God of the Living

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family. 

Tyler Childers has a song that goes like this:

Now you tell me that there are streets of gold and angels in the air
Now all that’s fine and dandy and I’m sure it’s nice up there
There’s just one thing that I need to know before I settle down
Can I take my hounds to heaven
Can I hunt on God’s ground

Now you say if I quit drinking and try to toe the line
I can make it up to glory at the end of my life
Now whiskey’s hard to throw away something I might try to do
If I could spend forever running round treeing coon’s

But if I can’t take my hounds to heaven
If I can’t hunt on God’s land
Then I’d rather load my dog box up and go to hell with all my friends

If you listen to the song, you get the impression that he’s being halfway serious about this. Despite the clear misunderstanding of the Gospel, there is also a clear misunderstanding of our future hope as Christians. It’s a problem a lot of people have with the afterlife.

We’re going to try to get some of this straightened out today in Luke 20.

²⁷ There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, 

The Sadducees denied the resurrection because they only accepted the Torah, or the book of Moses, as authoritative Scripture. That’s Genesis through Deuteronomy. And they did not see a clear teaching on the resurrection in those books.

They did not believe in angels or spirits. Instead, they favored a more earthly, political view of Judaism. The power and wealth of the Sadducees were tied to the temple system, so they focused on preserving their status rather than hoping in a future kingdom.

They were the enemies of the Pharisees, who strongly affirmed the resurrection. But they were not friends of Jesus either, and they tried to test Him as well.

²⁸ and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.

This is true. Mosaic law provided for widows and helped preserve family lineage. But watch what they try to do with this law.

²⁹ Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. 

³⁰ And the second ³¹ and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. 

³² Afterward the woman also died. ³³ In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”

In his commentary, Ralph Davis jokes that this is obviously a made-up story. No woman could actually survive seven husbands!

The Sadducees are trying to mock the idea of the resurrection by using this ridiculous hypothetical situation.

What if a woman is widowed and successively marries seven brothers, each dying without producing offspring? In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?

By framing the question this way, they hope to expose what they see as the absurdity of resurrection, assuming it would create these types of impossible dilemmas and thus discredit the doctrine entirely.

But they are assuming that resurrected life is going to function exactly like our present earthly life. And they are wrong.

³⁴ And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, 

³⁵ but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, 

³⁶ for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. 

In other words, life after the resurrection will be significantly different from life before the resurrection. The most obvious difference is that it will be eternal. Death will no longer exist.

But Jesus also teaches something about marriage that you may not have realized. Notice he says, very clearly, that marriage will not exist in the next age because death will not exist.

What is the relationship between marriage and death? It ends at death. When we take our marriage vows, the last part says what? Until death we do part.

In other words, marriage is something that can only exist in this age. It was never meant to be eternal. Marriage was a creation ordinance, given to Adam and Eve for a specific purpose that Jesus claims was temporary.

Marriage was given for companionship, but in the next life we will experience perfect fellowship with God and with each other. It was given for procreation, but in the next life we will no longer need to reproduce because the number of God’s saints will be complete. And according to Ephesians 5, marriage currently serves as a symbol of Christ’s love for His church, which will no longer be necessary after the resurrection.

So, the Sadducees have made some bad assumptions about marriage. But there’s more.

³⁷ But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. 

³⁸ Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” 

³⁹ Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” 

⁴⁰ For they no longer dared to ask him any question.

Jesus does something here they did not expect. He proves the resurrection from the Torah itself, quoting Exodus 3:6, where God says, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Present tense.

Since God is “not the God of the dead, but of the living,” Jesus shows that the patriarchs must still be alive in God’s presence, proving that the doctrine of the resurrection is real and consistent with the very Scriptures the Sadducees claimed to follow.

In other words, Jesus says, “You’re wrong about God, you’re wrong about the resurrection, you’re wrong about Moses, you’re wrong about marriage, and you’re wrong about angels!”

But this is all stuff that most of us, if not all of us, believe in already. I don’t think we have any Sadducees in attendance today at Christ Fellowship. So, what does this mean for us?

First, I think we should consider that there is a human tendency to reduce divine realities to earthly categories, which can lead to skepticism and error. There are several other examples of this in Scripture.

Nicodemus has a hard time understanding the new birth in John 3. The Israelites in general had an overly physical understanding of what the Messiah would accomplish, completely missing the spiritual significance of what Jesus came to do.

The early church struggled with the doctrine of the resurrection as well. Paul spends an entire chapter in 1 Corinthians explaining the resurrection to clear up misunderstandings.

And we have similar problems today. A lot of Christians struggle with the doctrine of the Trinity, the relationship between free will and God’s sovereignty, and many other things because it doesn’t “make sense” to them. Modern skeptics reject miracles, including the resurrection, because they are judging them by naturalistic assumptions.

This kind of thinking also leads to extremes in Christian practice. Legalism and license are both a misapplication of the relationship between truth and grace.

I think we need to be aware of this tendency in all of us and we need to submit to God’s Word, even when we struggle to understand something. Where are we tempted to doubt or dismiss parts of God’s Word because it doesn’t make sense to us? Is it possible we have been relying on some bad assumptions?

Second, I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about and talking about our future hope. There are hundreds of verses in the Bible that direct our attention to the hope of the resurrection. Nowhere in the New Testament is the Gospel preached without reference to the resurrection of Jesus and the promise that we will also be raised. Nowhere! It is an essential feature of the Gospel.

But most Christians, me included, have a tendency to focus on what God did for us in the past or what He can do for us in the present. And that leads to several problems.

We may struggle to have endurance when suffering comes into our lives. We may become complacent and struggle to pursue holiness. We may lose our sense of urgency to share the Gospel with others. We may grow cold in our worship.

Paul says it bluntly in Corinthians – “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” And so we should ask ourselves:

Do we live as though God is distant and weak, or do we believe in His power to redeem, restore, and one day resurrect His people?

How does the certainty of the resurrection shape our decisions, values, and priorities? Are we living as though we have hope in this life only?

I want you to imagine two men. We will call them John and Robert. They each receive $100,000 to invest. John is told that in five years, he will receive a guaranteed return of a million dollars on whatever he wisely invests. Robert, however, believes that this money is all he will ever have, and he must make the most of it now.

John, confident in the promise of a future reward, invests his money wisely, denying himself temporary luxuries. He lives with a mindset shaped by the certainty of what is to come. His choices are intentional, strategic, and future-oriented.

Robert, on the other hand, spends the money recklessly, indulging in every pleasure he can afford. He anxiously tries to squeeze the most joy out of what he has, because, in his mind, there is no future beyond this.

Five years later, John receives his promised return—$1,000,000. Robert has nothing. And you may be thinking, cool story, but there are no guarantees like that with investing. And you’re right.

But here’s the thing… Without the certainty of the resurrection, we might as well live like Robert. Enjoy life while you can. Eat, drink, and be merry – for tomorrow you may die. But if the resurrection is real, then our values, priorities, and decisions should reflect that greater reality.

We should invest in eternity instead of maximizing our present comfort. We should embrace sacrifice, knowing that our labors are not in vain. We should face suffering with hope, because our future glory far outweighs our present trials.

Are we living as people who belong to the God of the living?