When a person gains interest in Jesus, especially when we accept his rule and love in our lives, the reality of Jesus’ teaching concerning the resurrection of the dead must be considered and ascribed to in one aspect or another. The resurrection addressed in this encounter with the Sadducees is not the Lazarus resurrection type (John 11). Nor is this resurrection like Elijah’s and Moses’ appearances with Jesus on the mount (9:30-33), although there are similarities. Nor is it about where our soul and spirit go when this body stops living.
The Sadducees’ question and Jesus’s answer regards the resurrection of all the dead in Christ at the beginning of the next age (34-35; Matthew 22:29; Mark 12:24; 1 Corinthians 15). The Sadducees were descendants of Levi and controlled Temple worship in Jesus’ time. They did not believe in this resurrection. Most Sadducees believed that after we die, a person’s existence ends. They recognized that Jesus’s teaching included this resurrection. So they tried to publicly humiliate the man who overturned the tables of the money changers in their temple with a silly hypothetical question.
Jesus first responded to the silliness of their hypothetical question. Matthew and Mark record Jesus telling them they were in error because they do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. Then he tells them that those worthy of the coming resurrection of the dead at the end of this age will neither marry nor be given in marriage as has been done till today (34-35).
Secondly, Jesus says the people at the resurrection to come will never die physically, just as angels can no longer physically die (36). Lazarus and all those before like him physically died again. No, the resurrection to come is different.
I do not want to be like the Sadducees who were in error because I do not know the Bible and the power of God.
More on this resurrection in the next BDBD.
