The Reality Of Resurrection

THE REALITY OF RESURRECTION.

Matthew 22:23-33.

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 (Matthew 22:23). 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. This is why they congratulated Jesus on His ingenious response (cf. Luke 20:39). According to Moses, argued Jesus, death is not the end because Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive to God (Matthew 22:31-32; cf. Exodus 3:6)! “The multitude” were content to be “astonished” at Jesus’ teaching (Matthew 22:33).

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). We gather from all this that belief in the resurrection of the body is an essential article of the Christian faith.

As to the nature of the resurrection, Jesus does give some clues. The Sadducees were ridiculing belief in the resurrection when they asked their hypocritical hypothetical question (Matthew 22:24-28), based on their own favoured Scriptures (especially Deuteronomy 25:5). In the wording of this argument they were playing the part of unbelievers!

“You do err,” responded Jesus, “not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). If we will rightly learn the Scriptures, and will honestly take into account (as an absolute fundamental) the very power of the God who is able to do all things (cf. Matthew 19:26), 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 in the resurrection” there will be no more marrying, nor being given in marriage. They are “as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30).

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).