Chapter 1: What hope do Christians have regarding resurrection?
If you use your imagination and try to conjure up the greatest possible experience that you would have in heaven, once you reach the pinnacle of that imagination, multiply it by a million times, and you still won't have reached what God is preparing for His people.
When we have that kind of eternal perspective, as the hymn goes, the things of earth grow strangely dim. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. During His earthly ministry, people confronted Jesus, asking Him questions to trap Him. And today, another question is posed to Him, a question about marriage and eternal life. But they didn't trap Him.
Before we hear today's sermon from R.C. Sproul and Jesus' response to the question from the Sadducees, remember that if you'd like to study all of Mark's Gospel, you can request Dr. Sproul's commentary when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. Well here's Dr. Sproul in Mark chapter 12.
We're going to turn our attention now once again to the gospel according to Saint Mark. I will be reading from chapter 12 beginning at verse 18 and reading through verse 27. And then some Sadducees who say there is no resurrection came to him
And they asked Him, saying, "'Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man's brother dies and leaves his wife behind and leaves no children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.' Now there were seven brothers."
The first took a wife, and dying he left no offspring, and the second took her, and he died, nor did he leave any offspring, and the third likewise, so that the seven had her and left no offspring. And last of all, the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection when they rise, whose wife will she be? For all seven had her as wife."
Jesus answered and said to them, Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures, nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. But concerning the dead… that they rise.
Have you not read in the book of Moses in the burning bush passage how God spoke to him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken."
When we looked the last time at the confrontation that Jesus had with the Pharisees and Herodians, I mentioned that chapter 12 gives to us three episodes of encounters that Jesus had with various groups that were present in that day. each of which had their own agenda, and each of which came to Jesus trying to trap Him and impale Him on the horns of a dilemma.
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Chapter 2: How did the Sadducees challenge Jesus about marriage 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." 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. But Jesus rebukes them for this reason, you are mistaken because you don't know the Scriptures.
You know, I think 100% of the theological errors that we make are because we don't know the Scriptures, because God has revealed the same things to all of us. It's in the same book. We read the same book, but we don't always agree on what the book teaches, and that's because we don't really know what's in there.
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Chapter 3: What was Jesus' response to the Sadducees' question?
He takes him to the Torah, takes him to the second book of the Old Testament where he says, "'Have you not read in the book of Moses, in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him?' That is, to Moses, saying, "'I am the God of Abraham.'" the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He's not the God of the dead, but He's the God of the living. Therefore, you are greatly mistaken."
To prove his point, of future resurrection, Jesus goes right to the very book that they thought did not teach life after death. And he said, what do you think the Bible is teaching? God's not the God of the dead. And why would God say I'm the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, unless He was still the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?
Do you realize what that means to us today? That Abraham, dear friends, is still alive. Isaac still lives. Jacob is alive and well because their lives are in the hand of the God of the living who will not let death end our personal existence. So that we find in this text, dear friends, not only a magnificent philosophical refutation of the views of those who would try to entrap Jesus.
But we find from our Master's lips once again His bold and strong affirmation to the oldest question that man has, which is this, if a man dies, shall he live again? And our Lord, without hesitation, answers that question in the affirmative. We have life, and we have it forever, and to miss that is not only to be mistaken, Jesus said, but to be greatly mistaken.
My prayer, dear friends, is that that mistake may never be found
This life is full of pain and hardship, and you may be experiencing some sort of difficulty right now. Well, R.C. Sproul's sermon pointed our attention away from our present circumstances and provided us with an eternal perspective.
I'm glad you're with us today on Renewing Your Mind as we spend several weeks in the Gospel of Mark, seeing how Jesus responded to those who sought to trap Him with theological questions. If you'd like to read more of Dr. Sproul's exposition of these questions in Mark 12 or his commentary on all of Mark, I do encourage you to respond to today's resource offer before midnight tonight.
When you give a donation to help fuel the spread of the trusted teaching we feature every day on this program, to thank you, we'll send you his hardcover commentary on Mark. Drawn from his sermon series in Mark, you'll gain his pastoral insights from this fast-paced gospel. Respond now at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes.
But when questioning Jesus, the religious and legal scholars of the day did their best to trip him up, but they never succeeded. Next Sunday, they'll try again as they ask which commandment was most important. So I hope you'll join us next Sunday for another sermon in the Gospel of Mark, here on Renewing Your Mind.
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