Happy Palm Sunday. This passage on the surface looks like it is a passage about the resurrection and marriage, but I would argue that it actually isn’t. I would argue that it is a passage about skepticism. Here you have the Sadducees asking Jesus a question about the resurrection, but Jesus sees right through it knowing that they really don’t care what Jesus says about the resurrection. They just want to try and make Jesus look stupid. 

Reading this passage brought to mind a situation I haven’t thought about in 15 years. When I was a new believer, I was at our family’s hunting camp and I remember one guy there who was not a Christian, but had a very high view of his theological studies which consisted of about three articles he had read. He said, “You know, I’m a theologically minded guy, but once you get into predestination and free will deeply enough, you realize how much you just can’t know and I decided to stop trying.” Do you hear what he’s saying? It sounds like he’s talking about predestination and free will, but he’s really not. He’s using that topic to justify his skepticism about Christianity. And a very similar thing is happening in this passage. Skeptics are not a new thing. They have been around for thousands of years which makes this passage as relevant today as it was in Jesus’ day. 

I’m going to try and be a bit shorter today because of our new member installation so I want to look at this passage by seeing the skeptical question the sadducees raise and then the errors in their question. 

1. The Skeptical Question

The question itself probably sounds odd to us and I think it would have sounded odd to the people who heard it asked. The Sadducees said there was a woman who had been married to a man, but he died before they had children so she was given to his brother, as the Law of Moses allows (that may sound weird, but I’ll explain it in a bit), but this other brother died too. Then she was given to another brother, but he died too. And so on until she was married to the 7th and final brother. Then the Sadducees ask who is her husband in the resurrection. 

Now, to understand the question better, we need to understand a few things about the Sadducees and the Mosaic law. The Sadducees were a very educated, aristocratic group of people who inherited the priesthood and, because of that, they held a place in society of great power, wealth, and status. They believed in God, but a very watered down version of our faith that only held to the first five books of the Bible and did not believe in basically the rest of our Old Testament. They hardly believed in anything supernatural which means they did not believe in a coming Messiah, a final judgment, angels, demons, or the resurrection. They believed in a view of God that just asked you to be a good person. They appreciated the faith as a way of giving us some ethical boundaries, but not much more. 

The Sadducces were pretty much the exact opposite of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day. One commentator described the Pharisees as the moralistic conservatives and the Sadducees were the relativistic liberals of their day. The Pharisees were lower on the socio-economic ladder and more conservative. The Sadducees were wealthier and more liberal. And they really did not like each other. They sat opposite each other in the Sanhedrin, which was the Jewish legislative council in that day. So, the Sadducees were the ones coming and asking this question. 

But we also need to know something about the Mosaic Law. In ancient Israel, so way back in Moses’ day, not quite as much in Jesus’ day, to be a young widow with no kids was something just short of a death sentence. You might not have had anyone to protect or take care of you so a provision was made to take care of the woman and continue a family line. But, this provision in the law, as best we can understand, was not still being used in Jesus’ day. Most scholars believe that this scenario that the Sadducees are putting before Jesus is completely made up. Not only that, but can you imagine if there was really a poor woman who had lost seven husbands and had no children? How horrible would that be? How much pain would she have gone through? And these Sadducees don’t seem to care anything about it. 

Because they don’t believe in the resurrection, they are asking Jesus whose wife she will be in the resurrection. They aren’t trying to gain any more clarity on the topic than the people in the last passage asking about Caesar and taxes. They want Jesus to say he doesn’t know. They want him to take the bait and say something like, “The first husband or the seventh husband.” And everyone knows Jesus can’t say all the husbands because even though provision for multiple wives was made on occasion in ancient Israel, multiple husbands for one wife was never allowed. 

So, everything about their question is not only skeptical, but manipulative and even deceitful. It’s entrapment. They are trying to catch Jesus, not understand Jesus. It’s designed to mock the whole idea of an afterlife. And again, Jesus has an answer that will shut all their mouths and that tells us even more about the kingdom of God. Jesus does this, in his words, by pointing out the errors in their questions. 

1. The Errors In The Questions

The ESV quotes Jesus as saying, “You are wrong.” But, the Greek is even stronger than that. It’s more like, “You are way off base!” It’s as if he’s saying, “I can’t even answer your question because the premises of your question are so wrong.” Jesus doesn’t try to answer their question the way they had hoped, he points out the errors in the question and the errors are two-fold: They don’t understand the Scriptures and they don’t understand the power of God. First the error in the understanding of the Scriptures. This would have highly offended the Sadducees. But, they probably expected Jesus to go to one of the books of Scripture that they don’t believe. But Jesus doesn’t go to Isaiah or Daniel, he goes to Exodus 3. He goes to one of the books they do believe in! And he goes there to prove that they are flat out wrong about the resurrection. 

Exodus 3 is where God speaks to Moses at the burning bush. It’s like Jesus is saying, “Oh, you want to talk about Moses? Let’s talk about Moses.” And then he quotes Exodus where God says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham. I am the God of Isaac. I am the God of Jacob.” Now, at the point in time when God said this to Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been dead for centuries. The Sadducees imagined that these men were nothing but bones or dust by this point not realizing that what God promised these men was an everlasting covenant relationship with Him. 

Do you see the brilliance of this? God isn’t saying, “I was the God of Abraham while he was alive. I was the God of Jacob while he was alive.” He’s saying even though they died hundreds of years ago, he is still their God because they did not truly die. He speaks of his relationship with them in the present tense. And it feels safe to say that these Sadducees had never thought about the implications of that passage. 

The basis of the resurrection is our relationship with God. There can be no resurrection without this relationship. Here me out here. This is exactly what God is communicating to Moses and to the Israelites at the burning bush and this is exactly what the Sadducees are missing. Think about it this way. God is talking about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (who we call the Patriarchs) after they are dead in terms of an ongoing relationship with them. That’s not the way it is in our relationships. I am the husband of Angela. I am the father of Turner, Collins, Ivey, and James. But there could be a day when people die and that will not be true anymore. Some of the hardest words to speak…words that some of you know all too well…are ‘I was.’ I was the husband of so and so. So and so was my son. There will be a day, in all likelihood, when either Angela will say, “Jim was my husband” or I will say, “Angela was my wife.” 

That’s because as much as we love them, our love will not keep them alive. But that is the difference between our love and God’s love. When God sets his love on us in the person of Jesus Christ, it is so strong that it does two things. It makes us alive and it keeps us alive. It makes us alive because we are born into this world spiritually dead. We are born sinful people who actively resist the love of God and who pursue the joy and satisfaction we are designed to have in God in literally every other place you can imagine. But, when the love of God enters our hearts, Paul says we are made into a new creation. We have new desires. We have new convictions. We have new loves. In a spiritual sense, we are made really human for the first time and we spend the rest of our lives becoming more and more real as we are conformed into the image of Jesus. 

It makes me think about the book The Velveteen Rabbit. There is the part where the Skin Horse is talking to the rabbit. It goes like this…“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.' 'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' 'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” 

God’s love makes us real and because God is eternal with no beginning or end, his love that makes us alive keeps us alive for all eternity. Think about it, eternal life and the resurrection are the most logical outcomse based on who God is. God sets his love on someone and he will never ever have to say, “I was the God of Jim. I was the God of Jane. I was the God of Dan.” His relationship with us will never go into the past tense. He will always be able to say, “I am the God of my people” and that is what Jesus is showing these Sadducees. That’s the error he’s showing them in the Scriptures. They may be able to quote Scripture, but they do not understand it. 

Tim Keller makes the case that what Jesus is doing here is the opposite of some of the hell-fire preaching some of you grew up with. By hell-fire preaching, I mean people who say, “You know there is an afterlife. You know there is a heaven and a hell and, without God, your afterlife is not going to go well. So, have a relationship with God so you can have a good afterlife.” While that logic isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s not what Jesus is doing. Jesus kind of did the opposite. He’s saying, “Get a relationship with God and then you’ll know there is an afterlife. Get into a relationship with God and when his love invades and opens your heart, you will be in a relationship that will never end.” He will never cast you off, he will never abandon you, and not even death can separate God from his people. 

Wouldn’t we expect God’s love to be more intense than ours? Just think about the person or people you love most intensely. Would you not do anything in your power to stay in a relationship with them? Would you not do anything in your power to keep them safe? To keep them alive and in your presence? Of course you would. But the problem is that you don’t have that power. But God’s love is exponentially more intense than ours and he does have that power. This is why Jesus is saying that God is the God of the living, not the dead. 

I hear people say that they believe there isn’t anything after we die. I hear them say that, but most of them don’t live in accordance with that belief. If there really isn’t anything after this short life, then none of it matters. If we die and go into the ground and rot and that’s it, why live a life of any kind of ambition? Why have any kind of moral expectations of yourself or others? And many of these people would say, “Well, I still have desires. I want to pursue those desires as much as I can as long as they don’t hurt other people.” But, I then ask why they have those desires in the first place if they can’t ever be fully satisfied in this life and if those desires will all end at our death? C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise [...] If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

That’s the first error. That they don’t know the Scriptures.. The second error is that they don’t know the power of God. This takes us to verse 30: 30 For in the resurrection they neither xmarry nor xare given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. - Matt 22:30 Now that we have established eternal life in the Scriptures, let’s talk about marriage. In the resurrection, women are not given in marriage the way they are in this life. That’s what the ‘they’ is referring to. The women. But it’s true for men too. He says that in this way, we will be like the angels. He’s not saying that we become angels, he’s saying that with regards to how marriage and sex works, we will be more like the angels and less like we are currently. 

Now, I know that many people, including me, have thought, “Now I don’t like that too much.” What if you’ve been married for 50 years and you really love your husband, the thought of not being married in heaven doesn’t sound ideal. What if you like everything that comes with the physical intimacy of marriage, the thought of that not awaiting you in heaven might not seem that attractive. What if you’re single and don’t get married during your life? What if physical intimacy isn’t something you enjoy, did you just miss your shot here on earth? All of these lines of thinking, while reasonable things to wonder, are woefully misunderstanding what awaits us in the resurrection. If this is how we think then we might also need to hear Jesus telling us that we don’t know the power of God. 

Remember that we have already established that God’s love is exponentially more intense than ours. Well, all the emotional and physical satisfactions we will experience in the life to come will also be exponentially better. The best marriage in this life, in all the emotional, relational, and physical components, when compared with the joys yet to be experienced will be like a teardrop compared to the Atlantic Ocean. When we have that, no one will long for what they had in this life and no one will regret anything they did not have. 

Marriage in many ways is like a shadow of what is to come. If marriage is a part of your experience here and now, it’s a good, beautiful, and sanctifying thing. But, it’s only the faintest taste of what’s to come. And what’s to come is so great that it makes marriage, in the way we know it, irrelevant to our life in heaven. Marriage exists in this life primarily for procreation and companionship. Well, in heaven there is no need to procreate and the companionship we will experience with all of God’s people will be so intense and so satisfying that it will make marriage, in the way we know it now, obsolete. Angela and I have talked about how we don’t want to lose the special bond we have now in heaven. But the Bible teaches that we won’t. It will actually be even stronger. 

But, not only that, but we, the church, will be married. Revelation 17 says that we will be married to the one whose love made us alive and will keep us in his arms for all of eternity. Heaven isn’t just that we will be happy and healthy, reunited with our loved ones for all eternity. All of that is true, but all this will be so because we are filled with the consummation of the love God has for us in Jesus. A never ending, never ceasing, never depleting, never stopping love. This is why the Apostle Paul says of marriage, “ 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and pthe two shall become one flesh.”32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” - Eph 5:32

All of this is possible because of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that is what both the Pharisees and the Sadducees hated. That is what fueled their skepticism. They were skeptical of Jesus and his gospel for different reasons. For the Pharisees, Jesus wasn’t conservative enough. They saw Jesus and they saw someone who was too liberal for them. They were skeptical of Jesus offering this love to sinners, to prostitutes, and to tax collectors. These people, in their minds, didn’t have the moral qualifications to enter the kingdom of God. 

The Sadducees, on the other hand, were skeptical of Jesus because he wasn’t liberal enough. They wanted a God who loved everyone and didn’t have strict moral requirements. They didn’t want to hear about a God who judged and has any kind of wrath. They didn’t like that Jesus believed and taught all the books of Scripture. They didn’t like that he believed in the supernatural. 

Here, though, we can fall into a fatal flaw by trying to put Jesus somewhere between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. To understand the gospel, we need to see that Jesus is actually more liberal than the Sadducees and more conservative than the Pharisees. The love of God which is perfectly manifested in the person of Jesus is actually more morally demanding than the Pharisees. God doesn’t just demand the moral rigor that they were teaching, he demands perfection. Moral perfection. But the love of God is actually given more liberally than the Sadducees could ever imagine because Jesus is the one who perfectly obeyed the law of God, Jesus is the one who took on the curse of our disobedience and failures, and Jesus is the one who first resurrected from the dead making our resurrection possible. This is what Paul means when he writes, 25 gHusbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and hgave himself up for her, - Eph 5:25

So now, the love of God is made available to anyone regardless of where they are morally. To understand the gospel, we need to see that the justice of God is more demanding than what the Pharisees taught and the love of God is more freely available than what the Sadducees taught. So, the issue at hand isn’t actually marriage or resurrection. The issue is the gospel. Do you believe this gospel? Are you experiencing the life giving love of God?