The Resurrection Life

Luke 20:27-38

Antioch Christian Fellowship

Nov. 11, 2007

The Text

Luke 20:27-38   ²⁷ There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection,  ²⁸ 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.  ²⁹ Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children.  ³⁰ And the second  ³¹ and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died.  ³² Afterward the woman also died.  ³³ In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife."  ³⁴ And Jesus said to them, "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage,  ³⁵ 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,  ³⁶ for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.  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 and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.  ³⁸ Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him."

The Sermon

This passage from Luke about levirate marriage seems irrelevant.  For ages women relied on men to provide for them.  If a woman had no husband or heir, she would be reduced to begging or would starve.  The law provided for these women by requiring the brothers of the widow’s husband to marry her.  It seems an odd law to us, but was required for the women of antiquity.  That is no longer the case in our culture so this discourse between Jesus and the Sadducees seems irrelevant, out of touch with our lives.

But the question asked by the Sadducees is really not about marriage at all.  It is about life after resurrection.  The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection and so wanted to prove their belief that resurrection causes problems.  It is a hypothetical question designed to prove their point:  there is no life after death.  It really would cause too many problems.

The clearest Old Testament passage that depicts resurrection life is Daniel 12:1-2.  There it is written:  "At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.  ² And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”  Jesus didn’t point the Sadducees to this place in Scripture because they did not believe in the authority of the book of Daniel.  The Sadducees only followed the first five books of the Bible, the Torah.  So Jesus uses what they believe in to point out that even in the Torah, the resurrection life is taught.  He points out to the Sadducees the encounter between God and Moses involving a bush. The passage Jesus refers to is Exodus 3:6.  There God says to Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”  These great patriarchs lived hundreds of years before Moses and were no longer on earth when God says this.  Jesus uses teaching methods that the rabbis used so that the Sadducees could understand him.  He  points out that God is not the God of the dead, but only the living.  If God is the God of those no longer on earth, there must be a resurrection life.

In Luke 20, verse 34, Jesus differentiates between the two worlds.  He says, “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.”

We live in this age under false assumptions.  We look at our best days, our favorite things and assume eternal life is like those best times, only they last forever.  But Jesus says no.  The life that God has in store for us in that age is of an entirely different sort.  Our current bodies and spirits are to our resurrected bodies and spirits like a zinnia seed is to a flowering zinnia.  The potential for that life is here now, but its everlasting form is very different. 

We do have some glimpses of life in that age from Holy Scripture.  But even those images are difficult to imagine.  John describes in Revelation 21:1 his vision of that age.  He writes, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  ² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  ⁴ He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."  ⁵ And he who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new."

Paul describes his mystical experience in 2 Corinthians chapter 12.  He writes there that he “was caught up to the third heaven- whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. . . and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.”  Paul, an articulate man is unable to verbalize his experience in the “third heaven.”

It is very hard for us to imagine what the resurrection life looks like.  It is even hard for us to imagine how very distorted our life on earth is from the way it was intended.  God created a perfect world in which everything was “good.”  Good when used in Holy Scripture refers to that which promotes, enhances or produces life.  God made us in his image to be his representatives on his earth and in that capacity we chose to obey not God, but follow the lead of God’s enemy introducing death, decay into the once pristine world. 

The Sadducees knew Holy Scripture and used their knowledge to ridicule the resurrection life.  Both are gifts from God:  Holy Scripture which reveals God’s plan for mankind and his covenant to live with us.  God is eternal, when he makes a promise, it is eternal, not temporary.  But the Sadducees were focused on the temporary world and its laws and based on what they knew, they could not imagine what the resurrection life would look like, and they were not willing to believe in anything that they could not conjure up in their own minds.  They knew Holy Scripture, but were worshipping the wrong thing.  They were worshipping what they could see and touch.  It is an easy thing to do. 

In Numbers chapter 21:1-9) the travels of Israel in Edom is depicted.  We read there that “. . .the people became impatient on the way.  ⁵ And the people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food."  ⁶ Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.  ⁷ And the people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you. Pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people.  ⁸ And the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live."  ⁹ So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”

God had Moses make an image of a serpent to symbolize his power to remove the curse of the serpent from his people.  This was not magic, but to look at the serpent, as God had said was a sign of faith in God.

Several hundreds of years later, under the reign of King Hezekiah, (2 Kings 18:1-4) when he was destroying all the idols that that Israelites had been worshipping, he also destroyed this same bronze serpent because the Israelites had been making offerings to it.  Instead of maintaining their faith in God, they had come to worship what they could see and touch but it had no power.

It is an easy thing to do.  We like things we can touch and see.  We live under constant temptation to worship God’s instruments, what we can see and touch, rather than God himself.  It is a dilemma because as his representatives on earth, we are to build structures, form relationships and take care of ourselves. All of these are gifts from God:  our homes, churches, families and our health.  It is a delicate balance to love the gifts from God without coming to worship them.  The test for us is the question, “What do you fear losing the most?”  If it is our health, then our wellbeing has become an idol.  We have lost sight of the fact that our bodies are temporary.  If it is our families, then our relationships have become an idol and we have lost sight of the fact that our earthly relationships are temporary.  If it is our structures, our homes, churches, businesses, they too, are temporary.  When God creates the new heaven and new earth, there will be no legacies.  The only place to put our worship, our trust is in the power of God as it is the only thing that is eternal.  Everything else will be lost.