The Resurrection
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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. The Pharisees raised the issue of paying taxes to Caesar, hoping that Jesus would either get Himself in trouble with the government or with the people. 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.
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