S157P2 – Life after death: the God of the living
Mk. 12:23-27
In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.” Jesus said to the [Sadducees], “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they 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, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘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.”
I have been to several funeral services for believers this year. There always is a conflict of emotion at a service for a Christian. We mourn because the people we love are no longer here with us, but we do not mourn for where they have gone. We know that their lives are endlessly better than what they experienced here, but it does not keep us from speaking of them in the past tense. Specifically, I have heard a number of times that the deceased person loved God so much. While I think the sentiment is that this person lived a life of loving God, the reality is that the love has not ceased. In fact, if that person is a child of God, he or she is still loving him even today.
The words of Christ here are pointed, and they follow a clear logic. His audience understood from the scriptures that their God was the God of these great men who had passed away. In fact, the scriptures tell us that God identified himself as the God of these men who were no longer living. If we really understand life and death, we understand that life comes through God while death comes through sin. Those who die in their sin are spiritually dead, and their god is not the Lord. He is the God only of the living, which means that these men of whom He spoke must still live. If these Sadducees here agreed that these words spoken by God were true, then that means they agreed that these men were still alive.
This exchange came about because the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, and their question to Christ was a trap. He answered by showing them how the faith they professed to have had a foundation in the very resurrection they refuted. If they questioned the resurrection, then they would have to question their faith. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live today. They have not tasted and will not taste death. This is the life after death we have in Christ, that we would continue to love and serve the Lord beyond the grave because that grave has no power over us. Father, help us to understand more fully the future of our lives in You beyond this world, and remind us that the believers we have lost live with You today.