"The King's Riddles: What Lives When Everyone Dies?" | Matthew 22:23–33 | Sunday Morning Worship Service

Yesterday, Rebecca Burnside, daughter of Bruce and Sandy Burnside, sister of Luke Burnside, died.

I know many of you know Bruce and Sandy, longtime members here at Emanuel, but I know probably few of you knew they had a daughter.

She was missing a um part of a chromosome, which means she was very um mentally challenged, disabled.

She was never really able to leave the house.

She um couldn't communicate.

She never said a word her whole life.

She was 25 years old when she died.

Those 25 years were marked basically living inside the Burnside house.

Um, you know, I knew I know the Burnsides pretty well.

I'd never heard them complain about her.

Their lives were different because of her.

You know, they couldn't do things like, you know, go on vacations as so many families would do and that kind of thing because they were caring for their daughter.

But honestly, I've never heard them complain about it.

Um she was kind of denied simple pleasures of life because she didn't have the capacity to understand them.

She did like certain kinds of food, and she her face would light up uh with certain cartoons.

She loved cartoons.

Um her parents and brother loved her, brothers plural loved her and cared for her, and by all accounts gave her a full life.

You know, they had adopted her from an orphanage in another country where she probably wouldn't have lived and brought her here at great expense to themselves.

You know, her life by any external standards didn't have a lot of meaning to it.

I hope you know what I mean by that.

Uh you know, she didn't accomplish anything, she didn't have a resume, she never said a word her whole life.

So there's a sense in which her life came and gone.

It impacted those who lived with her.

That might be about it.

Most of the world never knew her name, nor would they ever.

It's very different from God's perspective, of course.

While the world didn't know Rebecca's name, God never forgot it.

Her life may not have meant much to those outside the family, but it it was significant to God.

I don't even mean that in like a simplistic opposite kind of way, like the world doesn't value the right things.

I mean it literally.

She was made in the image of God, and God loved her and loved her in such a way that practically led her across the world and put her in the Burnside house where they would care for her and love her and have their own lives impacted by her.

So it was a love that God set in her that impacted her life very specifically and individually, even if she was not able to understand or appreciate that.

And now, of course, she's she's died.

That happened yesterday.

So if you know the burnsides, pray for them and encourage them, please.

It raises a question that's on the subtitle of the sermon this morning: what lives when everyone dies?

Everybody around you dies, what still remains?

What matters when everyone has died?

That's the text this morning in Matthew 22.

I'll read it beginning in verse 23.

The same day the Sadducees came to Jesus.

The Sadducees say, There is no resurrection.

And so they asked Jesus 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.

Now there were seven brothers among us.

The first married and died, having no children, left his wife to his brother, and so to the second and third, down all the way to the seventh.

After all of them, the woman died.

In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be?

For they all had her.

But Jesus answered them, saying, You are wrong, because you don't know either the scriptures or the power of God.

For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

As for the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read what was said to you by God?

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

He's not the God of the dead, but of the living.

When the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

This fictional woman, that's invented here by the Sadducees for their question, had seven husbands, seven brothers, seven funerals.

If this were a crime show, she would be a suspect.

We'd have a few questions for her, I'm sure.

As long as we could also ask questions for some of the brothers.

I mean, what was the second one?

I could maybe understand that, but the fourth one, the fifth one?

I mean, the sixth brother?

Are you kidding me?

He could hardly act surprised when he died.

Didn't see that coming.

Are you out of your mind?

In Matthew 22, she's a riddle, not a suspect.

And she is the Sadducees' best argument against the resurrection.

The riddle they built around her comes down to the question on the screen this morning.

What lives when everyone else dies?

Now there is a certain logic at play in the minds of many people who reject the gospel.

The logic goes like this: if I can't understand a hard part of the Bible, then I can reject all of the Bible.

There's a logical truth buried inside of that objection.

The logical truth, which is valid, is if the Bible has errors in it, then you don't need to trust it.

That's called the doctrine of inerrancy.

We believe that the Bible is inspired by God and is inerrant, which means that in the whole and the parts, in the words, there are no errors.

It is not only true, big picture, but it is true every word, every phrase is true.

If the Bible has errors in it, then you do not need to believe any of it.

If the Bible is wrong, if it is errant, then we may as well go watch football this morning instead of doing this.

That's the doctrine of inerrancy.

We believe the Bible is true and inerrant.

Notice the bait and switch the Sadducees are doing.

They are not saying the Bible has an error in it, therefore I can disregard it.

They are saying there are things I don't understand in the Bible, therefore I can disregard it.

Notice the subtle difference.

One person says, if the Bible has a mistake or an error, I'm not going to believe it.

That's fine.

The other person says, if I can't understand the hard parts, I don't need to believe the easy parts.

That's the difference.

And it is something that resonates with kind of the postmodern American self-autonomous, individualized kind of person.

I mean, just think of the intellectual hubris, the actual arrogance it would take for somebody to look at 2,000 years of truth passed down through Christianity, and somebody to say, who's been literate for 20 years or whatever, to say, I have read and I have researched and I have decided I agree with this parts of Christianity, but not those parts of Christianity.

Who exactly do you think you are?

You know, but we in our American individualized culture have so elevated the individual where, you know, your assent or your agreement with this doctrine or not that doctrine somehow becomes important to people.

The truth is the Bible is a unit, and the faith has been delivered once for all to the saints and passed down through the generations, and we have received it, and we receive it by faith and with faith.

And yes, there are hard parts of the Bible.

And yes, we still believe them.

Imagine how simple the Bible would be or simplistic the Bible would be if there were no hard parts.

There are hard parts, of course.

The Sadducees, in this morning's passage, come from a long line of people who refuse to believe what the Bible says because they don't understand difficult teachings of it, and so they use their inability to understand the hard parts as an excuse to justify rejecting Jesus.

And this is not new with the Sadducees.

Jesus saw this with Nicodemus back in John chapter 3.

John 3 · chapter mention

Nicodemus comes to Jesus to question teachings about heaven.

And Jesus' response to Nicodemus cuts through the smog here and says, if you don't believe what I tell you about earth, why do you care what I tell you about heaven?

If you don't believe the easy things that are in front of you that I'm telling you about you, Nicodemus, why are you gonna argue with me about heaven?

And Jesus goes on to say in John chapter 3, I'm the one who's come from heaven.

John 3 · chapter mention

I'm the only one who's come from heaven, so you better believe me when I tell you about heaven, because I'm the only one who's seen it.

But you're not even gonna get to understanding heaven if you don't understand what the Bible says about you right here now in this life.

John 3, verse 12, I'll tell you earthly things, and if you don't believe them, how would you ever believe when I tell you about heavenly things?

John 3:12

Again, notice the order.

If you don't believe what God says about here, you'll never believe what he says about there.

You know, if you don't, you're not gonna understand the world unless you understand Anandale, where you live.

Don't say the world's not knowable because I don't understand interior Mongolia.

Start with Anandale and then work out.

That's how the Bible works.

Start with what the Bible says about you and about truth.

Submit yourself to that, and you will find suddenly your horizons expand.

The Sadducees are about to prove this point.

They can't read Exodus 3 correctly, and so of course they're gonna get the resurrection wrong.

Now it starts in verse 23, the same day.

The same day here is this series of questions that people are ambushing Jesus with.

This is the Sanhedrin, they're a series of riddles.

The riddles the Sanhedrin come up with are not, you know, random, they're not fortune cookie style things.

These riddles are designed by the intellectual elite of Israel to corner and trap Jesus.

That's their goal is to have Jesus handed over to the government to be, for all intents and purposes, murdered.

They're gonna use lies and deceptions to murder him.

And they're going to get away with it.

It will happen, they will accomplish it.

These three riddles are their means of doing it.

And of course, they they go with the first one.

The first one is the reason Jesus ends up getting put to death.

But they had three of them.

They recognized they were not gonna be able to outmaneuver Jesus with the crowd.

He was very popular.

They weren't gonna be able to outteach him, they weren't gonna be able to fight his teaching with their own teaching.

Jesus would win at that game.

But but they recognized if they could corner him or trap him with his own words, use his own words against him, then the crowd might turn against him.

That was their goal.

And so they invented these three questions, three riddles.

We looked at it last week, what can Caesar tax but never rule?

About the connection of church and state.

And all three of these questions, remember, are flamboyantly hypocritical.

They are asked by people with no genuine pursuit of the truth.

It is the Herodians who ask Jesus, is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?

The Herodians, who are the party of Herod, they're the pro-Rome people.

Of course they pay taxes to Caesar.

And now you have the Sadducees, who Jesus says in verse 23, do not believe in the resurrection, asking him a question about intricate divorce and remarriage laws in the resurrection they don't believe in.

Next week you're gonna see the Pharisees, who are experts in the details of the law, asking Jesus what the most important command is in the law.

These are not genuine questions.

They are hypocritical, disingenuous questions.

Asked to trap Jesus, it exposes the questioner's arrogance and hubris more than anything else.

So they come to Jesus with this riddle about the woman with seven husbands who are all brothers.

Before we get into the riddle itself, you do need to know a little bit about the difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees to get the tone in which Jesus responds.

Because Jesus does respond harshly to this question, remember?

You are wrong, you clowns is implied.

So allow me five, six and a half minutes of history about the fat of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

When you contrast them, you get the full picture.

The Pharisees were fastidious, they were devoted to the law of Moses as well as to the writings of the Old Testament.

They loved the Old Testament, they would tell you that.

They loved keeping the law, they loved making rules about the law, they loved the Torah, they loved the Torah so much they would make other extra biblical rules to guard the Torah.

So the Torah says, don't work on the Sabbath.

They would make a whole intricate network of rules that defined work, like how much can you carry on the Sabbath?

You know, can you carry the weight of a fig?

What if you are cooking figs?

And they have all these rules about them.

That's the Pharisees.

The Sadducees, meanwhile, they did not care that much for the Old Testament.

They were more liberal than that.

They would say they believed the law of Moses, the first five books, but definitely not enough to make other rules to guard the law of Moses.

They didn't believe really, they didn't find Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, all that stuff.

They didn't find that helpful.

It was just words for them.

Not that important.

There is a sense in which, and I know this analogy will break down at a few points, but there's a sense in which the Sadducees are kind of like the modern day, more liberal denominations, like the denominations that are, you know, pro-gay marriage with the women preacher kind of denominations.

If you were to ask those people in those denominations, are you religious?

They would say, of course.

We go to church on Sundays, of course we're religious, of course we believe the Bible.

Okay, what does the Bible say about those things?

And they would say, Yeah, but that's like First Timothy.

I mean, come on.

We believe the red letters are important.

I'm sure you've met people that have said this.

The red letters are important.

And when you find people that say that, you can engage with them in a couple different ways, but one would be to argue that like 1 Timothy is also scripture, but or you could just say, fine, let's talk about the red letters, and that's going to be Jesus' approach this morning.

The Sadducees say, We believe the Torah, we don't necessarily believe the rest of it.

And Jesus doesn't need the rest of it to make his point.

He can make his point from the Torah.

So the very people who say, Oh, we believe the red letters, if you're like, okay, let's study what Jesus said, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Who are you, Pharisee?

That's the Sadducees' world.

We believe the Torah, and so Jesus says, okay, let's look at the Torah.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What are you, holier than thou kind of person?

That's the Sadducees.

They didn't add extra rules to the Bible because they didn't keep the ones that they had.

They didn't believe in angels.

They would mock the doctrine of angels.

You know, oh, there's angels in the world.

Ha ha, have you seen one?

How many feathers did it have?

You know?

If you believe in angels, just show me one and I'll believe in angels, kind of thing.

That's the Sadducees.

They did not believe in the supernatural.

They don't believe God is at work in the world.

Of course not.

Of course not.

They didn't believe in heaven like we think of heaven.

They were wealthy generally.

Their life was pretty good on earth.

So they didn't spend a lot of time talking about heaven.

You could see that if your life is very hard on earth, you might spend more time thinking about heaven or talking about it.

That's not the case for the Sadducees.

And they would say, we don't need to talk about a bodily resurrection.

The Sadducees might believe in some kind of spiritual afterlife, like when you die your soul, they weren't annihilationists.

You know, you die your soul, might go on to the next life.

There might be a better thing for you after death.

Who knows?

Probably.

That was the Sadducees.

What about the body raising from the dead to be reunited with the soul?

The Sadducees would roll their eyes and mock that.

You know, they would tell dumb jokes like, What if you died and you're buried and your body decomposes, you become grass, and the sheep eat the grass, and then somebody eats the sheep and then they die in the resurrection.

How does your body is it your body or the sheep's body or the grass's body or the other guy's body?

That was the Sadducees.

And I said they're like mainline denomination state.

They're kind of like annoying college students that ask those kind of questions today.

They're not genuine questions.

Like I don't believe in the resurrection because you know lots of people eat the same molecule in the sheep in the pork chop.

What are you talking about?

That's a Sadducee's.

It's not good to be a Sadducee.

It's always sad, you see.

Oh, come on, that is better than that.

Come on.

Next week we'll learn why the Pharisees weren't fair, you see?

How typical is it for people to reject the plain teaching of Scripture because there are some things that are hard to understand, they are easier to make fun of than believe.

That's the Sadducees.

And so they come to Jesus with their riddle in verse 24 a man dies having no children.

His brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.

Notice they sound like they care about the loss so much.

The scripture says this, Jesus, there's no wiggle room.

And they are quoting the Torah at least, so give them that.

They're quoting Deuteronomy 25, verse 4.

Deuteronomy 25:4

This is the concept of leveret marriage in the Old Testament.

That's what it's called.

If a couple marries and the husband dies, this is not reciprocal, it's not if the wife dies, but the husband dies and they die without a male heir.

Then it falls to the oldest living male in that family to marry the widow, to pass down the family name of the brother.

That's Deuteronomy 25, verse 4.

Deuteronomy 25:4

The first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother.

That is the key phrase, to the name of his dead brother, that his name might not be blotted out of Israel.

This is so weird to us, right?

This is not an American custom.

It's probably illegal in the United States for all I know.

If somebody dies and the brother moves in to marry his dead brother's widow, you would think that was weird, probably.

At the very least, it would make the living brother a suspect in the dead but his murderer, for sure, right?

You wouldn't want to double check the insurance claims at the very least.

But in the Israelite world, this was very important.

This is the world where they have the book of Numbers in the Bible.

You know, our world's not like this.

Our world doesn't understand why the book of Numbers is in the Bible.

Their world, Numbers is in the Bible, because God made a promise to Abraham to make a nation out of him and to give him this land.

He goes, his offspring goes to Egypt, populates, millions of them come back and populate Israel.

The promise that God will give Israel a nation is not abstract to them, it's not spiritualized.

It's a place with borders and a population and people with last names that have land in that place.

That's God's promise to Abraham.

And when you die, the land goes to your son, and when he dies, it goes to his son all the way down.

And every 50 years the land reverts back to the family that had it.

So you can sell your land and move somewhere else if you want, sure.

But every 50 years, the year of Jubilee, the land reverts back to the family by name.

That is God's promise to Abraham.

And if you don't have a son to move back to the land and take it, your family loses the land, which means the promise to Abraham is over to you guys.

Over.

So it's not even about where can I grow my vineyard?

It's about does God tell the truth to Abraham when he says, I'm gonna make a nation out of you and put people in it, and it will be a blessing to the world.

It's a huge deal.

Very different than in our world.

You know, our American culture, I have three daughters.

And I have had so many people come up to me, especially when we were pregnant with number three, and say, I bet you hope it's a boy.

So there's someone to pass down the family name.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

People say that kind of thing, and they mean it like a joke.

And I, of course, would say all the time, you know, I would say, you know, my family name has had a good run.

Like, there's no need to keep this show going any longer.

Like, hey, let that chapter close on human existence.

Fine with me.

You know, and they it's appropriate to respond like you all just did, with a little laugh and a chuckle, because it's not serious.

Like that's, you know, that's our world.

Very different than in this world.

In this world, it's not an option.

If the husband dies, his brother better marry the widow.

That's the command by God to pass down the family name, the family legacy.

The promise of God to Abraham has to be passed down.

Not optional.

I bet this would change dating in the ancient Near East, for sure.

Like, oh, I'm attracted to you.

Yeah, can I see your older brother?

I just want to check.

Just I don't know if they actually did that or not, but it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world, for sure.

So

That's the question the Sadducees ask about.

They make up a story about the seven daughters that die.

I mean the seven sons that die.

This is borrowing the story from the book of Tobit, which is in the Apocrypha.

That's extra-biblical writings.

It's not canonical, it's not true, but it was written before Jesus' lifetime, so they were familiar with it.

The Sadducees don't believe the Apocrypha, of course not.

They don't believe Joshua or Judges or they definitely don't believe the Apocrypha, for goodness sake.

But the Apocrypha has a story, Tobit chapter 3, about a woman named Sarah who marries seven husbands that are all brothers, and all of them die on the wedding night because a demon comes in and kills them.

So that's a story in the Apocrypha involving angels, the resurrection, and demons, all the things that the Sadducees think are silly to begin with.

So they take that story, they pounce it on Jesus as if it's a gotcha to him, they lump the truth of the resurrection with a fairy tale from the Apocrypha, so that laughing at one allows them to laugh at the other.

That's their strategy.

Link something true with something funny so you can make fun of what is true through what is funny.

And Jesus sees right through it.

Underneath the Sadducees' ridiculous question is a very bad worldview that I just want to draw your attention to before we get to it.

The assumption that the resurrection will be just like this life, only a little bit more.

Same bodies, same marriages, same problems, just more of it.

That's what the Sadducees are making fun of.

The idea that the resurrection will be like this world.

And Jesus blasts it.

He unlocks the riddle here with a couple points.

That'll be your outline this morning.

Unlocking the resurrection's riddle.

Unlocking the resurrection's riddle starts in verse 29.

Jesus answered them, You are wrong.

You don't know what you're talking about.

The words coming out of your mouth, when you put them together, don't mean anything, is what Jesus is telling them.

And he's talking to them about a question about the resurrection, by the way.

He's telling the Sadducees who fancy themselves religious experts, they don't know what they're talking about.

That's like telling Steve Jobs, you don't know what a computer is if it was in your breakfast cereal.

Seeing some 10-year congressman and 10-term congressman and saying, you don't know the first thing about politics, do you?

That's what Jesus is doing here to the Sadducees.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Why not?

Well, he gives two reasons.

They don't know the power of God and they don't know the word of God.

That's what he says in verse 29.

You don't know the scriptures or the power of God.

We'll take them one at a time.

Unlocking resurrection is riddled.

First, the resurrection will be better than you think.

The resurrection will be better than you think.

The resurrection life is new.

It's not merely more of the old.

The resurrection is not just a continuation of this life, it is a new life.

It is a different life.

There is continuity with your soul.

Now, your soul now will be your soul in the resurrection, but you will have a different kind of experience, a different kind of body, a different kind of existence.

You're the same being, you're the same person, but a different kind of person.

And it's, you know, there's an example for this in creation.

The caterpillar to butterfly kind of thing.

Almost every kindergartner does this experiment.

And it should be a federal law that every kindergartner should be required to do this experiment.

And our so-called Congress does nothing.

Nothing, I tell you.

You know, the kindergartner brings home the caterpillar and it spins the cocoon and you watch it and it goes inside, and then the cat bats at the cage for a few days, and then eventually out comes the butterfly.

And if your kid says that's the caterpillar, you would say it's no, it's not a caterpillar anymore.

It's a butterfly.

But it is the same being as the caterpillar.

It's the same essence, the same.

If caterpillars had soul, that butterfly has the same soul as the caterpillar did.

But you don't call it a better caterpillar.

It's not a better caterpillar, it's a different kind of thing.

It's a butterfly, way better, way prettier, and all of that.

You don't, you know, taxidermatize a caterpillar and put it on your wall, but I see people do it with butterflies all the time, kind of thing.

Butterflies are way better.

That is given to us by God to mirror or to teach us what the resurrection is like.

When you die in this life and you open your eyes in heaven, it is a different kind of existence.

It's a different type of existence.

An oak tree is not just a big acorn, it's a different thing.

And the oak tree won't exist unless the acorn first dies.

And if you look at the oak tree and you say, that is the biggest acorn I've ever seen, no, you don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, the oak tree is the same thing the acorn was, but it is a different kind of thing.

It's a heaven is better by kind, not by degree.

Do you if you understand that difference?

Here's a way of explaining it.

I have a friend who told me he does not like pumpkin pie.

Because, he says, the best pumpkin pie he's ever had and the worst pumpkin pie he's ever had taste exactly the same.

And ever since he told me that, it is stuck in my mind.

And it is probably true.

I confess, it's probably true.

The difference between the best and worst pumpkin pie is minuscule, probably.

I, from that, however, do not, you know, I love pumpkin pie.

I don't hear that and think, oh, that's why I don't like pumpkin pie.

No, I hear that, and it allows me, as a Christian optimist, to say that every pumpkin pie I try is the best pumpkin pie I've ever had.

The difference between one and the other, though, that's degree.

But the difference between, say, marriage and pumpkin pie, marriage is better than pumpkin pie.

That's a difference in kinds, not degree.

You know, getting a new car with a new car smell and all of that.

That's a difference in kind.

That's better than pumpkin pie.

I don't care how much you like pumpkin pie.

If somebody offers you a new car or the best slice of pumpkin pie you ever had, you would obviously take the new car.

It's better by kinds, not just by degree.

Heaven is better than this life by kind.

It is a different kind of existence.

It's still your same soul, of course, but it is different by kind.

That is what the Sadducees don't understand.

They're projecting onto heaven that the same problems, the same relationships, the same life you have now will be true there.

And Jesus says, You don't know what you're talking about.

When you die, verse 30, you'll neither marry nor be given in marriage.

You'll be like an angel in heaven.

He doesn't say you'll be an angel.

He says you'll be like angels in that angels can fly and they don't die and they're not married.

So you get that.

I don't know if you'll actually be able to fly, but the idea is you'll be able to move quite freely, quite liberally, and you won't ever die, and you're definitely not getting married in heaven.

In that sense, you're like the angels.

That's Jesus' point.

And by the way, remember what I said about the Sadducees?

They don't believe in angels.

I love, love, love.

The Sadducees ask Jesus a question about marriage, and he works angels into his answer just to poke them in the eye.

I love that.

Ask Jesus about marriage, and he answers with an angel to the Sadducees.

He knows what he's talking about.

We will have bodies in the resurrection.

Of course we will.

But we won't be married or given in marriage.

And that's because there's a sense in which marriage runs its course.

Every marriage in this life is designed to be an image of the wedding supper of the Lamb.

Paul says that in Ephesians 5.32.

Marriage is a picture of the relationship we have with Christ, Christ and his church.

And when you die in this life, you no longer need the sign because you get the reality.

That's Revelation 19, verse 9.

Revelation 19:9

Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Marriage doesn't end in the resurrection because something is lost in your life or in marriage.

Marriage ends at the resurrection because what it points to has arrived.

You don't need a signpost when you're standing at the destination.

You don't need to look at your engagement photos when you're married.

Mostly at me.

What a clown I was back then.

You're married.

It doesn't really matter what you look like in your engagement pictures.

That's the difference between earth and heaven.

Heaven is real.

Those who die with faith in Christ will be there.

In a sense, this world fades away.

It doesn't really matter in the scope of eternity.

That's what awaits us.

The acorn dies to become the oak tree.

We die to enter eternal life.

The resurrection will be absolutely better than you think it will be.

And he said, Yes, and it'll be better than you're imagining it will be.

Now, by that, don't misunderstand him and think he's saying that there will actually be coffee in heaven that'll just be, you know, ground perfectly kind of thing.

No, by that, he's taking issue with the idea that we like to define heaven by things that we don't think will be there, like things I love in this world that won't be in heaven.

Oh, how sad, and how can I love heaven if there's no coffee kind of thing?

I mean, I think there'll be soccer in heaven.

I'm even okay with soccer games in heaven, and I'm okay with some teams losing games in heaven.

That's okay.

It's not, you know, it's not deficient that some people and teams will be better than others.

That's okay.

Even in heaven, that's okay.

You know what won't be in heaven is bad referees.

They will be gone.

In heaven, all the lines will understand the offside law.

I mean, the idea is not that heaven is going to be a continuation of the games on earth, not that heaven will be a continuation of the food on earth, not that heaven will be a continuation of the relationships on earth.

It will be new and it will be better than you're imagining.

The Sadducees did not have a good imagination.

And so they're wrong about everything.

Secondly, resurrection will be better than you think.

Secondly, the word of God is clearer than you think.

Verse 31, as for the resurrection of the dead, Jesus says, have you not read what was said to you by God?

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

That is a very often repeated phrase in the Old Testament.

Repeated so many times, you probably have it memorized.

Iwana kids have that verse memorized.

They don't even need to learn an Iwana.

They don't even get a little Nwana share for this verse.

It's just something you learn reading the Bible.

The God is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.

This is going back to the fact that God promised Abraham to make a nation out of him.

That promise transferred down to Isaac and transferred down to Jacob.

It is quoting here in Exodus 3, where God is speaking to Moses from the burning bush, and he introduces himself to Moses by saying, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So do you remember how I said the Sadducees only believe in the Torah?

One way is to argue for the resurrection from all over the Bible, which you can do.

You can look at 2 Samuel 12 and say, David said he would look upon his dead son with his own eyes.

That's a resurrection verse.

You can look at Job in the wisdom literature, where Job says, I know my Redeemer lives, and in the end I will stand on the earth and I will look at God with my own eyes that are in my head, not with somebody else's eyes, but my body will raise and I will see Yahweh with my eyes, Job says.

That is a very strong resurrection verse.

I will be on the earth with these eyes, looking at that God.

Jesus could have quoted that.

It is so well known that you can almost miss what is blazingly obvious about it.

If he is the God of Abraham, because of his promise to Abraham, why does that promise matter at all?

It is axiomatic with human promises that they last as long as the person lives.

Your wedding vow, till death do us part.

Your spouse dies, you are no longer married to that spouse.

They have died.

You are released from that promise.

It doesn't, you know, annul your previous life or anything like that.

It's a promise that when your spouse dies, you're released from it.

That's the way promises generally work.

So in Exodus 3, when God says that he is the God of Abraham, why does anybody care about what God promised Abraham if Abraham is dead?

That's Jesus' point.

God is not the God of the dead, though, but of the living.

He keeps his promise to Abraham, even though Abraham has died, because in point of fact, Abraham still is alive with God.

That's the resurrection, Jesus says.

It's talking about the resurrection.

Verse 32, he's not the God of the dead, but of the living.

A promise made to a dead man is worthless.

But a promise made to someone who never dies is always valid, and God only makes valid promises.

And so Jesus turns the table in the Sadducees with one of the most powerful descriptions of Scripture in all of the Bible.

It's a little prepositional phrase tucked into verse 31 that you might have missed when I read it a second ago.

Have you not read what was said?

And here's the phrase to you.

Exodus 3 took place 2,000 years before this.

Some number of years.

4,000 years before us.

And Jesus can look at the Sanhedrin and at the Sadducees and at the crowd and say, when God said this to Moses, he was talking to you.

That is the truth of the Bible.

Every word of Scripture is spoken to you.

Yes, there's context.

That doesn't mean that every verse of Scripture is obeyed, like the people who received it obeyed it.

Jesus told Judas, what you do, do quickly.

So it'd be a mistake for you to say that means I got to speed to lunch.

No, hopefully you're doing better things than Judas was, but Jesus' words to Judas are spoken to you.

So you can learn from them and study them and see what God is like and how he fulfills his promises.

You don't, you're not under the Mosaic law and that you can't cut your sideburns and you can't wear mixed fabric clothes or something like that.

But the Mosaic law was spoken to you.

So you can learn what God loves and what God hates and how God responds to the grumbling and the complaining and the sexually immoral.

You can learn all of those things.

The word of God is spoken to you.

Every word of it, Jesus says, is given to you.

Moses being spoken to by God from a burning bush, God may as well have been talking to you today in Annandale.

That's the word of God.

There's no excuses for ignoring or getting out of the word of God because it wasn't spoken to you.

Jesus says, it's all given to you.

And God always keeps his promises.

Abraham dies in Genesis 23.

His bones are carted around the whole desert in and out of Egypt on the back of a camel.

And God still keeps his promise.

Hebrews 11, 13 says Abraham died in faith, not having received what was promised.

Abraham, I mean, Hebrews 11, 16 says God is not ashamed to be called their God, and that he will give Abraham what was promised, but only when we get to heaven with him as well.

All of God's promises are fulfilled to the people that he made them.

Because death is just in that sense an illusion.

There is a real life that comes with the resurrection.

So what lives when everyone dies?

That's the question.

What lives when everyone dies?

The answer was found back in the Leverate Law that the Sadducees sarcastically quoted.

Your name, if you die in faith, is written in the Lamb's book of life.

Your body may die, but your name lives on because God has made a promise to you to write his name on your heart, to write your name in his book of life.

And Jesus knows that.

Jesus is gonna die three days after this.

Let's say this is Tuesday.

He's gonna die on Friday.

Do you think he knew when he's talking about the resurrection here?

Do you think he's thinking of his own death?

He has to be, right?

I have visited so many people in the hospitals or in their home before they've died.

Sometimes when they're dying, sometimes a day or two before they die.

Often they talk about heaven.

And when they talk about heaven, it's you listen to it differently at that moment, don't you?

That's one thing for somebody who's healthy to say, oh, heaven's gonna be like this, and what will there be coffee in heaven kind of thing?

It's it's a funny question kind of thing.

It's another thing when somebody is using their last earthly breath to talk about heaven.

You just take the what they say more seriously.

Jesus is gonna die 72 hours after this.

And he says that God is the God of the living, not the dead.

He's talking about himself.

He's gonna be crucified and buried in a borrowed tomb and be with the Lord forever.

And the crowd, of course, is astonished at this.

They've never seen the Pharisees, or sorry, the Sadducees slap so hard as this.

The angel dig in everything.

People can't believe what he said.

One of my theological heroes, my theological hero is Jonathan Edwards.

He's my preaching hero, my pastoral hero, my hero from church history.

I've read everything that he's wrote that's been published.

A lot he wrote that hasn't been published.

He had a hard life.

He met his wife when he was 17 and she was 13.

Sarah Pierpont was 13 years old when Jonathan declared his love for her.

I am the father of a 13-year-old, and all I have to say to that is no.

He waited until she turned 17 and they got married.

They had 11 children.

They scattered all over the world in ministry, the Caribbean, active in the abolitionist movement.

Just an incredible legacy.

One of his daughters died.

A missionary came to their house who was probably dying of tuberculosis, and she cared for him, and they both died of it.

They had a hard life.

He was fired from his church unjustly, completely unjustly.

Lies were said about him, and he was fired.

And he could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard, his alma mater.

He could have gone anywhere in the scholastic world.

He was well known as an intellectual.

He moved his wife and his kids that were still in home out to an Indian village on the frontier that didn't speak English and learned the Indian dialect so he could preach in the Indian language and translate the scriptures.

And that's where they met the missionary to the Indians who died and took one of his daughters with him into death.

That's their life.

After being in the Indian village for a while, he did leave his family there with the Indians and moved to New Jersey to be one of the founding presidents of Princeton University, where he received a smallpox vaccination that killed him.

His throat swelled up.

He wrote a letter to his daughter from his deathbed.

Daughter Lucy, I'm gonna put it on the screen for you.

This is just part of it, of course.

Dear Lucy, it seems to me the will of God that I must shortly leave you.

His throat was so swollen he couldn't really speak.

Therefore, give my kindest love to my dear wife.

And tell her that the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual and therefore will continue forever.

He's not saying, don't misread him and say that we're going to be married in heaven.

That's not what he's saying.

He's saying that our relationship on earth is so spiritually profound, that which is spiritual can't be killed by death.

Of course, spiritual relationships last into eternity because they're spiritual.

Yes, your physical body will rise and be reunited with you, and the spiritual is what endures forever.

He says, I hope my wife will be supported under so great a trial.

Submit cheerfully to the will of God.

He goes on to say, I couldn't fit it on the screen, that he hopes Lucy will take from this trial a deeper trust in her heavenly Father who will never leave her like he had to leave her.

Incredible stuff.

Notice the tone that is different between this and the Sadducees' question.

It is, in some respects, the same question.

Notice the tone that is different between faith that says, I trust God, and what is spiritual is eternal, and doubt, which says, you know, whatever part of the Bible I want to believe, I believe, and makes fun of the rest.

You cannot mistake the two.

The Sadducees looked at the widow and saw the butt of a joke.

Edwards looks at his widow and sees the beginning of eternity.

What lives when everyone dies?

Isaiah tells us that in the resurrection all things will be made new.

Isaiah 35, verse 6, the tongue of the mute will sing for joy.

Isaiah 35:6

Think about Laverse.

The tongue of the mute will sing in the resurrection.

A person who has never said a word their whole life will sing in the resurrection.

I think it'll be worth the wait.

Lord, we're grateful for your word, which is written on our heart.

It is the promise of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, that we will live forever with him.

We're thankful for the resurrection of Christ, which gives us hope in the resurrection.

Hope for our future.

We know that which is spiritual remains forever.

We're grateful.

In the name of Christ we pray.

Amen.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or you want more information about what it means to follow Christ, please go to our church website, iBC.church.

If you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to see you at one of our own worship services at Emmanuel Bible.

Now may the Lord bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.