ONE BRIDE–SEVEN BROTHERS – Mark 12:18-27
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on November 13, 2016 under 2016 |
Message preached Sunday,November 13, 2016 from Mark 12:18-27
Theme: Our God is the God of the living, and His promise of our resurrection unto life is sure and certain.
(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)
Ordinarily, I don’t like confrontations. But I’ve got to admit, I have enjoyed reading the stories of how Jesus dealt with those who opposed Him. The story of this particular, very public confrontation in the temple in Jerusalem is found in Mark 12:18-27; where we’re told,
Then some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him; and they asked Him, saying: “Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man’s brother dies, and leaves his wife behind, and leaves no children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife; and dying, he left no offspring. And the second took her, and he died; nor did he leave any offspring. And the third likewise. So the seven had her and left no offspring. Last of all the woman died also. Therefore, in the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be? For all seven had her as wife” (Mark 12:18-23).
Can’t you just imagine the tension of the moment? I think they asked this question with a sly smile; because it was clearly a trick question—one that was designed to make Jesus appear foolish because of the things that He was teaching. It was a question that these clever individuals had used to perplex others with whom they disagreed. But what would Jesus say? Could He give an answer? You can almost feel the anticipation along with the crowd; can’t you?
And then comes the response—swift and sure;
Jesus answered and said to them, “Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. But concerning the dead, that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken” (vv. 24-27).
And I should tell you; in the other synoptic Gospels—Matthew and Luke—we’re told that the multitudes who heard this were astonished at Jesus’ teaching. The scribes who were listening in—and who were themselves experts in handling the Old Testament law—said that He had spoken well; and no one dared to question Him after that.
What an answer! What a Savior!
* * * * * * * * * *
There are lots of lessons to learn from this passage. One lesson, obviously, is that our Lord is wise; and knows how to give a true answer to even the most perplexing questions that His opponents put to Him. I happen to believe that that’s an applicable even today. We should never fear that the Christian faith will, somehow, be undone by the clever tactics or hostile questions of unbelieving people. Our resurrected Savior ever lives; and He Himself is able to defend and protect the truth that the gospel declares about Him. The unbelieving people of this current era of history may think that they are the ones who will have successfully disproven the Christian faith once and for all; but don’t waste a minute of your time worrying about it. They wont be.
Another lesson is that our Lord Jesus sets an example for us, who are His followers, in how to defend the truths of the gospel from those who try to twist and distort biblical truth. He dealt with this seemingly-perplexing question that put to Him by these skeptics by simply quoting—in a clear way—what it was that God’s word actually said, and by confidently affirming the power of God to do whatever He declares He will do in it.
But I would like to suggest to you, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, that the greatest lesson to learn from this passage has to do with a very practical and precious truth for you and me. It has to do with the precious truth about which these skeptics in this very passage were raising doubts; and that is the whole idea of ‘resurrection from the dead’.
In His earthly ministry, our Lord taught that the dead are raised. He even affirmed this before those who were opposing Him in teaching. In John 5, Jesus was being opposed by the Jewish leaders for the things that He was doing and teaching. And in verses 25-29, He spoke to them of Himself and said;
“Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man” (John 5:25-27).
That is speaking of a ‘spiritual’ resurrection—that is, of being raised by God from out of spiritual death and into new life in Jesus. But He then goes on to say;
“Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation” (vv. 28-29).
Clearly He taught the idea of the physical resurrection of the dead. And as He walked on this earth, as if to give proof of this to all, He literally raised people from physical death. He raised the little daughter of the synagogue ruler from death—even after she had clearly been pronounced dead. He also raised the son of a widow woman of the little town of Nain from the dead—right in the middle of his funeral! It hadn’t been too long before the events of our passage this morning that He had even raised His friend Lazarus from the dead and called him forth from the tomb. That was when He told the sister of Lazarus,
“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die” (John 11:25-26).
And in just a few days from the events of our passage, He would go on to prove, most decisively, that there is such a thing as a resurrection by the fact that He Himself would be raised from the dead—just as He had repeatedly told His disciples would happen. But these skeptics who opposed Him were in denial of all that. They did not believe the reality of what He taught or the things that He did, and sought to make Him look foolish for teaching it.
And that makes this morning’s passage—and the answer that Jesus gave to them—a very crucial one for us today. It touches upon something very vital to our faith. The apostle Paul put it this way:
Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up—if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).
If there is no such thing as a literal resurrection from the dead—if we have no real hope of being raised unto life from the grave—then the entire enterprise of the Christian faith is a tragic waste of time. We who follow Jesus, and who even suffer for devotion to Him, have made a great and foolish mistake and are wasting our life. We have no hope beyond the grave; and all our life of labors in the faith, and indeed even all of life itself, is ultimately in vain—’a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.
But the great value of this morning’s passage is that Jesus answers the question of these critics; and in doing so, He assures us—with great confidence of hope—that our God is the God of the living, and that His promise of our resurrection unto life is sure and certain.
It was in this confidence that our Savior faced the cross for you and me, dear brothers and sisters. And He here passes this same confidence on to us—even in an age when a confidence in such a promise is considered foolish by the unbelieving world.
* * * * * * * * * *
Now; Mark has been telling us the stories of the encounters Jesus had with the Jewish leaders, while in the temple in Jerusalem, just a few days before going to the cross. We’ve already read of some of these encounters—encounters with the chief priests and scribes and elders, and then with the Pharisees and Herodians. And this is yet another encounter. In Mark 12:18, we read, “Then some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him.” So; let’s begin by considering these individuals who came to Him with this question.
The Sadducees were a group of the high priestly and leading lay-families of Jerusalem. No one is exactly sure of this; but it is believed by many that they took their name from an Old Testament priest who ministered in the days of King David named Zadok. In Jesus day, the ‘Sadducees’ were very wealthy and worldly and aristocratic; and they were also known for being rather arrogant and harsh. They were pretty big on themselves; and they were not so much concerned with spiritual issues as they were about preserving their esteemed place in society.1
We can know something about them by the things that are said about them elsewhere in the New Testament. They came once to Jesus—along with the Pharisees—“and testing Him asked that He would show them a sign from heaven” (Matthew 16:1). They appeared to be very doubtful of spiritual things in general, and of Jesus in particular. Jesus warned His disciples, “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6); which He later explained mean that they were to beware of their hypocritical teaching (v. 12; see also Luke 12:1).
There’s a very interesting bit of information told to us about the Sadducees in Acts 23:8. They got into a big argument with the Pharisees; because “Sadducees say that there is no resurrection—and no angel or spirit”, while the Pharisees affirm these things. So, you might say that they had a lot in common with the secularized attitude that we see in so many people today—a predominately materialistic worldview, with too much of a confidence in the powers of human reason, and a soul-crippling skepticism about spiritual things.
But they were also people who seemed to have known the law of Moses. Historians tell us that they doubted the authority of all other portions of Scripture, but that they also esteemed the teachings of the law contained in the Old Testament books written by Moses. Generally speaking, they were big on the rules but down on the miracles.
So; members of this Sadducees party came to Jesus. They started off respectfully enough. They called Jesus “Teacher”. That’s how the Pharisees and Herodians greeted Him when they came, just shortly before then, to try and trap Him (see v. 14). Those Pharisees and Herodians didn’t mean it when they spoke to Him so respectfully; and I suspect that these Sadducees didn’t mean it either.
In verse 19, they said, “Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man’s brother dies, and leaves his wife behind, and leaves no children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.” And in saying this, they were quoting from a law that was given to Moses all the way back in Deuteronomy 25. It was a law that was intended to provide for the perpetuation of the name of a man in Israel who had died without having a child, and also to provide for the care of his widow.
I often think of how this law would have made it very practical and very important that every family—and especially the young men in that family—had a say in who one of the young men in the family started dating! If some young man got smitten by some young lady in the neighboring town, all his brothers would want to know about her. And they’d also want to make sure that their brother was healthy and in good shape; because any one of the other brothers might end up having to take his bride as his own wife one day if he wasn’t!
These Sadducees knew this law very well. And they didn’t seem to have a problem with the law of Moses itself. But in their opposition to Jesus, they crafted a hypothetical situation from this law. In verses 20-22, they said, “Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife; and dying, he left no offspring. And the second took her, and he died; nor did he leave any offspring. And the third likewise. So the seven had her and left no offspring. Last of all the woman died also” (vv. 20-22).
By the way; was this an actual event? It might have been. In Matthew’s version of the story, we’re told that they said, “Now there were with us seven brothers …” (Matthew 22:25). And if this were a true story—the story of something that had actually happened among them—then it would have been a tragic story indeed! But personally, I tend to think it was something they made up for argument’s sake—a hypothetical story for rhetorical purposes. The Sadducees were always having it out with the Pharisees; and it seems like the kind of brain-teaser they would have made up to stump the Pharisees—who did, in fact, believe in a resurrection and in angels and that people had a spirit.
And then comes the stumper. In verse 23, they asked Jesus, “ Therefore, in the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be? For all seven had her as wife.” How clever.
I wonder; have you heard people do this kind of thing today? I’m sure you have. There are some hard-hearted people out there in the world—many of whom, in fact, have a background in the Christian faith that they have rejected—who love to think that they have found absurdities in the Bible; and they love to try to stump believers with them. People who embrace sexual practices that are forbidden in Scripture, for example, love nowadays to attack the Book of Leviticus in this way—saying that since we don’t to try to live out the morality of Leviticus with its prohibitions against eating shellfish, or its commandments to stone rebellious children, that it’s absurd and hypocritical to insist that we apply its teaching on sexuality. “If we’re going to take the Bible literally,” I once heard one very prominent person say, “then members of the NFL commit a horrible sin against the Old Testament law every time they take hold of a football—touching a pig’s skin.” In saying such things, of course, they show that they don’t really understand the teaching of the Bible at all regarding the distinction between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, or the purpose of the Old Testament ceremonial laws to Israel.
I heard once about a famous atheist who loved to point out what he thought was the absurdity of the whole idea of a resurrection. “What happens to all our old toe-nail clippings?” he asked mockingly. “Do they also get raised? What about all our years and years of hair growth? And what about all our dead skin cells? Our bodily cells replenish every seven years or so. Won’t all those old cells get raised too?” This, of course, neither rightly understands what the Bible teaches about the resurrection, or the power of God in raising the dead. I feel like this was something similar to what these Sadducees were doing. “In the so-called ‘resurrection’—as you propose it, Jesus—who’s wife will this women be? How will that work out? Will she have one husband for every day of the week? Will she be taken out on seven anniversary dinners every year?”
But look again at Jesus’ answer. In verse 24, He says, “Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God?” That’s quite a thing to say to these very proud, self-assured Sadducees!—that they were “mistaken”. In the original language, the word means “led astray” or “deceived”; and it’s put in the passive voice of the verb; meaning that they were the recipients of the action—they were ‘led astray’ or ‘deceived’ by something. And look at what that something is! They did not “know”—in the perfect tense of the verb, which suggests a complete misunderstanding—two things: (1) what it is that the Scriptures actually said, and (2) what the nature of the power of God actually is.
He then speaks to the second matter first—what the nature of the power of God is with respect to those who are raised. In verse 25, He said, “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” He didn’t mean by this that people who are raised unto eternal life will become ‘angels’. Actually, the Bible teaches us that we who are raised will be greater than the angels in glory. Rather, this means that we will be like the angels in that we will no longer be subject to the kind of physical needs that made marriage necessary in the first place. Paul once wrote that “because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7:2). Marriage—as the Bible defines it—meets the temporary needs we have of proper expression of our sexuality, and for the raising of children. But for those who are raised unto eternal life, those temporal needs—made necessary because of our unglorified condition on this earth—will no longer have to be met.
I have often thought about his. Does this mean that I will no longer have a relationship with my wife in eternity? When I meet her on the streets of gold, will I only pat her on the shoulder and say, “Hey; good to see you again, ol’ chum! Let’s meet up for lunch sometime and talk about old times!” I certainly hope not! I love my wife; and I long to always love her and be with her. But I don’t think our relationship of love will end at all in heaven. God is the one who made the blessings and joy of marital love and closeness; and though I don’t believe heaven will involve the kind of physical expression of that love that is a part of marriage on earth, I believe that our love for our spouses will exist and continue in an even deeper and more profound way—in a way that we, in our present state of things, could not possibly understand or imagine.
But I think you can see what Jesus is saying. There won’t be a problem of seven men all fighting over one wife; because death will have concluded that temporal ‘marriage’ relationship—only to replace it with something greater and more wonderful in our union with Jesus Christ. We will be ‘like angels in heaven’ in that respect.
Well; these Sadducees wouldn’t allow themselves to understand that. They misunderstood the power of God with respect to resurrection. In fact, they didn’t even allow themselves to believe in angels, let alone that we will be like them in glory. And what’s more, they didn’t understand the word of God either. Jesus then goes on to deal with their first misunderstanding in verses 26-27; when He said, “But concerning the dead, that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.”
What an amazing thing it is that He said! They, of course, recognized the Old Testament passage that He was referring to; and so do you and I. It was the story in Exodus 3; where God introduced Himself to Moses at the burning bush. He said that God introduced Himself to Moses as the God of his Jewish patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These men lived and died some four to five hundred years before Moses met God at the burning bush. But do you notice that God said, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? It’s not that God merely had been their God; but that He is their God—right then, and right now! Though they had died physically, they were still alive; and they existed before God; and He could say, “I am their God”!
Now; the words of God at the burning bush, of course, don’t prove the resurrection. But they do prove the reality of eternal life. And Jesus made this an essential point about ‘resurrection’. He cited these words from the burning bush story “concerning the dead, that they rise”. If—according to the very Scriptures of Moses that the Sadducees had clung so tightly to—God preserves the ongoing existence of the spirits of those who love and trust Him in the spiritual realms, then surely He is able to raise their bodies to be reunited to those eternal spirits whenever He wishes. And He in fact does do so—as the Lord Jesus taught, and as He proved by performing miracles of the raising of the dead, and as He Himself proved by His own resurrection as “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20).
“You are therefore greatly mistaken,” Jesus told those Sadducees. And their inability to reply showed them that this was truly so.
* * * * * * * * * *
Dear brothers and sisters; there are many lessons to learn from this story. But above them all, I believe that the greatest lesson is that our God truly is the God of the living; and that our Lord’s promise of eternal life for those who trust in Him is sure and certain. As He Himself was raised from the dead, so shall we—who love and trust Him—also be.
Let’s give ourselves, then—with full confidence—to a whole-hearted devotion to Jesus Christ. We may suffer losses along the way; but we will never ultimately lose! As Paul put it;
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Cranfield, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 373.
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