Mark 12:18-27

Marriage at the Resurrection

18Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 19"Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. 20Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. 22In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. 23At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"

24Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 26Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? 27He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!"



BACKGROUND READING:


Genesis 38:1-10


Deuteronomy 25:5-10


Exodus 3



Dig Deeper

I recently spent almost a year studying the biblical teaching of spiritual beings, including angels and demons, as well as what happens to people when they die. One of the big misconceptions about all of that among modern Americans seems to be the belief that good people become angels when they die. Some have used this passage to bolster that belief. Jesus, of course, is saying nothing of the sort, but what he is saying s a bit complicated and worth taking a deeper look.


Regardless of the society and the social and political situations in that society, it seems that you will always find a group of conservatives and a group of liberals. Many have supposed that because the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection that they were religious liberals. That is not at all the case. They were ultra-conservative politically and religiously, and rejected anything that they thought were new ideas. This included anything that was accepted as Scripture by other groups, other than the first five books of the Old Testament. They regarded the Pentateuch as the only authoritative Scripture and didn’t believe that it taught any sort of resurrection. They believed that dangerous new ideas like that came from much later books like Daniel.


In their estimation, belief in new ideas like a general resurrection of the righteous was dangerous because people who believed in things like that became politically risky. They believed that to die as a martyr for the cause was glorious, because the righteous would be raised to life in the age to come. People who think that God is coming one day to re-create the world and everything in it, including the righteous, will tend to act in risky ways and rebel more often against oppression. The Sadducees tended to be rich and have positions of power, and people like that don’t want a bunch of resurrection-believing revolutionaries going around messing up the status quo.


Now along comes Jesus sounding a lot like just another revolutionary. So the Sadducees want to check him out and see if he is indeed another dangerous revolutionary like the Pharisees. He has had a lot of run-ins with them, however, so he was, no doubt, worth checking out.


They challenge Jesus with a hypothetical situation which depends on the Jewish law of the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 25:5-10; Genesis 38:8). The Sadducees, undoubtedly, had used this argument before and felt that it made the idea of a resurrection look silly. If a man had more than one wife, what would he do in the so-called age-to-come?


Jesus doesn’t mince any words as he chides them for not knowing their Bibles very well and for not believing in the power of God. They have made the classic mistake of placing their own logic above the power of God. He then uses a two-fold argument to completely refute their assertion.


The first part of his argument is that although the resurrection body will correspond to the old body, it will be different in some ways, it will be transformed. We must remember that when they are talking about resurrection, they are not talking about the erroneous belief of a disembodied existence after life. They are talking about the age to come when God makes all things new. Also, Jesus does not say that humans will be like angels in any way, except in one respect: we will not be married in the age to come. There will be no need for procreation in the age to come. Marriage, then, is one of those things meant to point ahead to the time when the righteous will be the bride of Christ. When we have the reality, the shadow of marriage will no longer be necessary. This is where they have missed the power of God’s plan.


The second part of his argument backs up his assertion that they didn’t know their Scriptures very well. When Moses encountered God at the burning bush, God told him that he was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He would not have said that, argues Jesus, in the present tense if they were dead and gone from existence forever. This is not to imply that Jesus was saying that they were ‘alive’ in the afterlife and that was the resurrection. Quite the opposite. He is saying that they are, of course, dead, but since he introduced himself in such a way, God wanted to be known as their God, and so God points to the fact that he intends to raise them from the dead in the future. Resurrection is not another way of saying that they are dead, but in the afterlife somehow, it is saying that God will one day reverse death.



Devotional Thought

Why does a belief in a future resurrection and the age to come, give full meaning to our present life? How does a proper understanding of the resurrection change the way we think about the present life and the present age?