Are you my wife? Luke 20:27-40
Big Questions...Real Answers Sermon #02
Many of us as youngsters had Dr. Seuss read to us. This morning let me take a few moments and read a portion of one of his books, perhaps you’ll even recognize it: “A mother bird sat on her egg. The egg jumped. ‘Oh, oh!’ said the mother bird. ‘My baby will be here! He will want to eat. I must get something for my baby bird to eat!’ she said. ‘I will be back!’ So away she went.
The egg jumped. It jumped, and jumped, and jumped! Out came the baby bird! ‘Where is my mother?’ he said. He looked for her. He looked up. He did not see her. He looked down. He did not see her. ‘I will go and look for her,’ he said. So away he went. Down, out of the tree he went. Down, down, down! It was a long way down. The baby bird could not fly. He could not fly, but he could walk. ‘Now I will go and find my mother,’ he said. He did not know what his mother looked like. He went right by her. He did not see her. He came to a kitten. ‘Are you my mother?’ he said to the kitten. The kitten just looked and looked. It did not say a thing. The kitten was not his mother, so he went on. Then he came to a hen. ‘Are you my mother?’ he said to the hen. ‘No,’ said the hen. The kitten was not his mother. The hen was not his mother. So the baby bird went on. ‘I have to find my mother!’ he said. ‘But where? Where is she? Where could she be?’ Then he came to a dog. ‘Are you my mother?’ he said to the dog. ‘I am not your mother. I am a dog,’ said the dog. The kitten was not his mother. The hen was not his mother. The dog was not his mother. So the baby bird went on. Now he came to a cow. ‘Are you my mother?’ he said to the cow. ‘How could I be your mother?’ said the cow. ‘I am a cow.’ The kitten and hen were not his mother. The dog and the cow were not his mother. Did he have a mother?” And you’ll remember that in the story, the baby bird eventually though was united with his mother.
In our text today in Luke 20 we have a “Are you my wife?” story and a question for Jesus thrown at Him by His enemies, the Sadducees, Luke 20:27-40. Someone has dubbed this account “one wife for seven brothers.”
As Jesus nears the end of His ministry, wave after wave of religious storm troopers launch their attacks on Him. He’s just silenced a combined assault of the Herodians and Pharisees about paying taxes. It’s as if the Sadducees were watching the whole thing and now that the other group had been driven off, they decide to launch their own assault – and they had a good one – a theological brain teaser. They had probably used it many, many times before. It had always stumped their competitors, the Pharisees, surely it would have the same results with Jesus, this hayseed from Nazareth.
Though the Sadducees were well-known in Jesus’ day, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., they disappear from history. This is the only time they are mentioned in the book of Luke. Mark also only mentions them once in his record of this same encounter.
a) Who are the Sadducees? The Sadducees were the “blue bloods” of their day, known for their arrogance and rudeness. Apparently, they had become an aristocratic, elite class based on their hereditary advantage. They were descendants of the ancient high priest, Zadok. They had been granted the privilege of serving as priests after the return from the Babylonian captivity. These “Zadokites” made up most of the priests who staffed the Temple. During Jesus’ day the Sadducees had a monopoly on the high-priestly line. Ananias, the high priest was a Sadducee. They also held the bulk of the seats in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. The Temple was their source of revenue. They carried on a lucrative business of money-changing and selling animals for the sacrifice. It was their money-changers Jesus threw out of the Temple...Jesus wasn’t exactly on their “top 10 friends” list. Then, they were sympathetic toward Rome – Messiah-talk threatened their status-quo.
b) What did the Sadducees believe? The Sadducees only accepted the Pentateuch; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, as inspired. They denied the existence of angels and demons. They were skeptical of anything supernatural outside of God Himself. Swinburne’s famous line, “That no life lives forever, That dead men rise up never,” could have been written by a Sadducee. It was all so simple for the Sadducee – for them there was nothing beyond. They didn’t believe in the resurrection, the continuation of the soul or even retribution in a future existence. Philosophically, they were committed to “God helps those who help themselves” in the here and now. They didn’t believe God ever intervened and they rejected divine providence, arguing that everything in life is up to man.
While the Sadducees may be dead and gone, their philosophical grandchildren are alive and well, even in the Church in America. Some times I’ve had to ask myself, “Am I an American Christian or a Christian in America?” Those are two very different worldviews. This is an area in which I have personally grown over the past few years. It’s my belief the American flag really does not belong in the church, except maybe on special occasions. That’s because as believers, we are citizens of another, greater kingdom. And certainly the two flags, the Christian flag and the American flag, should never be on an equal plane. We’re Christians 1st, Americans 2nd.
Too many times we’ve succumbed to protecting the status quo. Much of contemporary Evangelicalism is wrapped up in the American flag. Sermons will be preached on television with the American flag in the background symbolizing a way of life. Like the Sadducees, we often reduce the Bible to fit our American way of thinking. Even in the Church, individualism reigns. Each person struggles and sweats for their own personal fulfillment. Rather than asking why this fleshly egocentric approach does not satisfy our souls, we instead attempt to make our vain and toilsome activity meaningful by bringing in motivational speakers and gurus to inspire us to exercise Free Will in such a way that we will be “winners.” We are masters of our fate, captains of our souls. But then tornadoes hit Kansas or fires rage across New Mexico. We become faintly aware of our own frailty and a glimpse of harsh reality begins to transform us to disregard our individualism, and living for the “here and now.” We’re ripe for the question, “Is this all there is?”
The Sadducees believed that this world was all there is. That’s really the foundation of their question. They presented this “straw man” scenario in an attempt to trap Jesus and make Him look like a country bumpkin – for they themselves did not believe in the resurrection. They didn’t believe there was a hereafter or that there would be a final accounting...Do we?
While their question deals with a unique problem as far as the Sadducees were concerned, the topic it treats is a fundamental one: Will people be raised from the dead? The resurrection is not optional to the Christian faith because on it hangs three core issues: accountability before God, judgement and eternal life. Without the resurrection, death would be the end, our accountability to God would be limited only to this life – judgement and eternal life would be meaningless. While death may be the great equalizer, since we must all die – the resurrection is the great, no, the greatest opportunity, since we all have the opportunity to enter into eternal life.
As we work our way through this passage, let me suggest several Principles within this account that are essential for our spiritual and eternal health.
1. Our family responsibilities are very important on this side of heaven.
A minister was speaking to a Sunday school class about the things money can’t buy. “It can’t buy laughter and it can’t buy love” he told them. Driving his point home he said, “What would you do if I offered you $1000 not to love your mother and father?” Stunned silence ensued. Finally a small voice queried, “How much would you give me not to love my big sister?”
The Sadducees, though deniers of the resurrection, produced a question, which, they believed reduced the doctrine of the resurrection to an absurdity. They did this through using an injunction from the Old Covenant, a command from the Mosaic Law. Because Israel’s promises from Yahweh are interrelated to the land, not losing the land, family name or the inheritance – particularly by a family dying out – was critical. The Law contained a provision called Levirate Marriage. We don’t know how often it was practiced. Both Genesis 38 and the book of Ruth evidence that it was practiced to some extent, while there is no indication that it was still being practiced at the time of Christ. Levirate Marriage stipulated that if a man died childless, because the perpetuity of the family name and inheritance were crucial, his brother was under obligation to marry his widow and have children in his brother’s name. These children would be legally regarded as his brother’s. If the man though refused to marry the widow, they must go to the elders. The woman would take off the man’s shoe, spit in his face and curse him. This brother would be under a stigma for his refusal.
The Sadducees then cited a case of Levirate Marriage. They may have borrowed the idea from the apocryphal book of Tobit, which tells the bizarre story of a woman who married seven times only to have each husband strangled by a demon in the bed chamber on the wedding might (a kind of intertestamental Stephen King tale). But according to their story, there were seven brothers, each dying childless, who one after another married the same woman, finally the woman died (she was probably worn out). Then they asked “At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” after all, there were seven candidates? Their story even has a touch of humor, since one gets the feeling that it is a sentence of death to marry this woman! Can you just imagine this poor woman finding seven former husbands waiting for her on the other side of the Pearly Gates! I can’t help but think she would go back and check the sign on the gate to make sure that it really did say “Heaven.”
Of course the question is absurd. It was based on the presupposition that life in the resurrection is an exact counterpart to earthly life. This woman would then either be guilty of sevenfold incest – for all eternity...or she might be designated the wife of one of the brothers, or she might have to choose one of them – but which one? It was a theological catch-question if there ever was one. They were trying to demonstrate the absurdity of the resurrection by this type of monstrosity it might cause in a future life. They were not truly looking for an answer, they just wanted to stump our Lord. But even in this farfetched case, there is a Principle that we need to be aware of in this Church Age.
Though we are saved by grace and are not under the Law, we don’t get off scot-free. Church Age saints do have some “obligations” to at least the OT ethic. Within this Levirate Marriage regulation, there is the seed thought for a NT responsibility, Our family responsibilities are very important on this side of heaven. Now most of us willingly acknowledge our responsibility to our immediate family, but Levirate Marriage was not immediate family. It is not our children or our mate or even our parents – it is our siblings, our nieces and nephews. Let me suggest that even in a rootless, transient culture like the U.S., believers still have Biblical responsibilities to their extended family. 1 Tim. 5:4 says “But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.” Later today many of you will be spending time with family and extended family. Let me urge you to seek to repair any broken-down relational bridges with your siblings. Perhaps you’re the only believer in your family. God might use you as His light in your clan to win not just your siblings, but perhaps nieces and nephews. Nearly every family has a “black sheep,” please do not hold it against your nephews or nieces because their parents have in the past behaved irresponsibly. You may be their source of opportunity to change the family’s future by living in the light.
Note: Just a sidelight here, the Sadducees, with this extreme case, also demonstrate their low view of women – they saw this wife as little more than family property and a potential family “baby factory.” Such thinking is abhorrent in the NT – women are not 2nd class citizens in the Kingdom!
2. We make our greatest mistakes because we are greatly ignorant. Both Matthew and Mark record this potent response from Jesus, Matt. 22:29, “Jesus replied, ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God’.” They were about to be slam dunked. It was like Danny Devito taking on Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one.
Michael Billester once gave a Bible to a humble villager in eastern Poland. Returning a few years later, he learned that 200 people had become believers through the use of that one Bible. When this group of believers gathered to hear him preach, he suggested that before he spoke he would like each person to quote some verses of Scripture. One man rose and said, “Perhaps, Brother, we’ve misunderstood you. Did you mean verses or chapters?” Billester was astonished. “Are you saying there are people here who could recite complete chapters of the Bible?” That was precisely the case. In fact, 13 of them knew half of Genesis and the books of Matthew and Luke. Another had committed all of the Psalms to memory. Combined, these 200 people knew virtually the entire Bible by memory.
The Sadducees’ problem had two sources: 1) Ignorance of God’s Word, and, 2) Ignorance of His power. Almost all errors and sins among believers can be traced to one or the other.
What we dare not miss here is that these men were supposed to be the teachers in Israel! They were to be teachers of the Word but they were ignorant of the Word – but notice that though they were so ignorant, they were at the same time, so arrogant! American Christians today are probably more Biblically illiterate than at any other point in our history. Yet they’re typically arrogant, opinionated and often obnoxious, much like the Sadducees. What’s the problem? Though they may sometimes have information, they lack application. A true heart knowledge of God’s Word and power will always produce a sense of awe, humility and graciousness. When we see how great God is – through His Word and power – then we realize how small and insignificant we are. These Sadducees would have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment if they had stopped speculating about what heaven was like and instead studied God’s Word. It’s one thing to be able to quote passages that we think support our preconceived convictions, it is quite another to understand and follow the teaching of God’s Word. To understand and yield to what Scripture says is quite different from empty intellectual knowledge.
Jesus’ order of the “Word” and then the “power” is not an accident. We must know God’s Word before we will ever experience His power. The Church, the average believer today, lives in such feeble spiritual conditions because we are so ignorant of God’s Word. The key to God’s power is faith but as Romans 10:17 so beautifully states, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” We experience God’s power as we commit ourselves to live by His Word.
Ask any great cook about aluminum foil and you’re bound to get an opinion on which side is best. Some swear the shiny side must always be on the outside of a baked potato, while others condemn such nonsense and emphatically claim exactly the opposite. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are amused by the whole debate. You see, when aluminum foil is made, it’s rolled. One side of the foil becomes shiny because it comes in direct contact with the heavy roller. The other side stays dull because it never makes contact with the roller...but both sides produce the same results! The average believer today will debate trivialities of God’s Word while the Father just wants us to use It and apply It to our lives. Then we’ll know His Word and power!
“On the table side by side; A Holy Bible and the TV Guide, One is well worn but cherished with pride, (Not the Bible, but the TV Guide). One is used daily to help folks decide, No! It isn’t the Bible; it’s the TV Guide. As pages are turned, what shall they see? Oh, what does it matter, turn on the TV. So they open the book in which they confide (No, not the Bible, it’s the TV Guide). The Word of God is seldom read, Maybe a verse ere they fall into bed. Exhausted and sleepy and tired as can be, Not from reading the Bible, but from watching TV. So, then back to the table, side by side, It’s the Holy Bible and the TV Guide. No time for prayer, no time for the Word; The plan for salvation seldom is heard. Forgiveness of sin so full and so free Is found in the Bible, not on TV!!” These Sadducees did not know His Word or His power... Do we?
3. This life is not like the next. We used to just get our morals from Hollywood, now many of us are also getting our theology from Hollywood. We think of heaven and death in terms of the special affects of a “What Dreams may come” or “The Sixth Sense.” Our concepts of spiritual beings come from “Touched by an Angel” or “Twice in a Lifetime.” And while such shows are moral and sentimental, the concepts they “teach” are foreign to Biblical truth.
We often make the same mistake the Sadducees were making, we create heaven in our minds...in the image of earth. Their perceptions of heaven had evolved through the grid of their earthbound experience. Men have always done so. Native Americans looked at death as going to the “Happy Hunting Grounds.” The Vikings, who were warriors, saw death as “Valhalla”, where they would fight all day, and where at night the dead would be raised and the wounded healed so that they could battle again. And at night they would celebrate, drinking wine from cups made from the skulls of their conquered foes. Muslims see death as a place where men would live in a place where every physical and sensual pleasure would be satisfied. Man’s tendency has always been to conjure up a heaven from his earthbound experiences. The only accurate portrayal of heaven though is in God’s Word, from the God of heaven and earth. Paul writes, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him–but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:9-10).
The Lord Jesus was an advocate of a “new age” movement. While that expression has disturbing connotations today, the fact remains that Jesus was teaching a “new age” that was very distinct from the “old” order. Resurrection is not the restoration of life as we know it; it is entrance into a new life that is different.
What is this new life going to be like? Luke 20:34-36.
a) There will be no marriage in heaven and no concern about past husbands and wives, but that does not suggest in the slightest a reduction in love. When my best friend, Fred Froman, asked Susan, his wife, to marry him, he told Susan he would love her forever but Susan replied, “Well, I’ll love you as long as we live, but in heaven we’ll just be best friends.”
The fact that there is no marriage after the resurrection may be good news to some who have unhappy marriages, but if you are in love with your mate and as happy as I am, it seems kind of sad. The good news is that we’ll love each other more, just not as husband and wife. We’ll be ourselves at our ultimate best and will be more loveable and more capable of loving than ever before.
Now some ask, “Will we know each other in heaven?” I love Spurgeon’s reply to that question, “Do you think we will be greater fools up there than we were down here?” At the Mount of Transfiguration the disciples recognized Moses and Elijah. Yes, we’ll know each other, just better.
b) There will be no death in heaven. Marriage and procreation are essential to this mortal, earthly life so human life can go on. But since there is no death in heaven (we “no longer die”), marital intimacy will be surpassed by spiritual intimacy. Heaven has no coffins or cemeteries. There will be no gray hairs or bald pates on the heads of God’s immortals.
c) We will be like the angels. Now Jesus does not say we will be “angels” but like them. We will be like them in beauty and strength. Our resurrected bodies will have powers of which we now have no conception. We will have an enlarged mental capacity (you won’t forget someone’s name or where you laid something down) and you will have a greater spiritual range. We have been “sown in weakness” but will be “raised in power.”
d) Like the angels, our character will be faultless. The angels perfectly do God’s will. We now have to pray “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” there we will always do His will! We will have no unrighteous desires, no covetous cravings, no proud thoughts–we’ll never even say the wrong thing. Habitual sins we struggle with now will be gone for all eternity!
e) Like the angels, we will perpetually worship God. When I was naive of what Scripture taught about worship, I believed that the singing was kind of the commercial before the real worship – the preaching. I now know that is not true. In heaven we will worship God for all eternity, most of us would do well to start practicing down here. The angels bow before Him, they veil their faces at His holiness. They sing and shout His praises. And we will have even more to sing about because we have been redeemed, “Never did angels taste above, Redeeming grace and dying love.” Joy will ever be our emotion because joy is the emotion of Heaven. To be like angels is to be God’s children and children of the resurrection! Jesus slam dunks the Sadducees and obliterates their foolish notions of a crass earth-like continuity in eternity.
4. The living God is the God of a living people. In His final answer, (vss. 37-38), Jesus slam dunks them one more time. He proves their ignorance of the Word. He does not direct them to some obscure passage that only theologs might know about. The Sadducees held that only the Torah, the five books of Moses were authoritative – so Jesus takes them right to the Torah and the writings of Moses, “in the account of the bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise.” Though several hundred years had passed God does not say “I was the God of...” but “I am.” The Almighty was not the supreme Monarch of graveyards; He was not the Lord of bones. A king cannot be a king unless he has subjects to reign. A man can hardly be the principal of a school if there are no children within a thousand miles.
Jesus logic was: God’s statement (present tense), “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” makes no sense if they are not presently alive. If someone comes to you and says, “I was your father (or your mother’s) friend,” it may be because your parent is dead or there has been a change in their relationship. But if one comes to you and says, “I am your father’s (or your mother’s) friend,” that conveys two things: the existence of your parent and the ongoing relationship. God, in this threefold repetition is not only declaring the ongoing existence of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but also His ongoing relationship with them. To put it another way, if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are nothing but dust, God cannot now be their God! (Whoosh! It’s a slam dunk! You can almost hear the swish!)
The writer of Hebrews tells us that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs knew that the covenant promises God had made to them transcended earthly life and were eternal, Heb. 11:8-10, 13, 16. Then Jesus turns the Sword of the Spirit for the final thrust, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive” (vs. 38). If God is the God of the living, and since God had said, long after the deaths of the patriarchs, that He is their God, then they must be alive – and resurrection is coming! And if the Sadducees had only understood the nature of the miracle-working God of the OT, they would never have doubted His power to raise the dead!
D. L. Moody said, “One day you’ll read that Moody is dead. Don’t you believe it for at that moment I will be more alive than ever before!” Death did not separate the patriarchs from God and death will not separate us from God. He’ll not abandon us as we “walk through the valley of the shadow.” Paul reminds us in 2 Cor. 5:8, “absent from the body...present with the Lord.”
My friend, our hope and confidence in the resurrection rests upon the Word of God and His infinite power. To believe the Word of God and to trust in the power of God is much more than a head game – it should change both our beliefs and our behavior. Sadly, as one Britisher observed, “In England, we say that God is dead, but we pray to Him just in case. In America, they say that God is alive, but they live as if He were dead.” Our confidence in the resurrection should radically change the way we live.
Conclusion: As we close, let me point out, the degree to which we believe in the resurrection of the dead will determine the way that we presently live. If we truly believe in the resurrection, then we will boldly stand for Christ, fearing neither man nor death. If we believe that this world is not the end, we will look at this life very differently. It will totally change our “investment strategy” – of our time, money – our very lives.
People who are like angels do not die. My first funeral was for an elderly saint named, Bess Norum. She was a small lady, barely 5’ tall but Bess had a heart of gold and the spirit of a lion. She had more spunk than most people I’ve met. When I see Bess Norum again, it will be the same body in which she died. And I’ll recognize her at once, but everything will now be perfected. She will have a glorious body, now in its eternal potential. Her personality will be at its fullest – her wit, her charm, her tenacity, her love. She will be noble, beautiful – even regal – because she will be like Jesus!
Jesus said of the Father, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (vs. 27). He has an eternal relationship with the living. My friend, is He your God? Are you alive? Are you His child? Is He going to make you all that He ever intended you to be?
There are many areas in this life where we can afford to make mistakes. If you make a financial mistake, you’ll probably have a chance later to recoup your losses. Athletes may fail and lose a game, but there is usually next season and next year. Sometimes we even stumble spiritually, like Peter, but when there is true repentance, there will usually be new opportunities. But Jesus was talking about eternity. His emphasis was not on time, but on eternity. And in this realm, no one can afford to be wrong – there is no second chance. The biggest mistake the Sadducees made was that they were gambling with their very souls – please, my friend, don’t gamble with your’s!
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” How our hearts as believers should burn with this truth! We’ve not talked about the half of it today, but what has been said is so powerful, so shaking, that I hope that it grabs your soul! It should change our lives – has it changed your’s?
