R.C. Sproul

And now today we're looking at the issue of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which was a serious dispute in the first century that divided these factions, divided the Pharisees from the Sadducees.

Sometimes we tend to think that there was great unanimity between the Pharisees and Sadducees because of their commitment with each other to the destruction of Jesus, but that's about all they agreed on.

Both the sect of the Pharisees and the Sadducees presumably began in the second century B.C., but they had serious theological differences.

On the one hand, for example, the Pharisees laid great emphasis and stress on the sovereignty of God.

They were the Calvinists and Augustinians of their day.

Whereas the Sadducees

were the Pelagians before Pelagius who believed that the affairs of men and of history were determined not by a sovereign God, but solely and exclusively by the unfettered free will of human creatures.

Secondly, the Pharisees affirmed their belief in angels and in the demonic realm, where the Sadducees categorically denied the very existence of angels or of demons.

A third point of dispute had to do with what was contained in the canon of sacred Scripture.

The Pharisees believed that the Scripture contained the Torah, which was the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, as well as the prophets and the writings, the wisdom literature and such.

whereas the Sadducees had a much more restricted view of the canon, recognizing only the Torah as the Word of God.

That is the first five books of the Bible.

So any appeals to writings beyond the book of Deuteronomy

did not count for the construction of theology as far as the Sadducees were concerned, and so they were convinced that since there was no teaching in the Torah about life after death, certainly there would be no resurrection at the end of the age.

The Pharisees

building their case largely on the teachings of the prophets, however, believed in life after death and in the resurrection.

So since this was a key point of dispute among them,

The Sadducees bring their case to Jesus, and they set up this conundrum, this poser about what would happen in the resurrection to these seven men who shared at one time or another the same wife.

And so they put the question to Jesus, the man marries a woman.

The man dies before the woman has any children, and according to the law of Moses, which is called the Levite law or the kinsman-redeemer commandment, the surviving brother of the man who perished was obligated to take his brother's widow as wife that his brother may have some offspring."