Sadducees & Resurrection

Mark 12, 18 through 27.

And the Sadducees came to him who say that there is no resurrection.

And they asked him a question saying, Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves his wife, but leaves no child, man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.

There were seven brothers.

The first took a wife, and then he died, and left no offspring.

The second took her and died, leaving no offspring.

And likewise the third and the seven left no offspring.

Last of all the women also died.

In the resurrection, they rise again.

Whose wife will she be?

For the seven had her as a wife.

Jesus said to them, Is this not the reason you are wrong?

Because you know neither 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 the angels in heaven.

And as for the dead being raised, have you not read the book of Moses in the passage about the booksh?

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 of the living.

You are quite wrong.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Uh so thankful to gather together with you all.

Um if you've been coming here for a while and you hear uh somebody from the stage uh on the cusp of telling a joke that would make everyone cringe, then you would probably expect uh, oh, this is actually gonna happen.

Um because that's uh well, congratulations, I'm your pastor.

Uh so thank you for the joke and the restraint, Veronica.

All right, let's pray together.

Holy Father, we praise you for your loving kindness.

Lord, we praise you that you will not uh leave our bodies for corruption, but that you promise a resurrection for us.

Lord, that our whole lives are shaped by this hope, that when we face deaths of all kinds throughout our lives, hopes of futures that we uh mourn at not getting to experience in the way that we had thought, uh, deaths of loved ones, and Lord, when we understand that all all of our lives end in death, that we do not have a fear of the meaninglessness of the lives that we're participating in, we do not have a fear of the punishment for our sins.

Lord, but we have a hope of resurrection to eternal glory with you, because you are the one who took the death for us, and you are the one who grants us your resurrection.

Lord, I pray this hope would saturate our hearts and minds this morning.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

So Jesus is uh still in the temple, it is holy week, and he is creating these strange unities all over the place.

Uh last Sunday, Jacob described to us that the Pharisees and the Herodians, who are these natural enemies, had gathered together in opposition to Jesus.

And today we see that the Sadducees are coming to oppose Jesus while he's teaching in the temple.

And that's strange because the Sadducees and the Pharisees are natural enemies as well, and yet they are united against Christ.

The Sadducees are going to provide an example.

Uh they're actually going to give Jesus basically a riddle, and they're going to try and take him down by this riddle.

It's it's almost like the Pharisees, excuse me, the Sadducees, probably not the last time that's going to happen this morning.

The Sadducees will walk up to Jesus and ask him something like, Can God uh make a rock so big that even he can't lift it?

And then Jesus would say, ah, a contradiction in God's omnipotence.

My whole project is foiled.

And then the Pharisees, excuse, well, yep, the Sadducees would uh be victorious.

That type of riddle is the one that's going to be proposed this morning.

So Jesus creates these sort of strange unities of people that it shouldn't be together.

They are oppositional until Christ arrives on the scene.

And this is typical of Christianity itself.

Christianity is always creating these strange unities of parties that would have otherwise been opposed, but they're united in their opposition to Christ.

And so that's why the world itself can present this image of uh openness and this sort of radical inclusivity, and that it can make sense when it is opposed to the teachings of Jesus.

But we must recognize that it is not a true unity.

It is a unity that is about as deep as the unity between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

The only thing that is actually, it's not a unity, it's a co-belligerence against Jesus and who he is and the one that is truly Lord.

And that is uh not not a true unity.

Who are the Pharisees and the Sadducees?

Why are they so different?

And why are they a strange, uh, why is it strange that they are united against Jesus Himself or united in anything?

Well, the Pharisees were separatists.

So they uh removed themselves from the culture of the Greeks and the culture of the Romans, whoever the occupying force was, the Pharisees were the ones that were able to remain secluded from this occupying force and develop an image of their faith that was separatist and pietistic.

And the Pharisees had an uh honor for the full Old Testament as the Word of God, but likewise, and in basically equal terms, they honored the teaching that had accrued around the Old Testament as on an equal footing with the Word of God itself.

So they had a system of tradition, which, as we've seen through the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is consistently undermining.

And he's saying, your system of tradition you actually think of as more important than the scriptures, and because of your high honoring of your tradition, you are actually dishonoring the scriptures.

The Pharisees also believed in resurrection.

The Sadducees were not separatists, they were compromisers.

And so the Pharisees would look at the Sadducees and say, they're not the real deal, they're compromisers.

But because of their compromise, they were afforded positions of real power within the society.

And so that's one of the reasons that the Sadducees were the ones who ran the temple.

They were in charge of the temple, what took place there, how things operated, when the who would be selling where, and who would be uh making sacrifices.

That all was the responsibility of the Sadducees.

Now remember, it was just a day ago that Jesus came into the temple and cleansed it by driving out all of the money changers and basically exposing this is a badly run temple.

So the Sadducees were not fans of the Pharisees at this point.

I believe the term he uh used was a a den of thieves.

It's not a that's a bad Google review for the temple in Jerusalem.

But the but the Sadducees only respected the first five books of the Bible, and they did not believe in the resurrection.

So they denied that any resurrection would happen.

And that's the most important aspect of the Pharisees for our, nope, of the Sadducees for our uh looking at them this morning and the riddle that they proposed to Jesus.

So what we're going to see happen is them present a case that the scriptures themselves require that there is no resurrection.

There is no hope of resurrection.

And then Jesus will expose that the way that the Sadducees are thinking is flawed at the most fundamental levels.

That the ones who have the greatest education, the greatest credentials, and the highest levels of teaching of the scriptures know nothing of the scriptures.

So let's get ready for Sadducees versus Jesus riddles in the dark.

Mark 12, 18 to 19.

The Sadducees came to him who say there is no resurrection.

Remember, that's the important thing that we're uh I think you lost your soccer ball.

Nobody knows but me.

You can get it.

Nice.

Go.

Let's not let that happen again.

I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding.

It's next.

The Sadducees came to him who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.

You guys know about that, right?

So, Deuteronomy 25, this principle of Leverite marriage is explained.

And we actually, strangely, last year, you may remember, we talked about Leverite marriage three times last year.

I was going for four, it would have been the record.

But we hit it three times because we talked about Judah and Tamar on three separate occasions last year, which is a story in Genesis 38 that deals with this practice of Leverite marriage.

And it is precisely what's explained here that when a woman takes a husband, and if her husband dies and she has no offspring, then it becomes the responsibility of her brother-in-law, her husband's brother, to marry her and provide her with offspring in her brother's name.

Excuse me, in his brother's name.

This is Leverite marriage, is it doesn't roll off the tongue, it's like sad, you see.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, why are they why are they so unhappy?

Why are they so sad, you see?

So the uh so the principle is that it the brother's name would have been lost in Israelite history, but his name ought to be preserved.

And so uh the woman marries a man, the man dies, leaves no offspring.

That man's brother has the responsibility of marrying the woman and then providing her with offspring.

So that's the principle of leverite marriage.

It's shown to us in the story of Genesis 38, and it's explained to us explicitly in Deuteronomy chapter 25, the law of Moses, as it's laid out.

Deuteronomy 25 · chapter mention

So they lay out this principle.

You may be thinking, what does this have to do with resurrection?

Well, we'll find out soon.

They provide an example, a sort of a maximal example of what this principle requires.

So in Mark 12, 20 through 22, they say, There were seven brothers.

The first took a wife, and when he died, left no offspring.

And the second took her and died, leaving no offspring, and the third, likewise, and the seven left no offspring.

Last of all, the woman also died.

This is sort of the maximal example of Leverite marriage.

It's seven, because this is a Jewish story, and that's basically the way of saying this is the maximal possible example.

Imagine a woman with a week of husbands, and she ends up with no offspring, but a rightful claim to marriage to each of these seven husbands.

So that's the that's the case study that they're laying out.

Some commentators say this actually happened, others say it's just an example.

I say, how could you possibly know a thing like that?

In Mark 12, 23, it says, here's their question.

So we've got the story.

Now here's their question.

In the resurrection, Jesus, when they rise again, whose wife will she be?

For the seven had her as wife.

That's what they did afterwards.

And they likely thought something like, The uh uh, see, the Pharisees that just came after Jesus with their uh paying taxes the Caesar question, we could have figured that one out.

We're the ones who are on board with Caesar.

In fact, we collect some taxes here that we send over to him all the time.

No problem.

The Pharisees are not equipped to answer the real questions of Scripture as we Sadducees are, plus, they believe in resurrection, as we see Jesus does.

We are the ones who are skilled and equipped to be able to take down this false teacher.

So they ask him this riddle: who will she be married to in the resurrection?

And what it's supposed to expose is that any of the husbands, if Jesus picks one and he's like, it's the third, because he had the lovely singing voice.

Any choice would just be arbitrary.

And what that would show is that, well, each of the marriages were fundamentally arbitrary, and then that would expose that all marriage is fundamentally arbitrary and none of the law of Moses really means anything.

Well, that's not a possible outcome.

The shape of the argument is to show that the biblical teaching, which is plain in Moses, the teaching of Leverite marriage, if that is true, then it creates a natural contradiction with the doctrine of resurrection.

So if we assume that the scriptures are true, which everyone in this conversation does, the Sadducees and Jesus, they assume the scriptures are true, and then we assume the doctrine of resurrection, they are seeking to show that this creates a contradiction, and therefore, if if there is a contradiction there, and the scriptures plainly teach this, the scriptures win.

And so there is no doctrine of resurrection.

The shape of that argument is is it's called a reductio ad absurdum, which you can kind of hear uh precisely what that means, just in what the Latin kind of sounds like.

And the shape of that argument is you you demonstrate that one side of an argument is wrong by assuming the principles of this side of the argument, and then showing that it creates an internal contradiction with itself.

And then by showing that it creates an internal contradiction with itself, then you're proving that the other side of the argument must be correct.

So it could sound something like this if you wanted to hear it in the most boring way possible.

The first premise is the teaching of scripture requires a woman to only have one husband.

See Genesis 2.

The teaching of Scripture requires a woman to marry her brother-in-law if her husband is deceased.

See Deuteronomy 25.

Here's our assumption.

If the resurrection is true, the woman would have multiple husbands.

Do you see that?

If the resurrection is true, after the resurrection, when she'd married these seven husbands, then it implies that the woman would have multiple husbands, in this case, seven, with legitimate claims of being her husband.

Remember premise one?

The scripture requires a woman to only have one husband.

Therefore, there is a contradiction between the scripture requiring a woman to only have one husband and the resurrection being true, resulting in a woman having multiple husbands.

Therefore, the resurrection isn't true.

That is the like third or fourth time in my life that my philosophy degree is actually really, really worked.

Because I practiced doing that for like four years straight.

So you can see that they're creating this contradiction.

So the way they're pinning him, say the doctrine of resurrection creates a contradiction with scripture.

What are we gonna go with?

We're gonna go with scripture.

If we really trust the scriptures, then uh the doctrine of resurrection is absurd.

Now, Jesus' response to this, in so many words, is that they are very wrong.

Mark 12, 24.

Jesus said to them, is this not the reason you are wrong?

Because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.

We have to see how completely he is saying that they are wrong in their denial of the resurrection.

He says, You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.

Now, in the framework of their thinking, in the framework of Christian thinking, there are two real sources of knowledge.

There's the creation itself, which we refer to as general revelation.

You can look out and see the intricacy and the design and the detail of the creation itself.

And what that requires us to conclude as we look out and observe it, is that there is a divine power that has established this creation.

And so what he's saying is, you do not know the power of God, which means that they do not understand even the shape of the world itself.

And he says, you do not know the scriptures.

Now, this is a particularly damning claim against the Sadducees, because they are the ones who are experts in the scriptures.

And you can tell they're experts because look at how subtle their argument is.

And expertise is, I don't know if you've spent any time around experts, it's a subtleness competition.

Where half the proof of your argument is the difficulty of others in seeing it.

But they are demonstrating here, Jesus says to them here, you do not know the scriptures, which they would have said we're the Sadducees, were the keepers of the scriptures.

We take it so seriously that we've even narrowed them down to the real scriptures, just the first five books of the Old Testament, just the Pentateuch.

What Jesus is saying is He's what he's teeing them up for is I'm not about to beat you on a technicality like you're about to try and beat me.

What I'm about to demonstrate is that your position is so completely out of step with everything you ought to know about the world and everything you ought to know about the scriptures themselves, that your entire framing of this question reveals that you actually know nothing.

And in order to come to terms with the answer that I'm going to give you, your entire worldview must be reframed.

Your whole perspective on the creation itself and on the scriptures themselves and on the way that those seamlessly interact with one another is going to have to be completely reframed in order for you to understand this question.

And he is showing.

This sort of strange thing, which is the answer that I'm about to give you, you ought to know.

You ought to have already known the answer to the question that I'm going to give you.

So Jesus enters into the particulars of their question and he provides these answers, which are fundamentally a defense of resurrection.

Mark 12, 25.

Excuse me, I think I skipped up.

I skipped one.

Yep, I skipped one.

Nope, I didn't skip one.

Is this not the reason that you are very wrong?

You know neither 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.

The sticking point for me in this sermon, when I was reading through this, is Jesus implies so clearly you ought to have known this.

I've read the Old Testament.

And I think, how ought I to have known that in the resurrection there's neither marriage nor nor are we given in marriage?

And because we're like the angels, why is it that we ought to have known that?

Well, there's one sense which is very plain, that they ought to have known that after this death, marriage has ceased.

And that's because death and the ending of a covenant are the same thing.

Death and the ending of a covenant are the same.

This is one of those, this is one of those hard things for us to get because we all think we know what death is.

And we all we we've we've been to funerals, we've seen dead people.

Not in the you know, not to give away the ending.

But uh he was dead the whole time.

Spoilers at this sermon for movies from like 1999.

At the end of Titanic, the ship sinks.

We think we know what death is, and we think of it as just like this physical biological reality.

But the first introduction of death is not just a physical biological reality.

Adam and Eve are in a covenant with the Lord in the garden.

He is their God, they are his people.

They're in Eden, which is this priestly temple.

They are given a position of dominion over the temple.

It's kind of like the Sadducees, the ones that have this position of dominion over the temple.

And the way that they ought to lead that temple is that they might promote the flourishing of the temple structure that they are in, which is the Garden of Eden.

They might spread the flourishing of the temple structure that they are in, and all of that would be to the glory and honor of God, who they are in a present and immediate relationship with.

And the definition of that present and immediate relationship is a covenant.

It's a covenantal relationship.

There are terms to this covenant, just as there are terms to every relationship, you already know this: that in order for a relationship to be real, it must conform to a particular definition.

You know this even for implicit relationships, because if you met someone and you kind of hit it off and they texted you the next day and said, We're best friends now, you would say, That's not that's not how this works.

There's terms to this relationship.

And it's gonna take a it's gonna take a little bit more than you know, one time where we quoted the same movies together.

It only takes a little bit more than that for me.

But it's gonna take a little bit more than that for us to move this thing into the category of best friends.

Well, that's a fact of relationships.

And this is described to us in the scriptures where all of our relationships with God are laid out in covenantal terms, where the terms of the relationship are made explicit.

That way we might freely participate in it.

Because there's a bondage of relationships which do not have an explicit frame.

And that bondage sounds like I don't know who we are in this.

That's why we've invented these horrible categories.

Like, how are how are things going with you guys?

It seems like it's going good.

Yeah, we're talking.

We're talking.

That's a that's a that's bondage, is what that is.

Definitely bondage for one of the people who's experiencing that.

The terms of the covenant are obedience to the Lord, service in the way that He has commanded them, and do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

There is a constraint which looks like adultery, so that the relationship would be ended when this constraint is violated.

Adam and Eve break the covenant, and they are cursed with death.

The breaking of a covenant and death are the same.

We think of it as just the breaking of a covenant and death.

Uh death is perhaps just the implications of the breaking of a covenant.

I'm trying to show that it it's it's it's more than just the implication.

It is, it's almost like what it means to break a covenant is to die.

That's more, there's a sense in which that's more to the heart of the matter than biological decay and ceasing to exist.

Because what's more to the heart of the matter of our of our reality?

It's that it demands us to confess that there is a divine power over it, that we are related to.

If that relation is broken, it is death.

There's a sense in which the Sadducees are exposing, they already understand this principle.

Because it's implied in the concept of Leverite marriage.

When the husband dies, the covenant is over.

That's why she's able to remarry.

Do you see it?

Why was it that she was able to marry the second husband?

Because the first husband died.

And the third husband?

Because the second husband died.

And the fourth husband?

Because for some reason nobody was asking questions.

But you see that it's because the covenant ended with death.

Why did the covenant end with death?

That's what death is.

Romans 7, 1 through 12, Paul argues from this as though people already get it.

He says, Or do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives.

For a married, here's the example he gives, as though you just ought to know.

For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives.

But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.

Law, covenant, these are technical terms, but I want you to see that you you implicitly get this in all of your relationships.

That there are terms in which the relationship is able to exist and you are able to participate in it.

When it moves outside of those terms, you are not able to participate in the relationship.

Death ends the covenant.

That's what it means.

Paul assumes it in his teaching.

It's a clear example that ought to have been taken for granted.

So they should have seen this.

But it goes on to say they neither, he says, for when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage.

And this is something that I come back and hear my sermon 20 years from now when I understand the Bible more completely.

But this same phrase Jesus uses throughout the scriptures to refer, and even Peter does, to refer back to this moment before the flood.

It's like Jesus is calling, because in that phrase there's this term of they're being uh they are marrying and they are given in marriage, which is a way of saying they're like going about their ordinary lives right before the flood.

That's what's taking place.

Peter says it's to say people won't understand when the end is finally coming because you know what it's going to be like?

They're going to be marrying and they're going to be giving in marriage, and then the end will come.

But he references this idea of they're marrying and they're given in marriage as a sign of what things are like right before the movement into a new age.

What are things like right before?

We're about to move into a whole like something like a remade world, which is one way you can see what the flood is.

It is cleansed.

Something of what was cleansed is preserved through it, and then resurrected on the other side of the flood.

That's the Ark.

Noah and the Ark is this little thing that's preserved through the flood into the age, and it and then uh like a resurrection, the world is reborn.

And what happens when the world is reborn then?

God play you uh there may be one right now, probably not, because the sun seems a little darked out, but what happens, you know, rainbows, that's what I'm getting at.

Rainbows are the sign of God's covenantal promise, that he will not destroy the earth again.

It's his way of saying there's no going back to that.

We're in a new world.

And the resurrection is something like that.

That the terms of the old world are not the same as the terms of this new world that we're moving into.

So your marriage category that you're taking from over here is not that you're when you're taking that and you're mapping it on over here, it doesn't apply in the same way.

You're in a different world now.

It's something like before the flood, the stakes of the game were when everyone did what was right in his own eyes, the wrath of God would come and destroy the whole world.

After the flood, when everyone does what is right in his own eyes, the Lord will demonstrate an unthinkable patience and not destroy the world by a flood again.

It's God's way of saying there's no going back.

You're gonna have to learn to think in terms of the new world.

Likewise, he says, he says more than this.

He says that they are like angels in heaven.

The angels do not marry or reproduce.

The angels have a fixed number, not an expanding number, like humanity has.

You know, this sends us into a bit of a conversation about like the gender of angels, and I don't want to be too much of a scholastic theologian talking about how many can fit on the head of a pin or doing too much strange angel analysis, but I'll do a little.

There are no female angels presented to us in the scriptures.

All the angels that are given to us in the scriptures are male.

Why is that?

Is that because the angels are reducible to a biologically male type of thing?

I don't think so.

I'm gonna put that in the I don't think so category.

It's because they come from heaven to us.

And the masculine is the authority, the one that speaks with the voice of God, and the feminine is like us, the church.

We receive it.

And so, how is it that we ought to relate to the heavens that come to us?

We would relate to them in the masculine form.

God is teaching us this.

These are not arbitrary distinctions that God has placed into the world, they're meaningful ones.

We know that they're meaningful ones because they're in the world.

And what ought we to conclude when we look at the world that it was made by a divine power and authority.

So there is no arbitrary in the world.

But this shows us that there is a way in which the heavens relate to the earth that is different than the way that we experience this right now and in this present age, as in the way that we relate to one another.

And that means that there is a new type of relationship that is coming that humanity will enter on the other side of the resurrection.

And it's like this.

Here there are male and female, and we relate to one another in marriage.

But in the heavens there will be neither marrying nor being given in marriage, because but it does that mean there's no marriage?

There is a marriage.

We know the marriage that's coming.

God will be our true husband.

We will be his true bride.

We're practicing that right now as we gather as his church.

We're being washed for our wedding day.

And I I don't know, I can't describe to you, like, here's the particulars of that and exactly what that will look like and what the implications of that are for our experience of the new heavens and the new earth.

But I know that it will not be a loss of the glory of marriage, it will be the fulfillment of it.

And that our marriages now are just these types and shadows of the marriage that we are finally looking forward to.

Now, what are the terms of that marriage?

He will be our God, and we will be his people.

And as his bride, because this is what you do with a bride, he will place his name upon us in such a way that it can never be removed.

And all of the glory that he is, we will be able to immediately and joyfully participate and receive the goodness of.

So Jesus is saying to the Sadducees, you don't know how to think about this at all.

Because you look out into the world and you see no divine power.

Which means, it's another way of saying, you look out into the world and it's meaningless.

And you just think you already know what it is.

And because of that, you aren't able, excuse me, you aren't able to interpret the scriptures.

Because the scriptures describe the meaning of the world, that it is made, that we are to participate in it, in the structures that he has given to us.

Next, Jesus describes resurrection.

In Mark 12, 26, he says, And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?

And then in verse 27, so he's saying, Have you not read in the passage about the bush in Exodus, the burning bush, the uh how God says when he introduces himself to Moses, I am the God of Abraham, I am the God of Isaac, and I am the God of Jacob.

Now there, then Jesus says, so we've got that introduction, right?

Then Jesus says, He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

You are quite wrong.

Which is nice.

And you hear that, and he says, I'm the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

Well, why does that mean he's not the God of the dead, but of the living?

Why does it entail that?

Because when I think like this was the God of my grandfather who's dead, I'm I'm not thinking like that when I say that, that means my grandfather's alive.

When I say that, I'm saying like the same God that he worshipped when he was alive is this same God that I'm worshiping now.

So why would we take it to mean when he says, I'm the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, that this implies Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive.

Because he's not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Because when he's saying, I am the God of Abraham, I'm the God of Isaac, I am the God of Jacob, he's not just saying, I'm the one those guys worshiped.

He is saying that.

But he's introducing himself to Moses.

And he'll later command Moses, introduce me like this.

Let this be my name.

I am the God of Abraham, I am the God of Isaac, I am the God of Jacob.

I have placed my name upon them.

I am in a covenant, like a marriage with them.

And I have placed my name upon them in such a way where their names have become my name.

It's almost too, I hesitated to say that because it's almost too much to say, but it's what the Lord is doing.

Such is his commitment to place his name upon his people, to enter an absolute and eternal covenant with them, a covenant that they participate in by faith, that when God says it, it's true.

And so when God placed his name upon them, he really is their God.

They really are his people.

They really are united to him in a way like Adam and Eve were united with him in the garden before they sinned, and the covenant was broken.

And so, how is it that they are living?

Remember, the breaking of a covenant is death.

The renewal of the covenant, which God of his own accord, by his grace alone, towards his people, the renewal of that covenant is life.

And so within the promises of that covenant, they live.

And we know that they they really do live.

Jesus tells parables where he's describing going to Abraham's bosom after you die in that intermediary state.

We'll talk about that later.

And he's showing that the very fact that God entered into a covenant with these people when they ought to have been dead implies a resurrection is coming.

When they would say, We are the people, that same people of the God of Abraham, of the God of Isaac, of the God of Jacob, what they are saying is God has done something in which He will unwind this death that we deserve and bring us into a future and glorious resurrection.

Jesus is saying none of the scriptures make sense if you do not understand the category of resurrection, because here's what happened.

You were in humanity, a glorious covenant with the Lord, and you broke it.

That's death.

But God, because of the great love with which he loved us, and because of the richness of his mercy, has re-entered into a covenant with his people and given us the promise of life.

And what is this all pointing to?

We sang Psalm 16 this morning, which was wonderful timing.

Because Jesus could have just gone straight to Psalm 16 this whole time.

And he he could have just said, He could have not gone to Exodus, but he could have gone to Psalm 16, and he could have said, For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.

That's like a term for returning to the dust.

Dying.

You won't let your holy one do that.

And Jesus is the holy one.

And so how does this covenantal framework work?

How is it that we have a hope of resurrection in Jesus when we are the ones who deserve death?

It is because Jesus became a man, took on flesh, he bore the death that we deserve by his freedom of grace alone, by the absoluteness of his grace, he bore the death that we deserve.

So that old covenant that we were in, which condemned us, is over now.

And he established a new covenant with us in the fulfillment of the old.

And this new covenant is that by faith in him, all of his righteousness is given to us.

That he places his name upon us.

And we are the ones who are in Christ.

And so we look forward to a fullness of resurrection.

You right now have something in your life that you know is a death.

There is a relationship which has just changed categories.

And there's no going back to the way it was.

That covenant was broken, and it is a death.

Your hope, Christian, is that that's the way God does it.

And in the midst of it, he brings eternal life.

We become a people who, in the face of an absolute death, have an absolute hope.

An absolute hope.

You can't see it now.

It's the way life works.

Comes to us at a steady rate of one minute per minute.

And you can't peer to the other side of death.

You can't look to what it's like over there on the other side of the death.

But we know the one who's been there.

And he's come back.

And he says, when you go there, I'll bring you back with me.

That the covenant that has been broken with me, I have restored on your behalf.

So though your life looks like it's arcing towards death, as all of ours out of as all of ours are, in Christ, you can know it is moving towards resurrection.

This is the wonder of our hope.

The Sadducees couldn't see it.

And even after they heard this, I I I don't it probably didn't land.

It didn't land.

They went later and murdered him.

But you can see it.

You can see it.

So, Christian, trust in the hope of the resurrection.

Are there any questions today?

Who good.

What was that?

In 1 Corinthians 11, 23, Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Why is it that in our faith, every week we proclaim the Lord's death and think our faith keeps going?

You know when Nietzsche did that, he was saying it was the end.

He didn't believe in resurrection.

I know there's something in your life right now where all signs point to the end.

Not in Christ.

Not in Christ.

Hope in him.

What is this divine power?

How could we hope in resurrection?

Well, because the divine power that we look out and see at the creation of the world, it's spoken into existence from nothing.

Isn't resurrection just saying he could do that again?

So we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes, and we recognize that it means the atonement of our sin, our sin, that breaking of the covenant.

It's atoned for.

So Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, he took the bread and he broke it and he said, This is my body which is broken for you.

The brokenness that you deserved, I take in my body.

And he took the cup and he said, This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

And he invited us, the sinners and adulterers, against him, to enter into a relationship which far surpasses and eclipses the glory of the one that came before.

One sealed in his death, made certain in his resurrection.

So we are a people of faith and hope and love.

Faith because you can't see it.

You can't look on the other side of death and know what's there.

But we trust him.

Hope because the promise is resurrection.

It's a good thing on the other side of it.

Love because it was the depth of love which he showed us and that he gave his son that we might be in covenant with him again.

So let's remember that as we come to the as we come to this meal this morning.

We invite all of you who have been baptized and who confess Christ as Lord to come and participate in this communion meal with us this morning in remembrance of the wonder of what Christ has accomplished, the unshakable hope that we have because of his death, what we look forward to in our resurrection, all the layers of your life.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this time.

Lord, that you would be glorified and that you would work this into our hearts, in the fullness of it, that when we face death itself, that we might be confident, that we are headed towards a greater glory and the fullness of communion with you, which we only sample now.

And Lord, in the areas of our lives where we are experiencing death, where there is real dissolution, real returning to dust.

Lord, that we would not lose hope in you.

That us who hope in you are never put to shame.

And that we would trust you for resurrection of greater glory.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.