God of the Living (Mark #41)

Before we get into today’s passage, let me offer a financial tip: consider investing in a company that sells caffeinated beverages, because I suspect my family will be purchasing quite a lot of them thanks to our newest member.

After years of confessing my love of dogs and torturing myself by browsing listings online, we finally did it. We adopted an eight-week-old beagle, and she is precious.

I know — a beagle. Even my own dad said he’d never get one. But this is the quietest beagle any of us have ever been around. That could all change in six weeks, but right now she’s genuinely wonderful, and even the non-dog-lovers in our family have fallen for her.

(If I make any mistakes today, I’m blaming sleep deprivation. I expect to use that excuse for a while.)

A Genius Who Believed Something Strange

Many years ago I met a young man I’ll call Leonard. It didn’t take long to realize he was extraordinarily intelligent. He’d been hired by an engineering firm before he even graduated. In conversation you got the sense he could run mathematical circles around you without breaking a sweat.

I met him through a Thursday night young adult ministry in Cedar Rapids. A few other leaders and I had started a citywide gathering where twenty-somethings from about a dozen different churches came together weekly for worship and teaching. He was there almost every week.

And as I got to know him, I discovered he wasn’t a Christian. The reason he came to a Christian event was to meet people his own age. He’d moved to town without many friends, heard about it, and figured this was a place to connect.

So one day we got together for coffee, and I asked what he believed. He said the Bible was fascinating — his grandmother had taken him to church occasionally — but he also found a lot of fiction fascinating. So I wanted to know: what makes you tick? What gives you purpose? What do you actually believe?

He told me he’d been reading a particular philosopher. I wish I could remember which one. He was on his third or fourth book by this man and was convinced the philosopher had it all figured out.

And the more he explained, the more stunned I became — because what I was hearing left me wondering how a twenty-five-year-old genius could believe any of it.

I’m not good at confrontation, so I just pushed back gently and asked questions. And he said: “I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand. It takes a genius like me to grasp these concepts.”

I may have failed to mention he didn’t have many friends. Now you know why.

You Can Believe Whatever You Want

But the longer we talked, the more I learned something important about human beings. Watching a brilliant young man commit himself to a set of genuinely strange ideas, I realized: you can believe whatever you want.

You can commit so completely that even overwhelming evidence gets rejected out of hand, because what you already hold makes sense to you and feels comfortable — so everything else gets refused.

Here’s an example. Over the last decade or so, a group of people have become convinced the earth isn’t a globe at all — that it’s flat and we’ve all been deceived. Someone I know began posting a great deal of this material, and whenever anyone pushed back the response was always: here are the videos, research it yourself, the evidence is overwhelming, we’ve all been duped, those photographs are fabricated.

Now, from the way I’m describing this, you can tell what I believe about the shape of the earth. Which means if you happen to believe it’s flat, what you’re thinking right now is: I’m not sure I can listen to this man anymore. Because if I’m wrong about something you consider so well established, why would you trust anything else I say?

Minds Wide Shut

Two authors published a book during the pandemic called Minds Wide Shut, arguing that America is more divided than ever precisely because of this phenomenon.

And it isn’t confined to science. You find it in politics. You find it in the church and in theology. There’s a spectrum of positions — but instead of conversation happening between them, people become so entrenched that anything originating outside their camp is rejected on arrival. There may be excellent evidence for something, but it doesn’t fit the narrative, so it’s discarded.

And it goes further: we start rejecting the people rather than the claims. Name a particular news network and some people will immediately dismiss anything it broadcasts while others will accept anything it broadcasts. Name a well-known megachurch pastor with books and a podcast and some will say everything he says is gold while others will say everything he says is heresy.

We settle into camps, and it divides us, and we refuse to hear anything that might challenge the position.

Why This Matters Today

I bring this up because today we watch Jesus in conversation with people who flatly reject part of what he teaches. It doesn’t fit their narrative. It doesn’t fit their box.

And I want us to look at it because we fall into the same trap. There are things we want, things we desire, things our culture presses on us — and sometimes the Scriptures run counter to all of it. That’s uncomfortable. So we either try to massage the text into saying what we’d prefer, or we quietly ignore it.

Fair warning: when you push back on Scripture, you may find yourself doing exactly what this group did — pushing back against God himself.

The Passage

In Mark 12:18–27, the Sadducees — who say there is no resurrection — come to Jesus with a scenario. Moses wrote that if a man dies leaving a wife and no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. So, they say, suppose there were seven brothers. The first married and died childless. The second married her and died. Then the third, and so on through all seven. Finally the woman died too. In the resurrection, whose wife will she be, since all seven had her?

Jesus answers that they are wrong precisely because they know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God — that when people rise from the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, haven’t they read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God said I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.

How We Got Here

Last week we saw Jesus in conversation with the Pharisees. At the end of chapter 11 they confronted him; in chapter 12 he told a parable they correctly perceived was aimed at them — in effect prophesying that they would have him arrested and killed. Realizing he had seen through their schemes, they decided to trap him.

So they went in disguise, partnered with the Herodians, and asked about taxes. Either answer would ruin him: one would turn the public against him, the other would get him arrested by Rome. And he didn’t take the bait. Instead he turned the conversation on them, showing that the image of God is stamped on human beings — and therefore we must give all of ourselves to God.

Enter the Sadducees

I suspect the Sadducees were standing nearby, quietly delighted that Jesus had just made the Pharisees look foolish.

The Sadducees held many of the seats on the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, and carried more influence with Rome than the Pharisees did. Where the Pharisees devoted themselves entirely to studying Scripture and the law, the Sadducees would be considered the liberal party on that question. They accepted only the first five books — the ones written by Moses — as authoritative. Everything else was, to them, worthwhile literature but not the word of God. And having narrowed their canon, they oriented themselves around law and power, taking up positions of authority.

Much of what Jesus taught aligned with Pharisee teaching, so they wanted him discredited. And since the Pharisees had just failed, the Sadducees figured they’d handle it. They were the sharpest men around. They could do theological gymnastics without breaking a sweat.

So they arrive with what they consider the perfect question — built by combining two sources.

Source One: Levirate Marriage

The first is Deuteronomy 25:5–6, where God instructs through Moses that if brothers live together and one dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother is to take her as his wife and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law, and the first son she bears will carry on the dead brother’s name, so that his name is not blotted out of Israel.

I’ll admit my modern American mind finds that strange. I have a wonderful sister-in-law — we were texting yesterday while my niece and nephew were at a swim meet. Great relationship. But if my brother died, I am not looking to propose. It’s simply odd to us.

What’s strange to us, though, was protection for them.

Many ancient cultures — and unfortunately some modern ones — regard women as barely above property. There’s an organization called International Justice Mission that works through legal channels to free people from labor and sex slavery, and they encounter cases where a man dies and his extended family swoops in and takes everything, turning the widow out with nothing. In their view the property was never hers; it belonged to their brother, their son, so they take it.

That’s why God gave something like Deuteronomy 25. It’s called levirate marriage, and it leveled the playing field. By providing a son who carried the deceased husband’s name, the dead man’s line continued and his property passed to that son — which meant the widow retained the property, retained a measure of security, and when the son grew up, everything passed to him and he cared for the mother who had cared for him.

It was protection.

And because it’s in Deuteronomy, the Sadducees have no objection. Moses wrote it. It’s in the first five books. It’s authoritative.

What They Rejected

What they did not accept was resurrection — because you don’t find it in those first five books. You find it in Daniel. In the Psalms. In Ezekiel. But not in the Torah. And since it isn’t there, in their view it doesn’t exist.

Jesus teaches as though resurrection is real. So they set out to discredit him — by combining levirate marriage with a story from a second source.

Source Two: A Story of Seven Deaths

The second source is the book of Tobit, part of the Apocrypha. Some Christian denominations consider it Scripture; the large majority, particularly Protestants, do not, and most Jews did not either. It was written around 300 B.C.

The story concerns a blind man named Tobit and a righteous woman named Sarah. I’ll spoil it: Tobit’s son eventually finds a way to cure his father’s blindness, marries Sarah, and it ends happily.

But before that, Sarah becomes engaged repeatedly — and each time the marriage ends in disaster. A demon is pursuing her, and each time she becomes engaged and the couple retires to the wedding chamber, the demon kills the husband so the marriage cannot be consummated and Sarah remains unclaimed. This happens seven times.

So the Sadducees take the seven husbands from Tobit and combine them with levirate marriage from Deuteronomy, producing a scenario they consider so absurd that it disproves resurrection outright.

They’ve got him. They pose the question expecting Jesus to say, “I never thought of that.” It’s the ancient equivalent of asking whether an all-powerful God could create a rock too heavy for him to lift. They’re smiling inwardly.

Jesus Doesn’t Soften It

And then verse 24: Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?

He doesn’t say, “Interesting concept, let’s talk it through.” He goes straight at them. You think you know. You don’t. You are badly wrong.

The Sadducees believed they had it all worked out: only the five books of Moses count, so everything else gets swept away — even though the vast majority of Judaism at the time accepted the rest as Scripture. The evidence was substantial. They wouldn’t hear it. And since resurrection appears in the parts they’d excluded, they simply denied it.

Jesus is telling them to expand their thinking. All of it is Scripture. You think you know the Scriptures, and you don’t — and because you don’t know the Scriptures, you don’t know the power of God.

Jesus is from heaven. He knows there is resurrection. We’ve already heard him say that before Abraham was, I am — he knew Abraham personally. Which is why in verse 25 he can state plainly what happens: when people rise from the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven. He has been there. He knows.

A Small Dig About Angels

That line about angels is another jab, because the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection or angels.

But please don’t misread it. Jesus did not say people become angels. He said they become like angels.

I’ve been at funerals and spoken with grieving families who say their loved one is now an angel. It’s a lovely thought, and it isn’t biblical. Psalm 8:5 says God created humans a little lower than the angels — so the order runs God, then angels, then humans, then the rest of creation. But in 1 Corinthians 6:3, Paul says that followers of Jesus will judge angels. So if your loved one knew the gospel and has gone to spend eternity with the Father, please don’t demote them. They’re actually greater.

And I can’t help wondering whether Jesus was a little insulted by the denial of angels. As God the Son he was present at the creation of everything — he made the angels and knows them by name. Imagine a stranger walking up to you and saying, “I don’t think you actually have children.” Or telling me that a close friend of mine sounds too good to be real and the whole thing must be an elaborate hoax. You’d just stare at them. What do you mean? I think that’s roughly the moment.

“But We Wanted to Be Married Forever”

I remember doing premarital counseling with a young couple when this came up — that there’s no marriage in heaven.

The point I was making then is the point I’d make to you: if you are married, this is the only marriage you get. So make the most of it. Love this person. Serve them. Pour everything into it. Because after you die, you will no longer be married.

They looked at me and said, “That’s kind of sad. We were hoping to be married for eternity.”

Part of me thought that was genuinely sweet. It also isn’t biblical. There is only one marriage in heaven, and it’s between Jesus and his church. There’s no need for reproduction, so there’s no need for marriage — and we get to be united with Christ for eternity.

Jesus Doesn’t Just Assert — He Argues

What Jesus does next is brilliant. He doesn’t merely state his opinion. He backs it with evidence — and he chooses his evidence with precision.

In verses 26 and 27 he goes to Exodus 3, the story of the burning bush.

Recall the setup. In Exodus 1 and 2 we meet Moses, born to a Hebrew family under a pharaoh who had ordered every Hebrew boy killed. To protect him, his family sets him adrift in a basket, and Pharaoh’s daughter finds him — so he’s adopted and raised at the very top of Egyptian society as Pharaoh’s grandson.

But he knows he’s Hebrew. And one day he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite, intervenes, and kills the man. Fearing execution, he flees — and ends up a shepherd in the wilderness. From the top of Egypt to the bottom of society, alone with sheep.

I picture a cool evening, the sun going down, when he sees fire with nobody near it. He approaches and finds a bush burning without being consumed. As he comes closer, God speaks from the bush, calling him by name. God tells him to remove his sandals because the ground is holy, and then identifies himself: I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hides his face, afraid to look.

One Verb

The Sadducees know this story cold. Some of them likely had it memorized. When Jesus brings it up, they’re probably thinking: of course we know it — this is Moses being called by God, exactly why we hold to the five books.

And Jesus says: yes, but you’re missing something.

You’re missing a verb.

God did not say “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” He did not say “I used to know them.” He said I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

Jesus uses that present tense to establish that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not simply die and remain in the ground. Because they were God’s, they live. He is not God of the dead, but of the living.

Takeaway One: God Is Alive and Powerful

Most of you already believe this. But I suspect the Sadducees would have claimed to believe it too. God is alive? Certainly. God is powerful? Of course — they could read in the Torah that God created all things, worked miracles in Egypt, parted the sea, and spoke to Moses from a burning bush.

And yet by denying resurrection, they were effectively saying God isn’t powerful enough for that.

We’ve already watched Jesus raise a little girl from the dead in this very book. He knows resurrection happens. But these men miss it, because no matter what the evidence says, it doesn’t fit their framework.

One theologian wrote about this passage that the charge against the Sadducees was that their detachment from God’s power stemmed from a deficient knowledge of Scripture — and that Jesus here pays Scripture one of his highest tributes by implying that knowing it guards a person from theological error and acquaints them with the power of God.

Their truncated view of Scripture cost them a full view of God.

Many of us want to see God’s power. We pray for a miracle because a loved one is in the hospital, or something tragic has happened. Pray for it — out of his mercy and power God may answer. But sometimes God has a different plan, which turns out to be a better plan. Just because God doesn’t act your way on your timeline doesn’t make him cruel. You have to come to a place of trust. He is powerful enough.

And what Jesus is pressing on the Sadducees is that sometimes God reveals his power through a miracle — and sometimes he reveals it simply through his presence. When you’re in the Scriptures, you’re in that presence.

Takeaway Two: God’s Word Is Reliable

Our local paper runs a church page every Thursday, and I’m one of nine pastors in the rotation. Another contributor is a retired pastor who has used his columns to argue that Christianity isn’t what we’ve been led to believe. He denies that Jesus was God. He denies the meaning of the cross and substitutionary atonement. He denies the resurrection. He regards the Bible as a purely human product containing good material we can learn from, and Jesus as a wonderful man worth studying. He’d call himself a follower of Jesus while no longer holding the tenets of the faith.

His journey isn’t unusual. Plenty of people grew up in church, believed certain things, and no longer do.

For some it began with a question they couldn’t answer. Someone posed their own version of the Sadducees’ puzzle, and they couldn’t respond the way Jesus did. They said “I don’t know,” the doubt took root, and eventually everything else came apart.

I’m not immune. Years ago, while we were preparing to launch that young adult ministry, I went through a stretch of several weeks convinced I had bought into a lie and that Christianity was fabricated — and I was a pastor at the time.

Others walk away because of something evil done to them or to someone they love, and it moves them from doubting God’s goodness to doubting his power to doubting his existence, until the whole structure collapses.

There’s a wide range of reasons people leave. But across a great many of those stories, one element recurs: they began to doubt the reliability of the Scriptures.

Remember what I said at the start — you can believe anything you want, and you can go find evidence that supports it. I’m not suggesting everyone who left wanted to; many felt something was taken from them. But it’s true that you can find plenty of material arguing the Bible is unreliable. And it’s equally true that you can find plenty of material demonstrating that it is remarkably reliable.

Personally, I’m going with the man who could raise himself from the dead. And when that man says Scripture is reliable right down to the tense of a single verb — that’s who I’m following.

Takeaway Three: God’s Word Is For You

When Moses wrote Exodus, who did he have in mind? I suspect he knew exactly how fickle the people he was leading could be, and, moved by God, he wrote these things down to protect them — so they’d remember, and not repeat what they’d done while he was up on the mountain receiving the commandments and they were down below building a golden calf.

It was written for them.

And yet when Jesus reaches back and brings Exodus 3 into his own moment, he’s saying: it wasn’t only for Moses’s audience. It’s for you Sadducees too.

Matthew’s account of this same episode makes it explicit. There Jesus says: as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?

What was written in Exodus was for the Sadducees. And what was written in Exodus was written to you.

For You, But Not About You

But don’t make the common mistake. The Bible is for you. It is not about you.

We’ve discussed this before — how we read David and Goliath and insert ourselves as David, cast our problems as the giant, treat our prayers as the stone, and imagine ourselves the victor.

The Bible isn’t about you. The Bible is about Jesus. First and foremost it’s the story of humanity walking away from its Creator through sin — and of God’s love and heart for those people, such that he came himself. God the Son set aside everything he had in heaven, came to earth, took on human flesh, lived a sinless life, and died in the sinner’s place.

That’s the story of the Bible. And that story is for you. Through it we learn God’s heart toward you. Through it we learn of his presence by the Holy Spirit.

Which is why Jesus is essentially saying: get into the Scriptures. Study them. They’re reliable. Because as you dig in, you discover how alive God is and how powerful he is — and it’s for you.

And you need to know that, because things will happen — internally, or as pressure from the culture, or as voices insisting that what’s good is exactly what Scripture runs counter to, therefore Scripture must be wrong. But this book has weathered countless cultures and centuries and is still here. And people who keep returning to it keep finding that it proves itself, because it is God’s word.

I don’t want you to miss it the way the Sadducees did — familiar enough to think you know it, while missing it entirely.

So get a Bible, and then don’t only use it on Sunday where it makes you look impressive. Use it Monday, in the privacy of your own home. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. And when you sit down with it, pray: God, show me your heart. Show me your presence. Let me see that you are alive. Let me sense how powerful you are. Because I believe this is reliable, and that you wrote it for me, so I could go live the life you’ve called me to.

A Prayer

Father, thank you for this passage, and thank you, Jesus, for what you said to those Sadducees and how it still reaches us.

I pray for those of us — myself included — who think we know the Bible and may be missing things. I think of Paul, who even while imprisoned asked for the scrolls to be brought to him, still wanting to study, still wanting to see whether there was more to see.

Some of us need to see your power and sense your presence. Help us get into your word. Some of us are wrestling with doubt as certain evidence comes our way. Help us see that we don’t have to be afraid of hard questions, because you have reigned over all of eternity and already see the end. You’ve got this, and you’ve got us.

Through roughly forty human authors you produced a work that weaves together history and poetry and instruction, and that ultimately points us to Jesus. Through him we see your heart for us — going to the cross to die the death we should have died, so we could live the life you always intended.

Make us people of the word. Keep us from being lazy in how we approach it. Help us dig in and let you shape us — because your desire is to make us like Christ, to help us love like Jesus loved and live like Jesus lived. And our world desperately needs that. In Jesus’s name, amen.