Reflective Bible Study

Every so often, while moving through the gospels, we come across a passage that has the power to radically change someone’s perspective. The passage we are looking at for this podcast episode is one such passage for me.

A number of years ago, while studying this passage using Reflective Bible Study, I noticed a phrase in Luke’s version of this event that is not in Matthew or in Mark, and this phrase radically shifted my view about God, about death, about the future resurrection, and about the idea of perspective within the Bible. In other words, this passage pushed me to pay closer attention to the perspective of who is sharing the message within each Bible passage, and in Jesus’ case, we must pay attention to whether He is sharing from humanity’s perspective or from God’s perspective. While Jesus can share from either, it seems that Jesus usually draws us to pay attention to God’s perspective.

The extra phrase that is found within Luke’s gospel also may have stood out to me when I read it simply because I have never heard anyone else mention it, or draw attention onto it prior to my studying it. It is almost as if this is a forgotten or intentionally ignored phrase in a passage that doesn’t get much attention, simply because it challenges most people’s views about death and the resurrection. In short, this passage challenges all three major views regarding the state of those who have died without really touching directly on this topic.

Let’s read what happened and then unpack what we can learn from what Jesus taught. Our passage is found in Luke’s gospel, chapter 20, and we will read it from the New International Version of the Bible. Starting in verse 27, Luke tells us that:

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?”

Pausing briefly, I am always a little humored at both the framing of the Sadducees dilemma, and at the ultimate question they ask. Luke has opened by saying that the Sadducees do not believe in a resurrection, but then they ask Jesus about what happens in the scenario they share at the resurrection.

I suspect that the Sadducees, who only regarded the Old Testament books Moses wrote as spiritually authoritative, had used this marriage dilemma as their reasoning for rejecting the resurrection. Because of this marriage instruction, it created a problem for when multiple brothers returned to life.

Because Moses clearly gave this instruction while not clearly drawing attention to the concept of a resurrection, in the Sadducees eyes, this dilemma logically concluded that resurrection was not valid because marriage is. In the Sadducees eyes, this dilemma made marriage, and all the legalities surrounding it, incompatible with the resurrection.

However, let’s read Jesus’ reply and uncover what we can learn about both these significant topics. Continuing in verse 34:

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.

I am continually amazed at Jesus’ response, because His response challenges everyone present, while also subtly affirming a difficult to accept belief.

As Jesus opens His reply, He both challenges the belief that the resurrection is a fantasy while also subtly validating the detail that marriage and resurrection are, in the framing of the Sadducees dilemma, incompatible. However, Jesus stresses the detail that the resurrection that He promises marks the end of marriage, and this also draws us to understand exactly where we are in history. Since marriage is still something that occurs today, regardless of what you believe about marriage, its existence places us clearly before the resurrection and before the age to come.

In Jesus’ eyes, resurrection is a clear promise and something we can look forward to experiencing!

Next, Jesus challenges the belief that death is simply a transition into heaven. This is because the Sadducees question and dilemma is framed at the resurrection, and Jesus’ reply is also framed as being at the resurrection. Before the resurrection, the Sadducees dilemma makes perfect sense because before the resurrection contains marriage. If those who have died are conscious and living in heaven awaiting resurrection, the scenario that the Sadducees give is a valid concern, because all seven brothers were married to this woman.

Jesus’ reply frames this dilemma as not a dilemma because everything in His reply happens on or after the resurrection transition. The state of those who are dead prior to the resurrection is equal to nothing, or at the very least, it lacks consciousness and interaction with others. (Remember that if those who have died are able to see each other, then the Sadducees dilemma is a valid logical argument.)

In Jesus’ eyes, the Sadducees dilemma is not valid because there is no consciousness between death and the resurrection.

The third major belief that Jesus challenges in this passage is that death is a sleep waiting for resurrection. While in many other places death is referred to as a sleep, Jesus’ final statement in this passage appears to take aim at this belief as well. Jesus’ final words in this response are “He [referring to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

This third challenge is valid because if God sees all people as alive, even after their bodies have long decomposed, then they must exist somewhere. It is less relevant the state of their existence as the fact that they exist separately from the breath and the dust that is not given any specific or special designation.

In Jesus’ eyes, everyone, regardless of whether they are alive or dead, is alive in God’s eyes.

All three major views of death are challenged in this short passage. I suspect this is why almost no one talks about this event. To bring up the Sadducees dilemma means putting a target on yourself and on your belief about death and the resurrection.

However, how can we reconcile this?

Is there a view of death that is compatible with all three challenges?

I believe the answer is a clear yes, even if this view will likely never be popular. The answer to this viewpoint is seeing history as a timeline. The answer is seeing history as His story – specifically as God’s story.

To reconcile this in my own mind, I needed to start somewhere. Since the most common metaphor for death in the Bible is sleep, I started there. Death is described as sleep more than any other way in the Bible that I am aware of. However, the typical understanding of death as a sleep leaves out one major idea. Death as a sleep leaves out history’s timeline.

God has a clear record of history because history is His story. Because God exists outside of time, all He must do to see people as alive is to go to the part of His story that they are in. This does not mean that people now dead or who are not yet born are currently alive from our perspective. Instead, this means that God merely moves to a different part in history to see them as alive.

Does this mean that we no longer have any freedom of choice? Some people believe this, however I do not. Only if I knew God’s perspective and could see my future would I surrender all choice. God knowing what I will choose does not mean I don’t freely choose it. Since I don’t know my future, I have the freedom of pressing forward with the freedom of choice.

What does this mean then for the resurrection? With the timeline perspective of history, the resurrection is simple. God has planned a sequel to the story that sin corrupted, and this sequel is the New Heaven and New Earth. The resurrection then becomes the transition moment when God closes this book of history, and pulls all His people from our current story into His sequel. Because God is outside of time writing history, He has the power to pull characters from any point in His story into His sequel and He chooses to do that for His people!

Jesus teaches all of us that the resurrection is defined at the transition between the current age and the age to come. The age to come is marked by the absence of marriage. This means that the age we are currently living in as the same age as Jesus spoke, since marriage is an issue and a topic of discussion today.

However,this age filled with sin isn’t all we have to look forward to. God is planning a sequel, and He wants you and me to be a part of it!

As we come to the end of a longer podcast than what I was planning, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As always, intentionally seek God first in your life. Choose to ally yourself with Jesus and accept Jesus’ gift that He offers, which is a place within His sequel.

Also, continue to pray and study the Bible for yourself. On any subject or idea you hear, see, or read, take the idea and filter it through God’s Word. Don’t take my word, or any pastor, speaker, author, or podcaster at face value. Study out your beliefs and let God push you into discovering His truth. If you haven’t studied the different angles of beliefs about death, perhaps this episode is an invitation or challenge to do so. Like me, you may be surprised about what you can discover.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or stray away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

As we continue looking at connections between the Old Testament and Jesus’ ministry, and before moving forward to prophecies focused on the resurrection and beyond, I thought it would be worthwhile to step back and look at a fascinating parable Jesus shared that is connected with a prophecy found in the Old Testament.

However, while pausing our journey through Jesus’ death and resurrection to focus on this parable mght seem a little strange, hinted at in the conclusion of this parable are connections and foreshadowing of the resurrection. Also tucked within this parable was foreshadowing of Jesus’ death.

With this as our foundation, let’s read this Old Testament prophecy-illustration and discover what we can learn from how Jesus takes this idea and incorporates it into His teaching. Our passage and prophecy is found in the book of Isaiah, chapter 5, and we will read it using the New American Standard Bible translation. Starting in verse 1, Isaiah writes:

¹ Let me sing now for my well-beloved
A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard.
My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill.
² He dug it all around, removed its stones,
And planted it with the choicest vine.
And He built a tower in the middle of it
And also hewed out a wine vat in it;
Then He expected it to produce good grapes,
But it produced only worthless ones.

³ “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah,
Judge between Me and My vineyard.
⁴ “What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it?
Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?
⁵ “So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard:
I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed;
I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground.
⁶ “I will lay it waste;
It will not be pruned or hoed,
But briars and thorns will come up.
I will also charge the clouds to rain no rain on it.”

⁷ For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel
And the men of Judah His delightful plant.
Thus He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed;
For righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress.

In this ominous illustration found in Isaiah’s writing, we see God giving His nation every possible advantage, hoping that all the attention and blessings given to them would result in a positive outcome. However, what happened instead was the opposite.

Through what would easily be a very unpopular message, God predicts the rejection of a people who He gave every advantage and blessing.

Moving forward to the New Testament, nearing the weekend He would be crucified, Jesus had the opportunity to share an illustration that also touches on the theme of a vineyard. In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 21, starting in verse 33, Matthew records Jesus teaching those present by saying:

³³ “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey. ³⁴ When the harvest time approached, he sent his slaves to the vine-growers to receive his produce. ³⁵ The vine-growers took his slaves and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third. ³⁶ Again he sent another group of slaves larger than the first; and they did the same thing to them. ³⁷ But afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ ³⁸ But when the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ ³⁹ They took him, and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. ⁴⁰ Therefore when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine-growers?” ⁴¹ They said to Him, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.”

Let’s stop reading here and save the rest of this event for our next episode.

I suspect that some of you, when reading Jesus’ parable about the vineyard, will easily see the connection between it and the illustration that Isaiah shared. While there are clear differences, such as the focus of Isaiah’s parable being on the grapes the vineyard produced while Jesus’ parable focused on the evil hired tenants, the gist of both these parables is on how every opportunity and advantage was provided to those involved in this vineyard. Even with everything blessing and advantage being given to the grapes and the tenants, the ultimate result was not positive.

One thing I find amazing about this parable is that with the way Jesus frames the question He ends with, it implicates those who are listening to Him. While we will focus more on this point in our next episode, it is worth pointing out that Jesus asks the question about what the vineyard owner would do, and according to Matthew’s gospel, it is those listening to Jesus who respond that the vineyard owner would deal harshly with them.

It is also amazing to point out the interesting irony that in this illustration, Jesus clearly predicts His own death at the hands of the religious leaders. While this detail is often only briefly touched on, it is amazing in my mind that if the religious leaders wanted to avoid playing into Jesus’ prophetic hand, they would have taken Jesus’ words in this parable to heart, and simply rejected Him rather than plotted for His death.

I suspect that these leaders simply did not care if something Jesus predicted would ultimately come to pass, at least at that time, because they had already written Him off as not fitting their understanding of Messianic prophecies. One could make the case that one reason Jesus died was because the religious leaders were too focused on only one way of understanding the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. An equally valid similar idea is that Jesus died because the religious leaders focused more heavily on prophecies that sounded good, while discounting prophecies that pointed towards a suffering and crucified Messiah.

However, if we take a step back and learn the lessons that the past teaches us, we can avoid making the same mistakes that those in the past made. In the case of the vineyard, we can be better than the bitter grapes that were produced by valuing the blessings God has given to us. While sometimes God’s blessings come through trials, we can know and trust that everything God allows into our lives has a purpose, and that God’s ultimate purpose is saving us for eternity.

Also, in the case of the evil tenants, we can learn from their mistake by returning to God His portion of the things He has blessed us with. While the parable ends before the actual judgment has taken place, if we are left to conclude the parable the way the crowd’s suggestion goes, then the tenants who were given every opportunity ultimately lose everything. These tenants owned nothing to begin with while they thought they could claim everything as their own, and because of this attitude, they ultimately lose more than they had to begin with.

It is the same way with each of us. We have been blessed with more than we deserve through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. We began with nothing, and were given everything. While we have the temptation to discount Jesus’ gift to us, and claim we can earn 100% of salvation on our own, if we go down this road, we will ultimately lose out on everything.

The way out of this trap is to continually acknowledge God’s blessings in our hearts, minds, and lives, and to live with an open hand towards God, allowing Him to loan things to us and being willing to return the things He has loaned when He asks. Living with a gracious, generous, open hand towards God is the way to avoid falling in the trap of the evil tenants, and it is also the way to produce a great harvest of fruit in our lives – a harvest of spiritual fruit that reflects God’s character and love.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always open these challenges by saying in one way or another, intentionally seek God first, in your life and choose to live in a gracious, generous way towards God for all the ways He has blessed you with.

Continue to pray and study the Bible for yourself to grow your personal relationship with God, and purposefully orient your life towards growing closer to Him.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or walk away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!