R.C. Sproul

But suppose the second the brother dies, and the woman still doesn't have any children.

and they have another brother, so the third brother marries the woman, and still she has no offspring, and he dies, and so on until we have seven brides for seven brothers or something like that.

We actually have seven grooms for one wife, and all of the men die without the woman bearing any children, and then at last she dies.

And so the obvious question that the Sadducees put before Jesus is this, right?

The woman's had seven husbands.

Who's going to be her husband in heaven?

Now, any time I stand up to preach in this pulpit about anything,

My chief responsibility is not to please you or the choir, but my ultimate responsibility is to please God.

He's the one who's going to judge me for how carefully I have handled His Word.

But today, I have a dilemma of my own, because not only do I have the responsibility of pleasing God,

I have the unenviable task of trying to please my wife on how I handle this text.

And we all know that her name is She Who Must Be Obeyed.

And this is one of her persistent theological inquiries that she brings to me.

She said, Honey, are we going to be married in heaven?

And I'm not sure how to answer that because I try to flee from this text as fast as I can because I know the text doesn't give my wife very much comfort or, on the other hand, maybe it would be bad news for her to think that she would have to stay married to me for all eternity.

So remember the vows was to death do us part.

know, this is a strong commitment, but I don't know that it's an eternal one that we've entered into between us.

But in any case, Jesus answered the inquiry of the Sadducees with a rebuke.

Listen to this for a minute, folks, because it's so easy for us to sit back in the comfort of the twenty-first century

and look in judgment at these contemporaries of Jesus of His day and think about how stupid or how arrogant they may have been where we harbor so many of the same ideas and same attitudes within our own hearts.