God to make all things new, and to bring a new heavens and a new earth when Christ returns? To know the power of God, you have to take God at His Word. Obey Him. Follow Him. Watch Him work powerfully in Your life. Don’t make God’s power exclusively about You getting what You want when You want it. Make Your knowledge of God’s power about God getting what He wants in and through You for His own glory. Isn’t He the One who gave You faith by His great power? Didn’t He make You a new person in Jesus Christ? That was a powerful thing to do. You can see His power at work in Your life.

The Astonishing Truth of a Coming Resurrection (30-33)

There is a coming resurrection of the dead. In that new age we will not be entering into marriages with each other, and the ignorant question of the Sadducees will apparently be very much beside the point. There is no point in our trying to say too much more about that life from this text, because Jesus does not tell us very much about that here. What we do need to realize is that the One who went to the cross to die for us knows all about heaven. He is the authority on the life to come. That is why He went to the cross with such faith. He believed in the resurrection. This Jesus says that the resurrection from the dead is very real. He proves it from the words God spoke to Moses in Exodus 3:6. God did not say “I WAS the God of Abraham.” He said, “I AM the God of Abraham.” The point is that God spoke to Moses about Abraham as a living being, and Moses came long after Abraham died. Abraham IS. Isaac IS. Jacob IS, David IS. Someone you know and love IS though a body may now rest in the grave, because Jesus IS and always will be. We believe in the resurrection.

Questions for meditation and discussion:

1. Compare and contrast the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

2. What do you think about the Sadducees question and their accompanying story? How about Christ’s response?

3. What are some questions people could be reasonable asking of the Scriptures for spiritual profit?

4. How do we know and experience the power of God in this age?