Again, the Sadducees try to catch Jesus out with a divisive question. If, as the Sadducees believed, there is no resurrection from the dead, then Jesus could not have risen. And if Jesus did not rise from the dead then death, sickness and sin still have power over us. As Paul says so clearly in 1 Corinthians 15:12–19, our faith is futile if the dead are not raised.

In the hustle and bustle of our twenty-first-century lives, it is easy to forget that this life is not the main deal: it is only a preparation. Our bodies may be decaying, we may be fighting sickness, but we are made to live for ever! Let’s lift our eyes off our present struggles and remind ourselves that one day we will be with Christ in glory!

From the hints Jesus gives in this passage, we can only guess at the details of what our eternal existence will be like. As far as marrying is concerned, we will be ‘like the angels’ (v 25), but the Bible doesn’t give us a very clear idea of what this means! What we do know for certain is that both they and we will spend eternity worshipping the Lamb who was slain and who was raised to life (Revelation 5:11–13).

‘Praise be to … God … In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’.¹

The resurrection is central to the Christian faith: it is our ‘living hope’. Yet there are many today who dismiss it as preposterous. This opposition is not new. The Sadducees were a conservative set of Jews who held only to the first five books of the Old Testament – the Law.² They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead (v 18) and sought to discredit Jesus and his teachings by showing the doctrine of resurrection to be incompatible with the Law. By using an exaggerated example of levirate marriage, they tried to make belief in the resurrection seem absurd (vs 19–23):³ which of the seven husbands would remain the woman’s true husband at the resurrection? 

Jesus makes it clear that the Sadducees’ doctrine is in error, not his (vs 24–27). First, they ‘do not know the Scriptures’ (v 24). The idea of the resurrection was present in the wider Old Testament.⁴ Jesus used even a portion of the Law⁵ to refer to the resurrection (v 26): years after the deaths of the patriarchs, God said to Moses, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’. He remains their God; and ‘He is not the God of the dead, but of the living’ (v 27).

Second, the Sadducees are in error because they do not have faith to believe that God has the power to raise the dead. For those of us already convinced that God can raise the dead, perhaps we have the opposite problem: perhaps we are so used to the doctrine of the resurrection that we have overlooked how mighty was the power that God needed to exert in order to overcome sin and death in raising Christ – and one day us – from the dead.

Meditate on Ephesians 1:18–20. Praise God for his resurrection power and the living hope it brings. Where else do you need that power at work today?

¹ 1 Pet 1:3  ² Cole, 1995, p264  ³ Deut 25:5–10; Hendriksen, 1975, p486  ⁴ Eg Dan 12:2; Job 19:25,26  ⁵ Exod 3:6