A QUESTION OF RESURRECTION.
Mark 12:18-27.
There have probably always been, and always will be, people whose so-called ‘faith’ is defined not so much by what they BELIEVE, as by what they DO NOT BELIEVE.
Yet people will stand and rattle off ‘their’ Creeds without a thought, and when questioned will suggest excuses why they should not ‘literally’ believe the very thing that they are so blindly reciting.
What is even more alarming is when people are allowed to stand in Christian pulpits and to deny the very things which even Jesus Himself endorsed!
The Sadducees, the ruling class in the Jerusalem Temple, flatly denied the resurrection of the body (Mark 12:18). They failed to find this teaching in their only authoritative Scriptures, the five books of Moses (Genesis to Deuteronomy). To them it seemed to belong to relatively ‘recent’ books such as Daniel (cf. Daniel 12:2).
The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed and taught this doctrine.
When the Apostle Paul, a former Pharisee now converted to the Christian faith, was obliged to make his defence before the Sanhedrin - the council made up of both Sadducees and Pharisees - he cried out: ‘it is of the hope and resurrection of the dead that I am held to account’ (cf. Acts 23:6-8).
Later the Apostle would declare the vanity of a ‘faith’ which denies the resurrection (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:14; 1 Corinthians 15:17).
The Sadducees were ridiculing belief in the resurrection when they asked their hypocritical hypothetical question (Mark 12:19-23), based on their own favoured Scriptures (especially Deuteronomy 25:5). In the wording of this argument they were playing the part of unbelievers!
“Are you not mistaken,” responded Jesus, “because you do not know the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24).
If we will rightly learn the Scriptures, and will honestly consider (as an absolute fundamental) the very power of the God who is able to do all things (cf. Mark 10:27), and with whom nothing is impossible (cf. Luke 1:37), then all our doubts will surely be dispelled.
You are confusing ‘this age’ with ‘that age,’ suggested Jesus. “For when they rise from the dead” there will be no more marrying, nor being given in marriage. They are “like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25).
This is not a call to celibacy in this life, but a recognition of the ‘change’ which will occur at the resurrection (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:51-54).
If we want some idea of what the resurrection body may be like, we have only to look at that of the risen Lord Jesus, which had marks of both continuity and discontinuity with His earthly body.
‘And if Christ rose from the dead,’ argued Paul, ‘how can anyone say that there is no resurrection?’ (1 Corinthians 15:12).
According to Moses, argued Jesus, death is not the end because Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive to God (cf. Exodus 3:6)! “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye do therefore greatly err” (Mark 12:26-27).
We gather from all this that belief in the resurrection of the body is an essential article of the Christian faith.
READ: 1 Corinthians 15:55-58.
