Hello everyone. My name is Nathan Ebbs. I am a student at Central Church. I am also a sophomore at Collierville High School, and I will be doing the scripture reading for today. Please open your Bibles to Mark 12:18 through 27. "Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him for a question. 'Teacher,' they said, 'Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up the offspring for his brother.
Now there are seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he died leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died, too. At the resurrection, whose wife will she be since the seven were married to her?' Jesus replied, 'Are you not in error because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God?
When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising: have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, "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 badly mistaken.'"
Thank you, Nate. With your Bibles open to that passage that Nate just read there, you can see that the topic today is resurrection. And yet, I believe that that's a word that is kind of losing its meaning in our increasingly secular culture today. What is Jesus referring to when he speaks of the resurrection? And maybe even if you've spent years in the church, or you're still not absolutely clear on what is being talked about when we speak of the resurrection.
By the way, as we'll see, it is something different than Jesus speaking of his own resurrection here. Well, here's a good starting place this morning. When we speak of the resurrection, that is under the broader topic of belief in life after death. And again, thinking about how we're being influenced in our thinking, I wanted to know a little bit more about what does our culture think about what happens after you die, whether there's any form of life or consciousness after death?
I went looking for the latest polls. I tried to find something that's fairly scientific in its polling, not just a popular poll . The most recent one that was a credible poll is five years old. It's from 2014, so I assume this has only increased, the trends that we're seeing here.
But in 2014, a nationwide poll was conducted, and here is one of the main questions, the one that we're focusing on today: "Do you believe there is a life after death?" And interestingly enough, five years ago, again, about 70% of people, this is all people, this is people in church, people who have nothing to do with church. About 70% said, "Yes, I believe there's some form of life, some form of consciousness after you die."
What I found real interesting were the next two: almost 18% said, "No, I don't believe there's any life, "there's any consciousness, after death," and about 11% said, "You know, I don't know. I really don't know whether there's any life or consciousness after death."
So roughly 30% of people, if this poll is representative of our population and our culture, roughly 30% either believe that when you die, that's it, that's the end, there's no more consciousness, or they're very uncertain about whether there is any existence, any life, after death. And again, I think over the last five years, that has probably only increased. It's probably greater than 30% now.
Some of you may be wrestling with that this morning, or, if you're not personally wrestling with the question of whether there's life or consciousness after death, you probably have family members or friends or coworkers that you know fall into one of these categories. So I think this is a very relevant topic for us. And again, let's drill down to what's really being talked about here. What is the resurrection?
When we speak of that term, "the resurrection", what are we specifically talking about? We see it referenced three times in our text today that Nate just read. In Verse 23, it's in the Sadducees' scenario that they're spinning out there: "in the resurrection, when they rise". The Sadducees are speaking in a hypothetical scenario about some brothers and a woman, and it's after their death, and they're speaking of them rising from the dead. Jesus picks up on this.
Verse 25: "For when they rise from the dead," and again in Verse 26: "now concerning the dead being raised". So what we see is in this text: Jesus isn't talking about his own resurrection. That is crucial to our faith. That's another sermon, because that's not what this text is about. They are talking about our resurrection. They are talking about what happens to you and me after we die.
So if you're taking notes, here's just a very succinct definition of "resurrection", and then I'm going to expand this out as we look at it in this passage. Resurrection very simply is this: it is the reuniting of the body and the soul after death. Resurrection is God reuniting your body, which has died, with your soul, bringing them together after your earthly death.
Jesus taught us about resurrection, not just in this passage, but in other passages, including probably John 5 is the one that stands out to me the most. The first verse reference is wrong. It should be verse 28. Jesus says this: "A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice." He's speaking about his voice, the Son of Man. A time is coming when everybody who's in the grave will hear the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, and come out, come out of the grave.
Those who have done good will rise out of the grave to live. Those who have done evil will rise out of the grave to be condemned. You know, we have a confession of faith here at Central Church, and you may have not seen it. You may have seen the little two-page summary that we have. That's what we generally use, because our confession of faith is over 120 articles long.
But there are two articles that, you know, even though we don't read from the confession of faith very often, there are two confessions of Central's-- or, there's two articles of Central's confession of faith that speak directly to this. Let me read, first of all, section 118, The Bodies of Men. And by the way, the confession of faith was written at an earlier time, when "men" was used generically for men and women, so read that "The Bodies of Men and Women" or "The Bodies of People".
"The bodies of men and women after death return to dust, they go into the grave. But their spirits, being immortal, return to God who gave them. The spirits of the righteous--" and let me stop there. Who are the righteous? The righteous are not good people. The righteous are not people who've, you know, gone to church all their life and done good things to look good in front of God.
No , the righteous are those who put their faith in the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, who are covered with his righteousness. They are righteous only in him. I hope that's you. I know that's me. "The spirits of the righteous are received into Heaven, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies."
And by the way, that article goes on to speak about what happens to the unrighteous, those who have not put their faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ. Again, another sermon for another day, so I won't go there. That sets us up for the next article, which is about resurrection. Article 119: At the Resurrection.
"Those who are alive shall not die but will be changed," and here's the resurrection: "and all the dead shall be raised up spiritual and immortal, and spirits and bodies be reunited forever." There it is. There's the definition of "resurrection". The bodies of the righteous shall be fashioned like unto Christ's glorious body. I know the language is from another time period, but you hear enough there to be encouraged.
Maybe you're here this morning, and you're struggling with a breaking down of your body, maybe through disability, maybe through illness, maybe through cancer. Do you hear the promise here, that one day, if you have faith in Jesus Christ, your body will be raised and glorified and be made like Christ's glorified body? Maybe you're here this morning, and you're thinking of a loved one who has died, but you know that that loved one died going within faith in Christ.
And do you hear the promise here, that you will see that loved one again? You will see them not in the final state in which they died, ravaged by cancer or whatever it is; you will see them glorified? You will see them in their perfect state, with their glorified body joined with their glorified spirit? Do you hear the hope in that? Do you hear the promise in that? I've tried to think this through. I'm a visual person, and helps me to try and draw something out.
You know, and that's a lot of words in those two articles, so here's my simple attempt that's coming up on the screen here to draw out, in a diagram, what we just heard there. And you see this illustration on the screen. We're in the left side of that diagram right now. We're living our earthly life. And what do we know about our earthly life? Well, we know that we have our bodies, but what we learn as we read the Bible, what we learn as we grow in our faith, is we also have a soul or spirit.
And so, that is our existence in this earthly life. We are part soul, and we are part body. That's how God made us, with those two basic aspects of who we are. But what happens at death? You see the line at "death" there. What happens at earthly death? Well, do you see how our body goes down into the grave? Whether our bodies are buried or whether they are cremated, our body, for a time, goes into a state where it, you know, very bluntly, it begins to rot.
It begins to disintegrate, either in the grave or in the urn , if it is cremated. But our soul goes on, our soul goes on in consciousness. Our soul is in paradise. You remember Jesus' promise to the thief on the cross who put his faith in Christ even just before he died? "Today, you will be with me in paradise." So following our death, our body may be in the grave for a time. We may no longer-- they are separated, very honestly, our body and our soul. But our soul does not become extinguished.
We don't lose consciousness. If we know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, if we put our faith in him, we enjoy him in paradise. But here's the thing: many people think that's it. Many people think that's the state of heaven. You know, many people have kind of the old Greek dualism, that the body is evil. And so at death, you're done with the body. You know, you shuck it off like a snake sheds its skin, and your soul lives on forever.
But in God's complete saving work, it is not finished even at that state. See the next line: there comes the resurrection, and what happens at the resurrection? God completes his saving work that he has begun in this life, and he resurrects your body. He reconstitutes your body. He glorifies your body so that your body becomes like Jesus' glorified body after the resurrection.
He joins your glorified body with your now-- your soul made perfect, your fully glorified soul, and that's what you spend eternity together in. That's what he's doing in his grand scheme of salvation. He made you body and soul; he intends to save you body and soul. That's the picture. Now, when does that second line come? When is the resurrection, when our salvation is completed and we spend eternity glorified body and glorified soul? We have hints of this in the New Testament.
First Corinthians 15:23, Paul says that the resurrection happens "when he comes". Who is he speaking about? The Lord Jesus Christ. When the Lord Jesus Christ returns, that's when the resurrection of believers' bodies occurs. He gives more detail of this in 1Thessalonians 4:16: "For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout and the voice of the Archangel and the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise." We live for that day. We live for that day.
If you know Christ as Savior and Lord, your salvation isn't complete in this life. We live for the day when we'll hear the trumpet call, when the Lord Jesus Christ will return, and we will be resurrected, whether we're still alive or we're in the grave, and we will be made into that state of glorified body, reunited with glorified soul, to spend eternity with him in Heaven. Well, what did they have at this time?
They didn't have the New Testament at the time that the Sadducees are challenging Jesus here in our account , in Mark 12. All they had was the Old Testament. They didn't know what God now has fully revealed to all of us. Did they know even about the resurrection? Does the Old Testament speak of the resurrection of a believer's body? It does many places, but let me give you two that really stand out and speak to me.
The first one, Isaiah 26:19, listen to God speaking prophetically through Isaiah: "Your dead will live. Their bodies will rise from the dead. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust, --" you who have been buried, you who have been cremated, "--for you will be covered with the morning dew." There's that image of a glorified, new existence. "And the earth will bring forth the departed spirits."
Or Daniel Chapter 12, Verse Two: Daniel, again, writing under the prophetic inspiration of God, "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth--" who are buried, who are cremated-- "will awake, some to eternal life and some to shame and eternal contempt." But what if there is no resurrection? What if our consciousness ends when our body dies? What if this is it? What if our soul perishes when our body parishes? I mean, you hear many people there today, embracing that.
Again, roughly 30%, and that is probably growing. And maybe you're here this morning and you wrestle with this. Maybe it is hard for you to conceive that after your body dies, there will be any more consciousness. That was the Pharisees. That was the belief of the Pharisees. We see that in Verse 18. I'm sorry, not the Pharisees. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection. The Sadducees. Verse 18: "Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection." Who are the Saducees?
The Sadducees are one of the priestly sects of Judaism. But they were the aristocrats. They were the wealthy sect. They were the ones who were politically powerful. They were the ones who controlled the high priesthood. All the high priests were four Sadducees. They were the ones who always had a majority control of the Sanhedrin. So they ran things. They had great wealth. They had great political influence. They ran things.
And here's what's unique about the Sadducees as compared to the Pharisees: if the Pharisees were the religious conservatives, the Saducees were the religious liberals of their day. Specifically, the Saducees, as we see, didn't believe in the resurrection. Why?
The Saducees believe that the only authoritative part of the Old Testament, the only part that you absolutely had to live by, is what we call the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. And so, if it wasn't in one of those books, they didn't accept it. And because the word, the term "resurrection" does not appear in those five books, they said, you know, "That's the Pharisees going off into fantasy land."
They rejected the doctrine, the truth, of the resurrection. They rejected even the whole idea of the immortality of the soul. They would be among those who would say, "When you die, that's it. This life is all there is." And the Sadducees think that now, they can accomplish what the Pharisees and the Herodians failed to do. If you were here last week, we heard about how the Pharisees and the Herodians tried to trap Jesus with a political question.
Now the Sadducees think they can trap Jesus with a theological question, and they lay out their trap in the form of a hypothetical question. Verse 19: "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother." Now, they are quoting from the Pentateuch. They are quoting specifically from Deuteronomy.
If you want to look this up later, it's Deuteronomy 25 starting with Verse Three, and it's the section that deals with what was called in Israel a Levirate marriage. And just a bit of background on that: if you are a woman living at that time in Israel, and your husband died, you could be left destitute, because land, the land even that you are living on, passed with the husband, passed from the husband to his son, if there was a son.
It did not pass to the wife like happens in inheritance rights today. That's just the way it was. And so, you were all right if you had a son, because the land that your husband had deed to and had rights to would pass to the son, and as long as you were living with the son or cared for the son, you could live on the land. But what happened if you and your husband had not had any sons by the time your husband died? You had no land. The land passed.
But Moses recognized that this left women in a very vulnerable position, and so, God working through Moses out of compassion for women in that situation created the section of law in Deuteronomy 25, the Levirate marriage law.
And basically, what it said is if that happens, if a man dies and he has no son at the time of his death, if the man has a brother, the brother marries the man's widow, and then that brother and the man's widow try and have children, and if they can have a son, then the inheritance rights of the man who is deceased pass to the son ,and the woman continues to be provided for. It was done out of compassion and mercy.
The Sadducees take this very compassionate, merciful section of law, and they spin it into this hypothetical that, in one sense, is ridiculous. In the other sense, you know, I guess this could hypothetically happen, but they spin it out to trap Jesus. And they think that if Jesus embraces what they have spun out in their hypothesis here, if he upholds, he'll be trapped.
If he affirms that, yes, what Deuteronomy says is the word of God, but he also affirms the result that they're positing, they will trap him in a contradiction, and they will make them look foolish and discredit his ministry, which is exactly what they were trying to do. And here they spring the trap now in Verse 26 with this question: "Hey, if all that's true, Jesus, and the seven brothers have all been married to this wife.
In the resurrection--" Remember, this is asked by Sadducees who don't believe in the resurrection-- "In what you say is the resurrection, when they rise, all these seven brothers and this one wife, which one's wife will she be? For all seven had her as wife." You know, you can tell they worked on this scenario long before they came and asked him, because the details are important here. They create this scenario in which none of the brothers had any children with the woman.
So none of the brothers, although all seven were married to her, none of them have any unique or special claim over the other on her. They all simply were just married to her. And so, they create this scenario: if marriage exists in heaven like it exists on earth, they create this scenario where these brothers and this woman go to heaven and they're all married, and that is polygamy. That is seven men married to one woman. They think they've caught Jesus in a trap.
"How can you affirm the resurrection and this all happening? Doesn't that uphold polygamy? Isn't that against what the first five books of the Old Testament have to say?" They think they've caught him in a trap. They think this shows how ridiculous the whole conception of resurrection is. You know, this happens to us today. The Saducees are like people today who come to you, and they know you're a believer.
They know you're a Christian, they know you believe in the Bible, and they're not really open, they're not really interested, but they want to trap you. They want to trick you, and so they ask you questions designed to try and put you in a trap like the Sadducees, like probably the most commonly known question is, "Can God make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?" Have you ever been asked a question like that?
You know, they think that if you answer, "Well, no , God can't make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it," well, "Isn't God all-powerful like you say?" But if they catch you, if you say yes to that, "Yes, God can make a rock so heavy that he can't lift it," "He can't lift it?" They think they catch you in an inconsistency . They're not really open. They're not really seeking to know God. That's the posture of the Sadducees.
You know, when we encounter people like that, and we detect, the Spirit really helps us to discern that this is not a person who is open in really hearing truth; this is a person who's trying to trap me. I often think of the wisdom of Proverbs 26 Four and Five. "Don't answer a fool according to his folly." Don't answer. Don't let a fool put you in his trap. Don't answer it within the confines of his folly, his foolish trap. But the very next verse: "Answer a fool as his folly deserves."
Oh, he needs an answer, she needs an answer. But you don't have to answer within the limits of that little trick question, the limits of that trap. And that's exactly what we see Jesus do here. Before I get to that, what is the relevance of all of this to you and me today? This goes to, kind of, even my working sermon title, "Modern-Day Sadducees". I think we live in the midst of many modern-day Sadducees.
I think we live in a culture where there's an increasing amount of people who are functional Sadducees , who, when they think of the afterlife, and they think of concepts like the Christian doctrine of resurrection, they think that is ridiculous, and they want to put that in your face, and they want to make you look ridiculous.
I think even within the church, I think there are many people, maybe some of you here today, who struggle to believe this conception that not only was Jesus raised from the dead, but that those who believe in Jesus will one day be resurrected, one day raised from the dead. And so, even to you this morning, I need to give the challenge: do you think like a Pharisee? Do you think like a Pharisee?
Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth, in a church there, in the Corinthian church, in 1 Corinthians 15, he wrote to Christians who are struggling to believe that believers will be raised, their bodies will be raised after they die. So he wrote to people like you and me, and here's what he had to say. Verse 32: "If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
He is describing, really, the kind of the modern thinking that there's no consciousness, there's no life, after death, that if there is no resurrection, if there is no life after death, then really, the only operating philosophy that really is worth living by is, "Eat, drink, and party. Enjoy life to the hilt while you can, because there's nothing after this life. You might as well go for the gusto." You know all the themes. You see it in advertising.
You hear it from people all around you, and maybe it leaks into your thinking. Maybe you, struggling to believe that there's any existence after you die, you fully embrace, even if you claim to be a follower of Jesus, you fully embrace a subtle form of hedonism, where your goal in life is to enjoy as much as you can now, to eliminate as much suffering as you can now, because you're living functionally as if this is all there is. And if that describes you, you are living like a Sadducee.
Jesus answers the foolishness of the Sadducees, not according to their folly. He answers them as their folly deserves. Look at verse 24: "Are you not deceived?" By the way, if you have a version that says, "Are you not mistaken?", that's not strong enough. The Greek word there really means "these are self-deceived men". These are men who are-- in some sense, they are hardened to God really revealing his truth to them.
"Are you not deceived because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God?" He challenges these men: "First of all, you don't know the scriptures." He challenges them, in other words, these men who studied the scripture , supposedly, he's challenging them: "You may have read the scriptures over and over again, but you don't grasp what they're teaching." And I wonder how many of us that describes. We may read the Bible, but we don't grasp, in this area, what it is really teaching.
The Sadducees think they've trapped Jesus, because they know that the term "resurrection" doesn't appear in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, but Jesus shows them as many times as they've read through those first five books, they keep missing it. It's there. They just keep missing it. They don't grasp that the Bible teaches it, and he speaks specifically of how it is taught in Exodus Chapter Three, in the account of Moses and the burning bush.
Look at what he says in Verse 26: "Haven't you read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him? 'I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.'" That's Exodus 3:6. And then Jesus goes on in Verse 27 to show them what they failed to grasp. "He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. "You are badly deceived." How does he get that? Do you notice the precise words that God speaks to Moses?
And just to set that scene in Exodus Chapter Three, when God is speaking to Moses, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob have been dead for many years. They've been buried for many years. Do you notice what God does not say to Moses? He doesn't say, "I was the God of Abraham. I was the God of Isaac. I was the God of Jacob."
Don't you think that Jesus, in other words, is saying, "Don't you think that if God viewed Abraham and Isaac and Jacob as when they died and their bodies went into the grave," that that was the end, there was no more consciousness, there was no more existence of the soul, don't you think that's what he would have said? "I was the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob"? Do you see how even the tense of the verb is so critical here? What does he say instead? "I am the God of Abraham."
Abraham who is in the grave. "I am the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." Isaac and Jacob who are in the grave. For Jesus, this statement proves that God's relationship with the righteous, it's not broken by death, that God continues to have communion, to have relationship with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in paradise. He is still their God. He is still in relationship with them. Why? Because their spirits are in paradise.
Their souls are in paradise with him, even though their body is in the grave. How about you? Do you grasp the Bible's teaching about the resurrection? Yes, the resurrection of Jesus. You have to grasp that. If you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus, you have no basis to believe that you are saved, but what about what's being talked about here? Do you believe in the resurrection of a believer?
Do you believe that if you know Christ as Savior and Lord, that your body will one day be resurrected? I would go so far as to say this is an essential of the faith. Your view of salvation, of your salvation, is limited. It is stunted if you do not see that your salvation is completed, is made full, when he finally resurrects your body.
This is the fullness of the Gospel: that he intends to save you and me, not just in our soul, but in our body, that our redemption includes not just our soul; it includes also our body. 1 Corinthians 15: again, Jesus-- excuse me again, Paul-- preaching or writing to people who thought they were Christians, thought they were followers of Jesus, people who were in a church but struggling with this conception of resurrection.
He writes in verse 12: "If it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection from the dead? If there is no resurrection from the dead, then not even Christ has been raised." Do you see how Paul links those two truths together?
You can't believe in the resurrection of Jesus without believing that Jesus will resurrect those that he saved, and you can't believe that God will resurrect those that Jesus has saved without believing in the resurrection of Jesus. This is an essential of the faith. Well , Jesus' second rebuke of the Sadducees' foolishness in denying the resurrection is the second part of the statement. "You don't know the power of God.
It's not only that you don't know the scriptures; you don't know the power of God." In other words, Jesus is saying to them, "You limit the power of God." The Sadducees are like so many of us today in our faith: we limit what we believe that God can do to what we can humanly understand from our earthly experience. And we hear about something that scripture says that God can do, but it's not something we can conceive of from our human frame of reference.
It doesn't fit what we know of the principles of science or human logic. We struggle to believe it. And what are we doing? We are limiting the power of God to what we can humanly understand. We are limiting the power of God, of what God can do, to what we can put in earthly categories. We do that with healing all the time. We say that we believe that God can heal, but then we come upon situations where we hear from the medical professionals, "You know, there's nothing more that can be done."
And hearing that in our earthly frame of reference, we struggle to believe that God can heal. We struggle on the opposite end of the spectrum. What if God doesn't heal? What if we pray for healing and God doesn't heal? I mean, our human understanding is that what is good and what should happen is that God always heals physically, and this person is healed of their affliction, or this person is saved from death.
Well , what if God, in his grand scope, has a bigger plan in mind that includes that that person is not physically healed, even though they are spiritually healed, that that person may even be called home to paradise with him? When we struggle with that because it doesn't fit within our earthly categories of what we want and what we desire, then we limit the power of God. We certainly see this in resurrection, and I'll just be very real: I think of a body dying in 9/11.
I think of what happened to the bodies perishing in the two towers, the Twin Towers, those bodies being basically incinerated, reduced to ash, and that ash being spread all throughout New York City, maybe beyond. Or I think of bodies that perish at sea and are never recovered, and what happens to them?
I mean, you can let your mind run, and you can think of all the ways that a body can die, where that body, all the elements of that body, are just spread to the degree that my mind cannot conceive. How could God bring all of that together? How could God reconstitute that person's body? And what is that? That is me limiting the power of God. That is me trying to view through my own human understanding, my scientific understanding, what God can do.
And because I can't work out a way that God could do that, limiting, doubting that God can do that, that's exactly what the Sadducees are doing here. But Jesus says, "You limit the power of God when you only believe what you can humanly understand, what only makes sense from what you understand as a person living on this earth." And that's what the Sadducees are doing when they bring in this hypothetical that assumes that marriage in heaven will be like marriage on earth.
The Saducees are bringing the earthly human assumption that relationships in heaven are like relationships on Earth. But Jesus says, Verse 25: "When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They will be like the angels in heaven." Now, this is not Jesus' complete teaching on Heaven. This is not the Bible's complete teaching on Heaven, but this gives us a little glimpse of Heaven, and what is the glimpse that we see in Heaven?
The righteous, those who know Christ as Savior and Lord, the righteous will be like the angels, and let me stop there. We do not become angels. I have to bite my tongue when I'm at a funeral and I hear, particularly, unbelievers but sometimes even believers, trying to comfort the one who is lost, someone saying, "Oh, now they're one of God's angels." No, that is not true. We do not become angels.
We become like the angels in this aspect that Jesus goes on to say here: that we are not married in Heaven, like angels are not married. We do not have children in Heaven, like angels do not have children in Heaven. Maybe at this point you're wondering, especially if you are happily married and if you've enjoyed the blessings of children, "Well, that sounds like a downgrade," but let's look at the purpose in marriage. What is marriage designed to do? What was God's design for marriage?
He designed marriage one, to propagate children, to fill the earth with other human beings. But what do we know will happen in Heaven? There will be no more death. There will be no one dying. There will be no need to continue to propagate the species. What else do we know is one of God's purposes of marriage on Earth? It's for companionship. It is for relationship. It is to keep us from being lonely, from being disconnected, and why is that purpose no longer needed in Heaven?
Because in Heaven, when all sin is removed, when we're there with glorified body and glorified spirit, there is none of the sin, there is none of the limitation that now comes between us, even in the closest of relationships, even in marriage. We will have absolutely perfect relationships in Heaven. Can you imagine that?
No more misunderstanding, no more conflict, perfect communication, perfect fellowship, and not just with the person that we were married with on this earth, which I believe other scripture says we'll clearly know them and be in relationship with them, but with everyone in Heaven. In fact, marriage on Earth is just a dim picture of the fullness of relationships in Heaven. Marriage on Earth is even a picture of the marriage that we will have with Christ in Heaven. Christ the husband, we his bride.
Are you a practical Sadducee, struggling to believe in the resurrected life? Paul says again in 1 Corinthians 15: "Now I say this, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood--" in other words, what we understand from our earthly life-- "cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." We can't limit our thinking about what God can do to our earthly flesh-and-blood understanding. Let me close with this.
If you have been made righteous by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and by your faith, your confidence, in his perfect sacrifice on the cross for your sin, if you believe in all that God says in his word, if you believe in God's unlimited power to accomplish all that he says in his word, then you will experience, when you experience earthly death, you will experience paradise when you die.
Yes, your body will be in the grave, or if it's cremated, in an urn, for a time, but your soul will be with Jesus in paradise. And that's not all: you will experience the resurrection of your body when Christ returns. Your body will be raised and made perfect like his body is perfect, and it will be joined to your soul, which is then made perfect, and that's what you will spend eternity in. You will experience the glorified state for all eternity.
So I'll leave you with these words, again, from 1 Corinthians 15: "Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. In a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. Death will be swallowed up in victory." Amen. Let's pray.
Lord Jesus, we have ups and downs in this life, and you bless us with some mountaintop experiences, but even those mountaintop experiences, when our life, when our relationships, are at their best, they pale in comparison to what we read of here. They pale in comparison to what paradise will be like, what Heaven, what eternity, will be like if we know you as Savior and Lord. So Lord, give us a yearning for Heaven. Give us a yearning for your return, when the resurrection will occur, Lord.
We pray for anyone here this morning who is uncertain, who does not know these truths at a heart level. I pray that even this morning, this reality that there is life after death and the decisions they make even now in this earth, determine what that will be like for them. I pray that with that, working in their hearts and minds, you would draw them to true faith in you, Jesus, as their Savior, as their Lord.
And Lord, for those of us who've already come to that point, and you have saved us, I pray that you'd grow in us a desire for Heaven, a desire for the resurrection, a desire for your glorious return. We pray this all, Jesus, in your precious name. Amen.