27 Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. 28 “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 offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. 30 The second 31 and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
34 Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. 37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ 38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
39 Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” 40 And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Read Luke 20:27-40 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!
Have you ever read a passage and had it change your perspective on the world?
Well today’s passage is a passage that has done this for me – specifically with a simple phrase that Luke included in his gospel that Matthew and Mark leave out: “. . . for to him all are alive” (v. 38b).
Most people feel/believe that there is life of some type after death. In this post, the Sadducees are challenging Jesus on this idea. Their question is one that they had used to disprove the idea of resurrection based on the writings of Moses.
The phrase Luke includes seems to support the idea of an immortal soul, but when we push past the surface, we find some interesting issues. If those who have “died” in this present life are conscious, and are either alive in heaven or alive in hell, then we have an interesting dilemma: Either God is in charge of both heaven and hell and Satan is trapped within time like the rest of us, or both God and Satan are outside of time and each have their respective “kingdoms”.
The fallacy in this argument is not in its logic, but in its assumptions – because it over-extends God’s perspective and superimposes our perspective onto it. We are assuming that because God sees everyone as “alive”, that everyone is “alive” throughout all points in history, or at the very least, for all points in history after they are born, and that they have simply transitioned “outside” of history’s timeline.
In our own storyline-movie example, would we think that someone dying in a movie means that they have died in real life or that if they are dead in real life, that watching a movie they acted in will bring them back to life? That would involve these actors shifting between two different timelines – and while it is easy for an actor to move into a movie timeline, a movie character cannot jump out of the movie and re-enter history at a later date.
However, if the creator of the character (i.e. the script-writer) wants to bring the character back in a sequel, they are perfectly capable of doing so.
What God promises to do is the same – to bring all of His people back into history in a “sequel” we call “the new heaven and the new earth”. God has promised a sequel for His followers – and what is great about this “perfect” sequel is that God has promised us that it will never end and that it will not have the negative points of the first history.
What happens between history and its sequel? Between two storylines, sometimes things happen, but if anything, the events between the present and the sequel are left to our imagination and are only uncovered when the sequel has begun. From our perspective, living in our chapter of history, we can only imagine what happens between the present and the sequel. This imagination is like a dream, which may be one reason why one of death’s parallel ideas in the Bible is “sleep”.
Have those who died left history and entered eternity? Perhaps, but when we dig into this passage, what might appear as a phrase that supports this thought really becomes a phrase that shifts our perspective – not a phrase that challenges the future resurrection that Jesus promised.
Is it possible for us to really understand God’s perspective? I don’t think so, but by paralleling God’s perspective alongside similar perspectives of our own, I do believe that we can have a better glimpse of how God sees life.
This thought was inspired by studying the Walking With Jesus “Reflective Bible Study” package. To discover insights like this in your own study time, click here and give Reflective Bible Study a try today!
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