SPEAKER_00: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_02: Apostle Paul says, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.
SPEAKER_02: That Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures.
SPEAKER_02: That's what we've been considering this morning as we come before the Lord's table.
SPEAKER_02: But the verse from 1 Corinthians does not conclude there.
SPEAKER_02: Because if Christ merely died, we would still be hopeless, right?
SPEAKER_02: Continues on, for Christ died for our sins in accordance with scriptures, that he was buried.
SPEAKER_02: And that he was raised on the third day.
SPEAKER_02: That's our hope.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, we were purchased by Christ's shed blood, but that hope is secured in an empty tomb.
SPEAKER_02: Did you know that there are at least a third of the people in the United States of America that do not believe in the resurrection?
SPEAKER_02: At least a third.
SPEAKER_02: That means that at least a third of the people that we encounter on a weekly basis do not have the hope of the resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: Do you know that that's not unusual?
SPEAKER_02: Take your Bible with me this morning to Matthew.
SPEAKER_02: Matthew chapter 22.
SPEAKER_02: If you weren't with us last week, our guest speaker for our men's conference opened God's word for us on Sunday morning, and his emphasis was on sola scriptura, scripture alone, from Deuteronomy chapter 8 and verse 3.
SPEAKER_02: We saw how God tests us so that we might know that his word is trustworthy, that we can believe what it says, even when there might be something difficult to believe.
SPEAKER_02: I encourage you to listen to that sermon from Pastor Hughes if you haven't had a chance to do so.
SPEAKER_02: If you were here, you will soon realize how well the Lord set us up, not just for communion from Galatians, but for our text in Matthew from last week's sermon in Deuteronomy chapter 8.
SPEAKER_02: This passage for us this morning in Matthew 22, beginning in verse 23, reminds us that failing to trust God's word results in an ignorance of both the Word of God and the power of God.
SPEAKER_02: And that kind of an ignorance may lead to missing out on the resurrection to eternal life.
SPEAKER_02: If you have your Bible, I encourage you to follow along as I read, beginning in Matthew 22, verse 23.
SPEAKER_02: The Word of God says that the same day, the same day as the previous interrogation by the Pharisees' disciples, the same day Sadducees came to him, to Jesus, who say that there is no resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: And they asked him a question, saying, Teacher, Moses said, If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.
SPEAKER_02: Now there were seven brothers among us.
SPEAKER_02: The first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother.
SPEAKER_02: So too the second and the third, all the way down to the seventh brother and them all.
SPEAKER_02: After them all, the woman died.
SPEAKER_02: In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be?
SPEAKER_02: For they all had her.
SPEAKER_02: But Jesus answered them, You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures, nor the power of God.
SPEAKER_02: For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
SPEAKER_02: And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?
SPEAKER_02: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?
SPEAKER_02: He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
SPEAKER_02: And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.
SPEAKER_02: Amen.
SPEAKER_02: You know, the Judaism of Jesus' day was much like our modern Christianity.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes we feel like the times of the Bible and the culture of the Bible were far away and were very different.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, who among us wears clothes made of camel's hair and eats locusts and wild honey, right?
SPEAKER_02: Just seems weird sometimes.
SPEAKER_02: But in reality, the people and the culture were not that different.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe the details were different.
SPEAKER_02: But we are very much the same.
SPEAKER_02: First century Judaism and modern Christianity are like ice cream.
SPEAKER_02: There are all kinds of flavors, and it's almost impossible to keep track of them all.
SPEAKER_02: So it's difficult to look at people in the Bible and to peg them and say they were like this.
SPEAKER_02: Because our tendency is to say that they were all like that.
SPEAKER_02: And that's not really the case because people in the Bible times were just like us today.
SPEAKER_02: We are all different.
SPEAKER_02: We are very, very diverse in our attitudes, in our actions, in our preferences, in our styles, and in our convictions.
SPEAKER_02: Now, in the Bible, we hear the most about these people called the Pharisees, a group composed of Bible scholars and other Jewish leaders.
SPEAKER_02: Then we hear about Sadducees and sometimes the zealots.
SPEAKER_02: But there were different flavors of Judaism, if we can use that term, just like there are different flavors of Christianity today.
SPEAKER_02: We have Roman Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox.
SPEAKER_02: We have theological liberals and theological conservatives and innumerable points in between.
SPEAKER_02: And all of those call themselves Christian.
SPEAKER_02: So when we talk about Christians today, what do we mean?
SPEAKER_02: How do we define whether or not one person is a Christian when we vary so much from other people who call themselves Christian?
SPEAKER_02: We have this in common with first century Judaism.
SPEAKER_02: But we need to take another step to understand the Judaism of Jesus' time.
SPEAKER_02: So try to imagine the vast spectrum of religious Christianity in our world today.
SPEAKER_02: Once you've got that in your mind, now imagine the vast range of political ideologies just in our own country.
SPEAKER_02: That might be easier for some of us to do.
SPEAKER_02: Now try to imagine those vast differences in the political spectrum and the vast differences in the Christian perspective as inseparable.
SPEAKER_02: That is, your Christianity, your faith is married to your politics, and vice versa.
SPEAKER_02: In some cases, it's not too hard to imagine.
SPEAKER_02: So to talk of politics is necessary in order to speak about religion.
SPEAKER_02: And vice versa.
SPEAKER_02: That's why some people say at the Thanksgiving dinner, you don't talk about religion and you don't talk about politics, right?
SPEAKER_02: Two things that will get you in trouble.
SPEAKER_02: Well, that way of thinking, that those are married and they come together, is much closer to the Jewish way of thinking in Bible times.
SPEAKER_02: That's why, after three years of following Jesus, we find disciples still wondering if Jesus is going to do away with the Romans and set up his kingdom on earth.
SPEAKER_02: Their faith was married to their politics.
SPEAKER_02: The Jewish way was to believe in the God of Israel.
SPEAKER_02: And to believe in the God of Israel was to believe in God's restoration of Israel to freedom under the political rule of the Messiah.
SPEAKER_02: So politics and faith were inseparable.
SPEAKER_02: None of the disciples, or the Pharisees or the Sadducees for that matter, would understand our modern desire to separate politics and religion.
SPEAKER_02: It just wasn't a part of their thinking.
SPEAKER_02: Now that kind of environment is vital to understand for considering this section of treacherous questions.
SPEAKER_02: First by the disciples of the Pharisees and the Herodians, and now by the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_02: But I think we should probably pause here for a moment before we get into our passage to understand a little bit more about the history of these people groups because they're so different.
SPEAKER_02: They're so diverse.
SPEAKER_02: And we have to understand where they're coming from in order to understand the passage itself and what Jesus is intending us to get away to take away from it.
SPEAKER_02: So let's think first about the previous section, beginning in verse 15 through 22, where we have those Pharisees and their disciples and the Herodians.
SPEAKER_02: The Pharisees, we might compare them today to the theological and political conservatives that exist in our country.
SPEAKER_02: Remember, politics and religion, faith are inseparable for them.
SPEAKER_02: But they stood on the conservative side of the spectrum.
SPEAKER_02: They would be what we might call today the religious right of the time.
SPEAKER_02: Now there were groups that were even further right, extreme, we might say today, from the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_02: But they believed in the scriptures.
SPEAKER_02: They believed that God gave them the scriptures.
SPEAKER_02: They believed that they were the people of God and that it was imperative for them to follow their Old Testament as perfectly as possible.
SPEAKER_02: Their religious viewpoint might be described as sort of fencing God's word.
SPEAKER_02: So the law of Moses was a fence.
SPEAKER_02: And that fence kept you, if you didn't go over that fence, it kept you from disobeying and displeasing God.
SPEAKER_02: And as long as you didn't cross that fence, you were in God's good graces, you might say.
SPEAKER_02: But the Pharisees became so concerned about the holiness of God that they decided the fence itself of God's word needed a defense.
SPEAKER_02: So they fenced in the fence of God's word.
SPEAKER_02: With 613 commandments.
SPEAKER_02: And so you kept those 613 commandments so as to necessitate not crossing the fence of God's word.
SPEAKER_02: They so wanted to honor God that they went further than what God said.
SPEAKER_02: Was that a bad thing?
SPEAKER_02: Yes and no.
SPEAKER_02: Is it good to want to honor God and to keep his word?
SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02: They had righteous intents.
SPEAKER_02: But in doing so, they kept people from coming to God.
SPEAKER_02: It was their way of saying, let's not even get close to the fence of sin.
SPEAKER_02: Remember, though, faith and politics are inseparable.
SPEAKER_02: So for the Pharisees, their politics were nationalistic and anti-Rome.
SPEAKER_02: They hoped and prayed for the Messiah to come and to destroy the power of Rome and restore Israel to her glory days.
SPEAKER_02: It makes sense then why they would test Jesus with a question about the Roman census tax.
SPEAKER_02: That really, that was a burr under their saddle.
SPEAKER_02: Because they just said to them, Messiah hasn't come yet to set up his kingdom and be rid of Rome.
SPEAKER_02: And they partnered in that first section in verses 15 through 22 with the Herodians.
SPEAKER_02: The Herodians might be best described as the moderates, if we want to use our modern terms.
SPEAKER_02: They were mostly religiously indifferent or religiously moderate, but politically liberal.
SPEAKER_02: They were sort of caught in the middle between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_02: But they were still Jewish.
SPEAKER_02: Never would they relinquish their Jewishness.
SPEAKER_02: Never would they let go of their faith.
SPEAKER_02: There are some today who fit that description and still call themselves Christian.
SPEAKER_02: They say, I am politically liberal, but I am a Christian.
SPEAKER_02: Not a Pharisee.
SPEAKER_02: But I'm a Christian.
SPEAKER_02: In the same way the Herodians were Jewish.
SPEAKER_02: But they tended to kind of stay out of the religious fights, the religious squabbles.
SPEAKER_02: But they loved to squeeze their way into the political arena in order to benefit from the rule of Rome while still trying to hold on to their Jewish faith.
SPEAKER_02: So they're sort of caught in the middle, feeling the tug of both sides, and in the end giving in to what works best for them.
SPEAKER_02: Then there were the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_02: This group might be best compared to the theological and political liberals in mainline Christianity today.
SPEAKER_02: They weren't necessarily best buds with Rome.
SPEAKER_02: They had no desire at all to dispense with their Jewish faith.
SPEAKER_02: They would say, like we would say, I am a Christian.
SPEAKER_02: I am a Jewish believer in God.
SPEAKER_02: I follow the God of Judaism.
SPEAKER_02: But you know, you do what's best for you.
SPEAKER_02: You do what's best for your family.
SPEAKER_02: So if standing dogmatically on your Jewish convictions and your Jewish faith is problematic for your status in life or for your income, then, you know, it's okay to relax those convictions a little bit.
SPEAKER_02: If relaxing your faith and and and your your Jewishness a little bit to warm up to the Romans, if that meant a nicer house and a higher end neighborhood, then what's wrong with a little compromise and a little political alliance?
SPEAKER_02: If it feels good to take one side over another, then just go ahead.
SPEAKER_02: Do what makes you happy.
SPEAKER_02: You only live once.
SPEAKER_02: It's common to find folks treating God's word similarly, whether in first century Judaism or 21st century America.
SPEAKER_02: It's common to find people handling scripture loosely.
SPEAKER_02: If something feels uncomfortable, feel free to dispense with it.
SPEAKER_02: That's way back then.
SPEAKER_02: Or you know what?
SPEAKER_02: That was a different culture.
SPEAKER_02: We don't have that same culture, and so that that doesn't apply.
SPEAKER_02: Feel free to dispense with it or reinterpret it in a current context because if if taking a stand is going to cost you, then just let it go.
SPEAKER_02: You see, the Sadducees had it made.
SPEAKER_02: While the Pharisees were the top dogs among the ordinary people, the Sadducees held the most religious and political authority.
SPEAKER_02: They ruled everything surrounding the temple, and they were political insiders with the Roman authorities.
SPEAKER_02: If you stepped foot in the temple commons, you were on Sadducee territory.
SPEAKER_02: If the Romans made a decision regarding your faith or your your Jewishness, it likely had the backing of the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_02: They were often wealthy, comfortable, and powerful, and God's word made them uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, they were Jewish.
SPEAKER_02: They would never let go of that.
SPEAKER_02: Just like many would say, I'm, yeah, I'm Christian.
SPEAKER_02: But their faith served their politics, and their politics served their faith, and both their politics and their faith served their wallets.
SPEAKER_02: And this is the group that comes to Jesus in the second questioning encounter.
SPEAKER_02: They arrive with a religious question because Jesus is a religious teacher.
SPEAKER_02: But remember, back in chapter 21, Jesus was in the temple, and what did he do?
SPEAKER_02: He drove out the money changers and he drove out all the animals, and he says, You've made my house a den of thieves.
SPEAKER_02: You think that went over well with the Sadducees?
SPEAKER_02: Probably not.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus wasn't a political figure, but he was treading on their territory and negatively impacting their world and their life.
SPEAKER_02: So imagine then, just to try to put this into our modern culture, imagine a group of politically and theologically liberal church leaders and pastors from influential mainline denominations in Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_02: coming together to challenge Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: That might be the closest we can get to a modern comparison.
SPEAKER_02: You see, these Jewish leaders believed in the God of Israel.
SPEAKER_02: And they thought they were being faithful to that God.
SPEAKER_02: But they were not about to hold to the same convictions as the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_02: Did you know that the Sadducees didn't believe in the whole Bible?
SPEAKER_02: A few decades after this encounter, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote that there were 22 accepted books in the Jewish Bible.
SPEAKER_02: If you look in today's Hebrew Bible, there are 24, but they're the exact same just because they divide them differently.
SPEAKER_02: Some books like 1 and 2 Kings were put together, 1 and 2nd Chronicles were put together, so there are some differences there, but it's the same material.
SPEAKER_02: So just a few decades after this, that the Old Testament was already established and already together and recognized.
SPEAKER_02: But the Sadducees only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_02: They only accepted the Torah or the or the Pentateuch.
SPEAKER_02: They elevated Moses, the author of those books, to a godlike status.
SPEAKER_02: What anyone else wrote didn't matter much.
SPEAKER_02: And besides, they didn't like what the prophets wrote because it condemned what they were doing.
SPEAKER_02: And they didn't like the histories that put Israel in a bad light.
SPEAKER_02: But that also meant that some doctrines made them uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_02: One of those doctrines was the resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: The theological and political liberals didn't believe in the resurrection, nor did they believe, Acts tells us, in angels or the spirit world.
SPEAKER_02: They argued that Moses never wrote of the resurrection, and Moses never wrote of the spirit world.
SPEAKER_02: So they came to challenge Jesus because he was infringing on their territory.
SPEAKER_02: He was threatening their authority.
SPEAKER_02: He was undermining their positions and their cash cows.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus' teaching aligns more with the Pharisees, although he's not quite there, than with the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_02: So he makes it a normal enemy.
SPEAKER_02: So they make up a story to trap Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: They don't believe in the resurrection, but they act as if they do.
SPEAKER_02: They're lying and they're hypocritical.
SPEAKER_02: So they approach Jesus with a question based on the principle of what's called leveret marriage from the law of Moses.
SPEAKER_02: You'll find it described in Deuteronomy 25, verses 5 and 6.
SPEAKER_02: So their trap is based on something that Moses commanded them in order to set up a question about something they refuse to believe from Scripture.
SPEAKER_02: Whose wife, Jesus, will she be?
SPEAKER_02: Moses commanded us to do this.
SPEAKER_02: So we do it.
SPEAKER_02: Well then, in your supposed resurrection, whose wife will she be?
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus answers their question.
SPEAKER_02: He speaks to their refusal to believe in the resurrection, and he affirms the existence of Angels, all in one moment.
SPEAKER_02: It's glorious.
SPEAKER_02: But if we are not careful, we will miss the point.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, Matthew is showing us how everything is leading to the cross.
SPEAKER_02: This is the last week of Jesus' life.
SPEAKER_02: He has days from hanging on the cross.
SPEAKER_02: Matthew's showing us everything is heading there.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is gaining enemies.
SPEAKER_02: The intensity of the interaction with people is ratcheting up by the moment.
SPEAKER_02: His enemies are going to want him out of the picture.
SPEAKER_02: The river of Matthew's gospel account is flowing swiftly in that direction.
SPEAKER_02: But at the heart of this challenge is a convicting instruction about trust in God's word.
SPEAKER_02: Let's think about this in a little more detail.
SPEAKER_02: Since you've patiently stuck with me through this history lesson, I hope, I'll give you an outline.
SPEAKER_02: We'll look at the premise of this challenge and the problem with the challenge.
SPEAKER_02: And if you'll grant me another P, we will conclude with the teaching point of the passage.
SPEAKER_02: So, first, the premise of this challenge.
SPEAKER_02: The premise is God's instruction to Israel to raise up offspring for those who died without children.
SPEAKER_02: Now it sounds like a weird practice to our modern ears.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, if a husband and wife don't have children and the husband dies, but he has a brother, then the brother is supposed to take on this sister-in-law as his own wife so that they can have a child.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: That's what God said.
SPEAKER_02: Sounds weird.
SPEAKER_02: But we have to remember that it's not some far-off cultural extreme, even though it sounds that way to our modern ears.
SPEAKER_02: This is the command of God.
SPEAKER_02: If a husband died without children, his brother would marry the widow to produce an heir.
SPEAKER_02: And that child would be the heir of the deceased man, not the brother who married the widow.
SPEAKER_02: So there's a biblical example of this that you probably know well.
SPEAKER_02: You remember the story of Ruth?
SPEAKER_02: Naomi's husband, and took his family to Moab across the Jordan River from Bethlehem because there was no bread in the house of bread.
SPEAKER_02: And they lived there and they had two sons, Machlon and Kilion, and they married them off two Moabite women, and then the sons died without any children.
SPEAKER_02: Ruth and Naomi go back to Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_02: And there's this situation where there's a redeemer that needs to come into play to marry Ruth.
SPEAKER_02: So they go to the city square and Boaz says, Hey, hey, Mr.
SPEAKER_02: So-and-so, he's never named on purpose.
SPEAKER_02: Mr.
SPEAKER_02: So-and-so, I'd like to redeem Ruth, which means I'm going to marry her, because he's the nearest kinsman.
SPEAKER_02: He said, But you have a closer kinsman relationship than I do.
SPEAKER_02: So you are first in line.
SPEAKER_02: And Mr.
SPEAKER_02: So-and-so says, Yes, I will marry her.
SPEAKER_02: And then Boaz says, Oh, but you know, if you do this, you also then redeem Naomi.
SPEAKER_02: And it means that anything that, any produce that you have, any children that you have, get the inheritance that goes to the other person.
SPEAKER_02: And Mr.
SPEAKER_02: So-and-so says, Oh, you know what?
SPEAKER_02: So I think about it, if I do this, then my own children are not going to have some inheritance taken away from them because it's going to go over here to this family.
SPEAKER_02: No, I can't do that.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not willing to do that.
SPEAKER_02: He passes the buck.
SPEAKER_02: So Boaz says, Great, I'll do it.
SPEAKER_02: Some normal situation.
SPEAKER_02: It's a command of God.
SPEAKER_02: In that way, the line of descent, the family line, would be maintained, and the inheritance that God had given Israel in the land would continue on down the line to the family.
SPEAKER_02: The command is found in Deuteronomy chapter 25, verses 5 and 6.
SPEAKER_02: Conveniently, in one of the five books, the Sadducees believed to be the Word of God.
SPEAKER_02: So now Jesus shows how people inevitably end up with faulty doctrine when they pick and choose which parts of the scriptures they want to believe and which ones they want to ignore.
SPEAKER_02: Another history lesson, though.
SPEAKER_02: Ancient Israel didn't have a detailed theology of the afterlife in the Old Testament times.
SPEAKER_02: God had not yet revealed more of those details.
SPEAKER_02: And so before the time of Jesus, people thought primarily of life and the grave.
SPEAKER_02: Life and death.
SPEAKER_02: Doesn't mean that there wasn't more, they just didn't think in that way.
SPEAKER_02: The belief that death and the grave ended anything that mattered was the accepted reality.
SPEAKER_02: So they believed that eternity rested not in some life to come, so much as in the continuation of your family with children and descendants.
SPEAKER_02: And so, to put it crassly, you won the game of life if you died with children to carry on your name.
SPEAKER_02: That was all that mattered.
SPEAKER_02: And so that theology was supported by God's command to raise up children for a deceased brother.
SPEAKER_02: And that idea of a resurrection from the dead was sort of uncommon in Old Testament times, but it grew in popularity during the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
SPEAKER_02: And it was an increasingly popular concept in Jewish literature of that time, but it wasn't thought of in individual terms.
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't thought of, oh, I'm going to put my beloved one in the ground and someday God is going to raise him up.
SPEAKER_02: That wasn't the way they thought about it.
SPEAKER_02: It was thought of in terms of national or ethnic identity.
SPEAKER_02: See, Judaism believed that God would resurrect his people from the dead altogether.
SPEAKER_02: God would raise up his chosen people Israel as a nation of God's people.
SPEAKER_02: And that's why it's so important to keep the family line going.
SPEAKER_02: But it was also not just a religious conviction, it was political.
SPEAKER_02: Because with God's powerful national resurrection came victory over Israel's enemies.
SPEAKER_02: So political triumph came through the religious conviction of God's mighty work on behalf of his people.
SPEAKER_02: That's why groups like the Maccabeans could revolt against Rome, be crushed, crucified, and destroyed for their rebellion, and yet still be national heroes.
SPEAKER_02: Because God would raise up all of Israel one day in victory over Rome.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah! That's why some joined the zealots and some joined the Sukari or the assassins.
SPEAKER_02: Because political hopes were held hand in hand with religious convictions.
SPEAKER_02: Unless you were a Sadducee.
SPEAKER_02: Because a Sadducee, Sadducee couldn't bring himself to view Rome as the enemy, because that would mean losing my position, losing my authority, giving up my power, my wealth, and my comfort.
SPEAKER_02: Because if I'm to believe the prophets who promised a coming king who would conquer Israel's enemies, that would then put me at odds with Rome.
SPEAKER_02: So what is a politically and theologically liberal Sadducee to do?
SPEAKER_02: The only thing that's left to do.
SPEAKER_02: Stick with Moses.
SPEAKER_02: That's safe.
SPEAKER_02: But while the theological and political conservatives are now putting their hope in a future resurrection, that's the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_02: They're saying the resurrection's gonna come.
SPEAKER_02: We're going to have this rescue both religiously and politically with a resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: The theological and political liberals are stuck with the continuation of the family as their hope.
SPEAKER_02: Their only hope is that their children will also be in Rome's good graces.
SPEAKER_02: And the way to ensure that was to placate the Romans and to adhere to the law of Moses.
SPEAKER_02: Unless you could somehow trap Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: And then everything else was on the table.
SPEAKER_02: So for the sake of expedience, they put Moses on the table along with an assumption about a resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: And that's where we need to understand a little bit more about the problem of the challenge.
SPEAKER_02: On the surface, the Sadducees refused to believe in the resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: But if you just look through your Bible, you will see that your Bible in the Old Testament speaks very clearly to a resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: For example, Daniel chapter 12 and verse 12 says that many, many of those who sleep in the dust, that's a turn of phrase for dying, who sleep in the dust, shall awake to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
SPEAKER_02: That seems clear.
SPEAKER_02: Oh then there's then there's Isaiah.
SPEAKER_02: So Daniel, okay, that's still in Babylon, but a little bit before Daniel in Isaiah chapter 26, Isaiah prophesies, your dead shall live.
SPEAKER_02: Their bodies shall rise.
SPEAKER_02: You who dwell in the dust, what's that referring to?
SPEAKER_02: Well, God said to dust you're going to return.
SPEAKER_02: That's talking about dying and going into the ground, returning to what God made you from.
SPEAKER_02: You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy, for your due is a deight, and the earth will give birth to the dead.
SPEAKER_02: It would be difficult to make the truth of a resurrection any clearer, would it not?
SPEAKER_02: But those passages aren't from the Torah, are they?
SPEAKER_02: They're from the prophets.
SPEAKER_02: And the Sadducees, they just can't take the prophets.
SPEAKER_02: They're picking and choosing which passages of Scripture they want to recognize and which ones they don't.
SPEAKER_02: And they declared that the resurrection wasn't true because Moses didn't write about it.
SPEAKER_02: Our modern parallels are claims like, oh, Jesus never condemned homosexuality or LGBTQ stuff.
SPEAKER_02: The word abortion is not found in the Bible.
SPEAKER_02: For that matter, the word Trinity is not in the Bible.
SPEAKER_02: The best one I've heard is, yeah, it's not in my red letters.
SPEAKER_02: Or that's just that's just an Old Testament cultural thing.
SPEAKER_02: We pick and we choose.
SPEAKER_02: Because we like some things and they feel good to us, and so by or by the simple nature of picking and choosing something, we are neglecting something else.
SPEAKER_02: It attempts to establish personal preference as gospel truth by taking part of God's word out of the picture.
SPEAKER_02: You see, the the question of the resurrection is just a surface issue.
SPEAKER_02: But Jesus shows them how baseless their argument is because he takes them back to Exodus chapter 3 in verse 6, where it says that God said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
SPEAKER_02: Where is, remind me again, where is Exodus in the biblical order of books?
SPEAKER_02: Second.
SPEAKER_02: Who wrote Exodus?
SPEAKER_02: Moses.
SPEAKER_02: It's in the Torah.
SPEAKER_02: Moses wrote it.
SPEAKER_02: There's no way for them to deny this text.
SPEAKER_02: When Moses wrote this?
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_02: Abraham's been dead five, six hundred years.
SPEAKER_02: Is Isaac alive?
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_02: Is Jacob alive?
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_02: But God said, I am the I am.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus says that even though Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are dead, their being raised to life again is grounded in the fact that God is their God.
SPEAKER_02: In the present tense, from that time, continuing on, there was not a time in which he was not their God.
SPEAKER_02: They claim to know, the Sadducees, they claim to know that God only revealed his word through Moses, but Jesus says, you are ignorant even of what Moses said.
SPEAKER_02: The truth, Jesus says, is that there will be a resurrection.
SPEAKER_02: And the Sadducees' eternal hope in the propagation of their families and the Jewish people of God is a false hope.
SPEAKER_02: Because in the resurrection, the only thing that matters is whether God is your God.
SPEAKER_02: Being married or given away in marriage will cease to carry the same level of significance.
SPEAKER_02: Not because there was anything wrong with it, but because God is going to supersede those human elements with something far more significant.
SPEAKER_02: He says his people will be like angels.
SPEAKER_02: What a slap in the face.
SPEAKER_02: Note note, he doesn't say we're going to be be angels.
SPEAKER_02: Right?
SPEAKER_02: Don't confuse that.
SPEAKER_02: It's a comparison.
SPEAKER_02: Be like angels in that they don't marry and have children.
SPEAKER_02: And so in one brilliant sentence, Jesus declares that there will be a future resurrection from the dead, and his eternal plan will supersede our earthly reality when that takes place.
SPEAKER_02: And there is a greater reality than this physical world, and that is the spiritual realm in which God exists, in which holy angels serve him and his people, and evil angels oppose everything that God does.
SPEAKER_02: And one day that realm will become a reality for everyone, to our great delight or our eternal dread.
SPEAKER_02: If God was the God of Abraham, then he is the God of the past.
SPEAKER_02: If God is today the God of Abraham, then he is the God of Abraham today.
SPEAKER_02: And if there's going to be a resurrection in which God reunites souls with bodies, then he must also be the God of Abraham in the future.
SPEAKER_02: But there's this one tense and unstated question underneath all of this.
SPEAKER_02: Is the God of Abraham the God of the Sadducees?
SPEAKER_02: Because if you reject all of that scripture, and you can't even see the truth of the scripture that you do accept.
SPEAKER_02: Is the God of Abraham the God of the Sadducees?
SPEAKER_02: Is he your God?
SPEAKER_02: Or do you have a God of your own making?
SPEAKER_02: Here's the teaching point of this passage.
SPEAKER_02: You do not know the God of the Bible if you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.
SPEAKER_02: And the lasting eternal reality may be that you miss out on the joy of eternal resurrection to life with Christ.
SPEAKER_02: These are Jewish leaders whose personal opinions and cultural sensitivities rose above Scripture.
SPEAKER_02: Scripture was no longer sufficient to establish their doctrine or guide their ethics.
SPEAKER_02: Because Scripture needed blending with culture, it needed blending with politics, it needed blending with personal comfort, blending with my own happiness and my own satisfaction.
SPEAKER_02: And if I don't like it, I can't blend it together.
SPEAKER_02: And when our culture and our comfort are combined with Scripture, Scripture loses its rightful place.
SPEAKER_02: And that results in people who call themselves God's people, but who are not led by God's word.
SPEAKER_02: The Sadducees said, we need more than the biblical text.
SPEAKER_02: Because it wasn't good enough.
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't sufficient enough.
SPEAKER_02: They needed something more.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus comes along and turns that on its head.
SPEAKER_02: He upends their religious and political world by turning them back to sola scriptura, to scripture alone.
SPEAKER_02: And he grounded his argument in the words of the text.
SPEAKER_02: Not in what he felt like doing, not in what the culture wanted him to do, not in the pressures of and anxieties of his world, but in what God said.
SPEAKER_02: And the Sadducees missed what God said by seeking something other than Scripture or beyond Scripture or some spiritual sense based on feeling or emotion.
SPEAKER_02: And in missing what God said, they missed out on trusting in the power of God on their behalf.
SPEAKER_02: Friends, don't pick and choose what you want to believe.
SPEAKER_02: Submit yourself to all of Scripture.
SPEAKER_02: For in submitting yourself to all of Scripture, it is there that you will find the power of God.
SPEAKER_02: That same power of God on our behalf is most evident in Jesus Himself.
SPEAKER_02: The Apostle Paul said it most succinctly.
SPEAKER_02: The reality of the truth is in Scripture displayed in Christ and is a power on our behalf.
SPEAKER_02: If we believe, it takes that reality and it squashes it like an annoying mosquito on a summer day in order to shut out God's truth.
SPEAKER_02: They do not want to hear it.
SPEAKER_02: My friends, let God speak his word.
SPEAKER_02: Hear him in all of it.
SPEAKER_02: And so come to know not just the scriptures, but the saving and sustaining power of God in your life.
SPEAKER_02: Let's pray, Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: May we know this power.
SPEAKER_02: May we know you.
SPEAKER_02: May we know the truth of your word that's sustaining grace for every day.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, we confess that too often we make your word about us instead of first hearing what you have to say.
SPEAKER_02: Open our ears and our hearts to see you first and to hear you in the words of what you've given us.
SPEAKER_02: So that we might magnify your name through your word.
SPEAKER_02: In Jesus' name we pray.
SPEAKER_02: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: He the theme of heaven's praises robed in frail humanity.
SPEAKER_01: In our longing, in our darkness, now the light of life has come.
SPEAKER_01: Look to Christ to condescend it.
SPEAKER_01: Competition, be the perfect son of man in his living, never trace or stay the trunks in the hellbound man, Christ the great and show profilement of the law enemy Come behold the wondrous mystery Christ the Lord upon the tree in the stead of ruins sinners hangs the lamb in victory See the price of our redemption see the father's man on ball bringing many sons to glory race on measure of Come be home the wondrous mysteries lay by death on God of life But no grave could ere restrain Praise the Lord is alive What a forte of deliverance How unwavering our home Christ in power resurrected as we will be when he comes What a forte of deliverance How unberring our home Christ in power resurrected as we will be when he comes the New Testament tells us that we've come to faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_02: Abraham is our father.
SPEAKER_02: I think it's appropriate in that sense that we have been grafted and adopted into the family, that we can apply Deuteronomy thirty, verses nineteen and twenty for I call heaven and earth to witness against you today.
SPEAKER_02: That I have set life and death before you blessing and curse.
SPEAKER_02: Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.
SPEAKER_02: Loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him.
SPEAKER_02: For he is your life in the length of day, and that you may dwell in the land that the Lord has given to you to Abraham and Isaac.
SPEAKER_02: To obey his voice and to hold fast to him as your life.
SPEAKER_00: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_00: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com