Mark 12 18-27

You know how one bad decision leads to another, and then that bad decision leads to another…When I was younger I worked in a group home, which is a facility for incarcerated youths. One night one of the newer kids started crying and couldn’t stop. I was sent in to see what I could do. So he and I talked. He had started making a bad choice; hanging out with the wrong friends. That led to him doing some drugs, and then stealing a motorcycle, which he crashed and tore up him leg pretty bad. Fortunately he was a kid who could listen. I told him how cows get lost.

Cows get lost by going from tuft of grass to tuft of grass all day, and then at the end of the day, when they finally put their heads up, they don’t know where they are, how to get back to the safety of the corral. They are lost. And that’s what this kid had done. He had put his head down, did things without really thinking about them, and then when he finally put his head to see where he was, he was in jail. And would be there for a couple years. He was seeing where he was, and knew he was lost. So I told him about the cows. I also told him he could get back to his old life, but that he had to listen to people in how to get back. Ended up being a pretty good kid.

But you can see how one bad decision can lead to another, even in our own lives. One sin leads to a lie, which leads to more trouble and so on. In the passage for today the Sadduccees, another one of the groups in Jerusalem takes their shot at questioning Jesus to see what kind of answer he gives to the questions they struggle with. Let’s see how their worldview clashes with truth. Please stand…

Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with 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 have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also 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 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!”

Let’s pray.

You’ll remember we have gone with Jesus from His baptism and the start of His ministry out in the desert with John the Baptist, all the way through Israel to Jerusalem, the city of His death and resurrection. We currently are with Jesus in Jerusalem; He has been teaching in the Temple courts, and has made Himself a public figure very quickly. The Pharisees have already been out to question Him, as have the Herodians, Jews who were very loyal to the Romans. Now another group has come to test the theology of Jesus, the Sadducees. The Sadducees were one of the two main groups of priests. The Pharisees were tied to more rules of the elders than were the Sadducees, and the Pharisees were more isolationist and more in favor of kicking the Romans out at the earliest opportunity. The Sadducees tended to be more focused on the laws of Moses, which we can see here in their question of Jesus, and more accommodating to the Greek and Roman aspects of culture. Because of this, and because of their denial of a resurrection, the immortality of the soul and the existence of angels, the Pharisees were the more popular of the two religious sects in Israel. The Sadducees were priests, yes, but also skeptics. The OT doesn’t mention much about Heaven, about what happens to people after they die. So the Sadducees decided there wasn’t life after death, while the Pharisees took the teachings of elders and rabbis over the years as proving there was life after death.

So it is these skeptics, focused on Moses and his law, that come to Jesus trying to figure Him out, trying to stump Him with a ridiculous question. This question strikes me as being very similar to questions of atheists who think they are clever trying to ask a paradoxical question, like can God ever make a square circle? So it’s a silly question, but behind it are some real bad understandings of Scripture that Jesus should address. You’ve met people like this who know a bit of Scripture, and who have come to a bad conclusion because the initial misunderstanding or because of their own desires. For instance, if someone says that God can only love, and not judge, and not be holy, then they will end up with a very different god than the real one. The critical trajectory was set early, and then all the bad decisions reinforced that first faulty decision. It is like the kid in the group home. He had to see where he was, and totally forget the path he was on because it was no good for him. Same thing with these Sadducees. They had gotten off track, and Jesus was going to set them straight.

This section is also an extended chiasm, with the middle section and the point being that the Sadducees are wrong about both Scripture and the power of God. And because they start with a faulty premise about God, and about the power of God, they end up in a theological place where they ask questions like this in order to confound Jesus, just as they had probably confounded the Pharisees with this same question for years.

This tradition of marrying your dead brother’s wife comes from Genesis 38:8. It was a way to care for the wife and child who had been left behind and vulnerable in a society that had very few rights for women and widows. But this tradition gave the Sadducees, who didn’t believe in a resurrection, an afterlife, a way to ask a confusing question. Within the traditional beliefs of the Jews, this question presented some serious problems. Whose wife would she be? She had been legally and rightfully married to a number of different men…let’s look at the text.

So there it is. The conundrum. They ask this question to show that the resurrection is a silly idea invented by people, not God. Some commentators say that the Sadducees were really a conservative movement within the Judaism of the time; that they believed in the Torah and that’s it; that the resurrection talked about in Daniel and Ezekiel were not proper additions to the Holy Scriptures. And so, anyone with a hope of resurrection was just fooling themselves. Content in their “knowledge” of how the world really is, they mocked others and lived without any real hope that there was anything beyond this world.

Things really haven’t changed. This sounds like so many people I know; people who mock faith. They live for this world, they believe all the things they do will be confined to this world. And call anyone who doesn’t live like them a fool. The truth is there is more than this world. And eternity is a long time to be separated from God. It is our job to stand up to that worldview and proclaim the truth, the kind of truth that Jesus gives to these scoffers. Jesus always stands up for truth about God, about the way the world works and should be. As His disciples, that is our job as well. There is more than just this world. There is a God who loves. There is His Son who died on the cross. There is forgiveness in Him alone. There is a place after this life for all people. Who we know in this life determines where we spend the next. If we know God through Christ, then we are invited into Heaven. And if we don’t know Christ, we don’t know God, and our sinful pasts will compel us away from the goodness and purity that is God.

We are up against many things in this culture. We are up against generations of nominal belief, we are up against a lack of knowledge, we are up against a culture that panders to sin more than any that come readily to mind. And we are up against the powers of evil. In proclaiming God’s way through Jesus Christ we are fighting against many of the same things Jesus stood up against. People are essentially the same, then as now. The main problem is sin, and the main stumbling block is people themselves. Our main stumbling block in our sinful nature, and our main problem is sin. But that’s what Jesus came for…to right us before God, in His blood, in His love. Therefore we don’t fear the world, because we know Christ has overcome the world. We have a gift to share with the world, the gift of life in Christ. There will be scoffers, there will be those who mock the gift that is offered, but that is no reason to stop offering the gift, or praying for people to receive it. We offer Christ; we offer His death and His resurrection. Christ is our calling card, our reason for the joy and hope we carry in our hearts.

The Sadducees are dead wrong. God isn’t a theological conundrum to be solved. God is the living God; and to explain away God, His demands and the way He has created the world with a clever ruse is to completely miss the point. The Sadducees, for all their learning, are not knowledgeable about God. You know people like this; people who think they are so smart that they are somehow going to outsmart God. They know deep down that they need God, but their pride gets in the way. Their smarts are what they depend on for everything, but smarts don’t get someone into eternal life with God. Only pure righteousness does that, and the only way we have to obtain purity is through Christ.

Clever questions do not get us out from the scrutiny of judgment before God’s throne someday. Only Christ will save us from judgment on that day. The Sadducees do not know Scripture and they do not know God because they have made the choice to not know. They have decided to remain ignorant, prideful about their ignorance. But Jesus doesn’t let this kind of ignorance and arrogance pass without a clarifying comment. These people were badly mistaken about God, and Jesus would explain to them that God is the living God, not a set of beliefs to agree with or disagree with. We too have a tendency to turn God, the living God, into a set of premises we either agree with or disagree with. In reality, our God is the living God who defies the boxes wed would place around Him to control Him, to explain Him.

We, like the Sadducees, often feel the need to explain or control God. I think part of surrendering to God completely is to take our notions out of the picture and simply desire to know God, and know more of Him. We feel the need to apologize to people whose lives are less than ideal. We feel the need to tell people instead that God is alive, and cares about them. Every time there is a tragedy Christians are called onto CNN or other news organizations and asked to explain how bad things could happen. Instead, we need to consistently live the truth that Jesus is our Savior and God loves His fallen creation so much it hurts. We don’t have an explanation for everything that happens. We don’t know what heaven will be like, or really what hell will be like either. We are assured they are real places, and real people go to either one place or the other. We will go either to Heaven to be with Christ or to hell to be away from Him. We shouldn’t over think this reality, like many folks did back then and do today. Jesus told us those places exist, and how to be with Him forever.

Sometimes I think we are so like the Sadducees. We want to play at being religious, but in reality we don’t want to bow a knee to God; we don’t want to give up our bad habits because they have come to define us, we want to be perceived as being nice, good people, but the reality is that we want people to talk about us being good people, and that’s it. Sometimes I think we approach life from a selfish point of view; that this life is all about us and what we can get out of it. Sometimes I think we have completely submitted ourselves not to God, but to the attitudes and hopes and dreams of a secular world. We ignore God, or make up an excuse not to study the Bible and pray because we’re too busy, we’re too important. We want a convenient God; one that stays out of our business except when we want Him around to save us. One bad decision leads to another; we decide we know what is best for our life in one area, and then another area, and then another and then very quickly we are lost in our life. We have put our head down, focused on the world rather than God, and we get lost.

When are we going to stop playing game with God? Now you have me, now you don’t? I feel like acting like a Christian today, but tomorrow, who knows? I feel like following Christ in my choices today, but come tomorrow, if life changes, maybe I’ll make a different decision. I know as Christians we are constantly tempted, and we often fail. I often fail. But my overall desire is to see God worshipped and glorified by more and more people. We shouldn’t go through life thinking about how we can justify certain actions before God, or other people. Are we playing games with God? Are we getting lost and distracted by the ground in front of us so that we can’t hear from Heaven?

The kids in the youth group play a game called Sardines. One person hides, and then the rest look for the kid. When you find the hider, you hide with them, thus the name Sardines. We have some kids we are really good hiders. They are small and fit into nooks and crannies that I wasn’t able to fit into when I was 5. I’m not a great hider. But then, I don’t want to be. Part of the joy of the game is being found, and having others hiding with you. Then the hider isn’t alone anymore. Hiding is lonely, but being found makes for good company. Sometimes when the best hiders are hiding, and we are having trouble finding them, on the verge of giving up, I want to shout, hey, give us a clue, help us find you. Don’t be lonely anymore, that’s not the point of the game, its not how you win. Being hidden and alone doesn’t feel like winning the game. And it doesn’t in real life either. We get lost and hidden because of the sin we commit, and sometimes because of the games we play with God.

Get found. Get found today. We need to quit messing around with semantics and love Jesus, follow God, and commit our lives to Him. Anything else is just messing around with semantics. You don’t want Jesus messing around with semantics on judgment day. Is she fit for Heaven? Jesus shouldn’t need to hem and haw. The promise of Christ is the promise of His presence forever, which is what we can only describe as Heavenly, forever. The absence of Christ, which starts in this life as well, will continue into eternity and we call that place Hell. We serve a living God who is for us, but allows us to make decisions on our own. Make decisions that lead you to love God more, to follow Christ more closely, to serve others to reflect the love you have received.

Let’s pray.