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Reading Luke 20:27-40 where Jesus is challenged by the Sadducees on the resurrection of the dead, and He not only answers their question but shows their beliefs are wrong. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
Jesus was challenged by the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead, and not only was Jesus able to answer their question, but he was able to show them from the scriptures that there is life after death when we understand the text.
This is When We Understand The Text, a daily study in the word of Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness. Find all our videos and other ministry resources at www .utt .com.
Here once again is Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Gospel of Luke, we continue on in chapter 20. We're up to this exchange that Jesus has with the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead. I'm reading Luke 20, verses 27 to 40.
Hear the word of the Lord. There came to him some Sadducees who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.
Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife and died without children, and the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward, the woman also died.
In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as a wife. And Jesus said to them, The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.
But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.
Then some of the scribes answered, Teacher, you have spoken well, for they no longer dared to ask him any question. Now you're familiar with this exchange, as we've read it previously in the Gospel of Matthew, Luke actually expounds on Jesus' answer a little bit, or he adds a little bit more to what Jesus said.
So we see Jesus shut down the Pharisees and actually prove to them, even from the books that they accepted as scripture, that even Moses talked about life after death, the resurrection of the dead, and that there are those who are still living even after they have died.
Now the Sadducees have always been something of a puzzle to me. They don't acknowledge the resurrection of the dead, yet they were considered very, very conservative. They held to the law, the first five books of the Bible, which are Torah.
So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, those that were written by Moses, they considered to be the word of God. God gave this word to Moses, and so therefore this is truly scripture.
But they did not consider the rest of the Old Testament as scripture. Now they certainly revered those writings, but they basically considered them as all wisdom literature. Like we consider Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs to be wisdom literature, and not only that, but wisdom from God.
So it's still scripture, it's still the word of God. But the Sadducees just considered it wisdom literature in the sense that it contains some wise things. It's good to read, good to live according to these things.
You can live a fruitful and productive life to God if you follow those things that are written in the wisdom books or even in the other prophets. But they did not consider the other prophets to be equal to what was written by Moses.
That was the greatest word. That was the word that was actually given by God to Moses. So that's the only word that they considered to be scripture. That's significant because when Jesus shows them that there is a resurrection of the dead, where does he go?
He goes to the Torah. He goes to Moses. He doesn't go to those books that the Sadducees would shrug off as, well, those aren't scripture anyway. The Sadducees believed that the resurrection of the dead was not written about in the law, so that was the reason why they didn't believe in it.
But functionally, they were no better than atheists, because if they did not believe that there was a resurrection of the dead, then they did not believe that there was going to be either some great reward or some great punishment for the way that you lived or what you believed in your life.
So what difference did it make how you lived? At the end of life, eventually, you were just going to perish. You were going to become worm food. You would go back to the dust from which you came. Of course, that's in the Torah.
That's in Genesis. Adam is made from the dust, so man just goes right back to the dust. So what difference did it make the way that you lived? The Sadducees still believed that you were to live a good life, and in living the life that God tells you to live according to the law, then you could live the most productive.
Life.
But it wasn't necessary to live in a way that was therefore going to add up to some sort of eternal reward, since they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead anyway. They didn't believe in angels either.
So there's just nothing after life. This life is all there is. Now that's not terribly unusual to the Jews, because even to this very day, those who would proclaim to be Jews or even Orthodox Jews, not many of them believe in a resurrection of the dead.
A friend of mine went over to Israel once, and he came back, and when I was asking him about his experience, I've never been to Israel myself. But when he was there, he said, well, we evangelized to Jews while we were there, and it was amazing to me how many I encountered.
It was probably all of them, everyone that I asked this question of about what happens to you when you die. They all said nothing, that there's nothing that happens when you die. And so it just seemed to me that when I was over there witnessing to Jews that I was talking to a bunch of atheists, because they did not even believe in a resurrection of the.
Dead.
There are some rabbis that you can read from today. I quoted one of them in one of my what videos. I can't remember which one that was now, but rabbis will teach on if there is a resurrection of the dead, then here's how you have eternal life.
And they basically tell you to live a moral life according to the laws that they are given in the Torah or according to the Mishnah or something to that effect. So they'll tell you to follow those writings, but they don't know for sure if there is any kind of afterlife.
If there is an afterlife, well, the way that you get there is by following these rules, by living a good life. And then hopefully when you die, you're going to enter into some kind of paradise. Jews don't acknowledge absolutely that there is a resurrection of the dead.
Now in the Old Testament, one of the plainest places where the resurrection of the dead is talked about is in Daniel chapter 12, where it is said in verse two, many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above. And those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever. So there it's talked about a resurrection of the dead and some will even go to everlasting.
Some will go to everlasting punishment. But again, the Sadducees did not believe that the book of Daniel was really scripture. They considered that to be novel. So those are ideas that are expounded upon much, much later.
But those words didn't actually come from God, according to the Sadducees. So here, when Jesus is confronted by the Sadducees, they have this riddle for him, and they think that this riddle is going to expose that there is no resurrection of the dead.
There is no afterlife. So all of these words that these people are listening to are really all for not because Jesus has the answer to eternal life. Remember that the rich young ruler a couple of chapters ago had come to Jesus saying, what must I do to have eternal life?
What must I do to enter the kingdom of God, which even in the kingdom of God, the people believed that they received everlasting life. Now, again, this is only the Sadducees that deny the resurrection of the dead.
The Pharisees did believe in an afterlife, and that's another reason why they were popular among the people. So the people would listen to the Pharisees tell them how they may live their lives and therefore gain eternity.
But the Sadducees didn't believe this, and it's significantly there. Of course, caused a significant rift in the Sanhedrin. As a result of that, the Sadducees and the Pharisees did not really get along, but they certainly got along in their hatred for Jesus.
And that's one place where you see them team up with one another. It's to put the son of God to death. But here they have this riddle for Jesus. They ask him a question saying, teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife, but no children, that man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.
Now, what they're talking about here is lever at marriage and lever at marriage is talked about in the law. You have lever at marriage in Deuteronomy chapter 25, where it's talked about how the Israelites were to care for women whose husbands died before they had children.
If she did not have any children who could take care of her then after her husband died, then the brother of the husband, if the brother was unmarried, the brother had to take the widow as his wife. He had the responsibility to marry his sister in law.
And God called this the duty of a brother in law. Now, lever at marriage doesn't have anything to do with Levi's, even though, or the Levi's, even though it looks like that in the name lever it, it's actually from a Latin word.
So the word itself is not derived from Hebrew or from any other word in the Old Testament. It is the, the Latin word for a husband's brother lever. And so from that, we've come up with the word lever at marriage.
So lever, it doesn't actually appear in the Old Testament in that way. Again, it's not an ancient word that we've done. We've then spun into this English word to describe this law that's written down in Deuteronomy chapter 25, but we call it lever at marriage because it is marriage with a brother in law.
So the brother in law of the widow takes her as a wife. Now it's supposed to be then that the first child that they have is going to be the child that bears the name of the deceased brother so that whatever belonged to the deceased brother could be passed along to that child.
And that deceased brother's name might continue in Israel. There was land and rights and all this other kind of thing tied into this. Then the next child that they had would belong to the, the, the, well, okay, the brother in law, the brother in law who is now the husband of the, uh, the woman who was previously a widow because his brother died.
I know this is all confusing, but anyway, you're tracking with me, right? You understand what I'm saying? So this is the law that the, the Sadducees used to create this riddle for Jesus. And again, they're presenting this riddle for the same, in the same way that the chief priests and the scribes had come to Jesus in the previous account that we read where they're asking Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar.
And they're hoping that with Jesus answer, either he's going to make the Romans mad or the people mad, but either way, then the, the Pharisees are able to gain back the admiration of the people. Well, here, the Sadducees are attempting to stump Jesus.
And if he can't answer this, this word puzzle that we're giving him here, then the people are not going to be impressed with Jesus and we will win their admiration back. So they present this scenario and it may have been a popular scenario among Sadducees.
It could have been that this was a common word puzzle that was used between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Because if the Sadducees are only accepting the Torah as scripture, as the word of God, then they're throwing this at the Pharisees and saying, see, this is how we know that there is no resurrection from the dead.
Explain this riddle to us. And the Pharisees couldn't explain the riddle. And so the Sadducees continue on with their belief, which they uphold in the Sanhedrin that there is no resurrection after the dead.
So there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, died without children, and the second and the third took her. And likewise, all seven left no children. So there was no children. Therefore the obligation remained with the brother-in-law to marry this woman.
Seven brothers marrying the same woman. And then afterward, the woman also died. So here's the riddle that the Sadducees have for Jesus. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? Because now they're all going to be in the resurrection.
Seven brothers, this one woman, who does she belong to? For the seven had her as a wife. And Jesus said to them, the sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. So that's talking about this life in which we live.
But those who are considered worthy to attain to that age into the resurrection from the dead, again, Daniel chapter 12, where it says that some will awaken to everlasting.
Now, Jesus is not referencing Daniel 12 here because the Sadducees wouldn't accept that. But it was still understood among the Jews that either you are resurrecting unto life or you are resurrecting unto eternal damnation.
So those who are considered worthy to be resurrected unto life, to the resurrection from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage. There's not marriage that is continuing on in the afterlife.
And the Sadducees would have understood this concept because it was written in the law that the covenant of marriage comes to an end when one of the partners dies. When either the husband or the wife dies, the contract is over.
So it would not continue on into the next life. That's written in the Torah. So that would be something that the Sadducees would have to accept. The Apostle Paul even uses this as an example of how we are dead to the law when he presents that very law at the start of Romans chapter 7, that once a spouse dies, then the surviving spouse is released from the covenant.
And so then they are free. Since that law is dead, they are free to go and marry another. So the Sadducees had to accept that since that was there in the Torah. That's even been written about in the law.
So they neither marry nor are given in marriage. Marriage is in this age. It's not in the next. And Jesus goes on to say, verse 36, they cannot die anymore because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.
Now, of course, that's an aspect of the resurrection that the Sadducees don't accept. They don't accept that there's angels and that there are souls that continue to live on into eternity. But then Jesus brings it back to the Torah.
Verse 37, but that the dead are raised, even Moses showed in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. So what Jesus is doing here is the Sadducees had asked him this question based on what Jesus believed about the afterlife.
Jesus is now coming back to them based on what they believe about the Torah. So I'm going to show you that even from the Torah, Moses wrote about a resurrection of.
The dead.
So verse 37 begins with Jesus saying, but that the dead are raised like you've brought me this riddle to try to expose that my teaching on the resurrection of the dead is inconsistent because the how would the law play out in the resurrection that is to come?
But Jesus puts it back on them. OK, I've answered your question. You didn't stump me. But now let me show you that the dead are raised. And even Moses talked about it in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.
Verse 38. Now he is not the God of the dead. But of the living. And all live, all who live, all who will come to life in that resurrection, they all live to him. And verse 39 says, then some of the scribes answered, teacher, you have spoken well.
Now that's not the Sadducees. So the Sadducees are not standing here impressed with what Jesus said. It's the scribes who answer, teacher, you have spoken well. Because they love that the Sadducees have just been put in their place regarding their denial of the resurrection.
So so even though the scribes previously had tried to catch Jesus in something that would get him in trouble, that was back in verse 19. Here they're congratulating Jesus. Now they like him because you just put the Sadducees down and they are.
They're always throwing this riddle at us and we don't know how to answer it. And now Jesus has just broken it and has even revealed to them from the law. How Moses made an argument for life after death.
How God is the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He's not the God of the dead, but of the living. And verse 40 says they no longer dared to ask him any question because he was so good at answering their questions and they didn't want to be made fools of.
My friends, we do have the promise of the resurrection of the dead and the guarantee of our resurrection is in Jesus Christ. By faith in him, our sins are forgiven and we have everlasting life with God in glory.
Be assured of that promise. Be comforted in that promise today that we will rise and live forever with him in glory. Heavenly Father, we thank you for what we have read once again, and I pray that we would continue to be reminded from your word, Genesis all the way to Revelation, that you have given us the promise of everlasting life, of resurrection from the dead.
And that is for everyone who believes in Jesus, he who died on the cross for us and rose from the dead himself so that by faith in him, we also have the promise of his resurrection. Forgive us our sins, lead us in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Pastor Gabe keeps a regular blog, sharing personal thoughts, alerting readers to false teachers, and offering commentary on the church and social issues. You can find a link to the blog through our website, www .utt .com.
Thank you for listening and join us again tomorrow as we continue our study in God's Word, when we understand the text.