Transcript

Luke 20. The song that the choir sang a while ago spoke of, “Every stronghold must come down,” and as we journey through the Gospel of Luke, we see one high form of thinking against the truth after another being confronted, exposed and brought down by our Lord Jesus Christ which is a prophetic foreshadowing of how everything is going to end up. When he comes again, everything will be brought down below him. Everything opposed to him will be crushed and obliterated.

This week as we continue the narrative, the Lord is in his last week of earthly ministry, the last few days before the cross, and he is dealing with enemies, one group after another and this is a new group that, as best I remember, we’ve been in Luke for a few years now, this particular group has not confronted him, at least as the Scripture text records in the Gospel of Luke but here they are today. I’ve entitled this, “Jesus Versus the Liberals.”

Verse 27 of Luke 20,

27 Now there came to Him some of the Sadducees (who say that there is no resurrection), 28 and they questioned Him, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that IF A MAN’S BROTHER DIES, having a wife, AND HE IS CHILDLESS, HIS BROTHER SHOULD MARRY THE WIFE AND RAISE UP CHILDREN TO HIS BROTHER. 29 Now there were seven brothers; and the first took a wife and died childless; 30 and the second 31 and the third married her; and in the same way all seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally the woman died also. 33 In the resurrection therefore, which one’s wife will she be? For all seven had married her.” 34 Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; 36 for they cannot even die anymore, because they are like angels, and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. 37 But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the burning bush, where he calls the Lord THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB. 38 Now He is not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live to Him.” 39 Some of the scribes answered and said, “Teacher, You have spoken well.” 40 For they did not have courage to question Him any longer about anything.

Now, once again, as we are in this narrative text of our Lord’s final few days on the earth, there are several things we need to remember. First of all, this is a true, accurate, historical narrative of our Lord’s final days on the earth. That’s important. Don’t ever miss the concept or the truth, I might better say, that the historical facts of Scripture are important. It’s important that this is actual history. This is not just mythological stories or analogies that we can learn from. No, these are actual, literal, historical events.

Secondly, there are many teaching points from this episode that apply to us today. This is not just stuff about history and unique to Jews and the skeptics and the unbelievers of Jesus’ day and how he dealt with them. No, there is real clear application for all individual Christians and all churches in today’s world.

But thirdly, as I’ve said numerous times before, this is also a prophetic statement of how the Lord will ultimately deal with those who oppose him and those who are his enemies. In particular here, we see that he silences the arguments of his enemies. The Sadducees and really the way the text reads here in verse 40, it seems that all the other groups, all the others who might try to discredit him and bring him down also were shamed into silence before him. But there is coming a day when a silence will be forced upon all the enemies of God and it will be a silence that is final for it is a silence that will last for all eternity. This is one of the things I’m convinced Romans 3:19 was alluding to when it said, ” Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed,” silenced, “and all the world may become accountable to God.”

Now, our outline, I. The liberal religious unbeliever. The liberal religious unbeliever. These guys have been around forever. Even back in the Garden of Eden, when Satan tempts Eve, he kind of came at her from a spiritual or religious background, “Has not God said?” He’s trying to play the doctrine card there, but he was a radical. He was, if you will, the first true liberal, the first true God denier, the first true self-centered one who challenged God’s authority and God’s truth. But now in this text, we have a group called the Sadducees and these are the secularists of the day. You might even use the word materialists. I’m going to use several different words so that you can see that there is a flavor of this group existing in our world today. As strict materialists, they believe that the soul and the body perished together. There is just, poof, annihilation when you die and it’s just all over. There is nothing after this life. There are no rewards after this life. There is no punishment after this life. They would be very akin to the secular progressives of our day, the freethinkers, sometimes we just call them the liberals. Those who would maybe have some use for the Bible which the Sadducees did, they had some use for God’s law and God’s truths, but only to the end that they thought it made life better for all of us to live. Not because they loved God and loved the truth, it was sort of a pragmatic thing to them. So they did honor the Levitical law but purely because they saw it best for their lives in this world.

Now, that reminds me again of what several scholars write about the founding fathers of our country and I believe they are probably accurate, that many of our founding fathers were not true born again Christians as you and I understand the truth, however, there was a strong Christian consensus. They were thoroughly convinced that the Christian religion was essential for a country to have sobriety, to avoid anarchy, and have decency and respect and to function well with the liberties and the freedoms they were establishing. That’s somewhat what the Sadducees were. They liked the Levitical law but not because they loved God, they were just pragmatic and they thought it was best for culture. They didn’t hold to a sovereign God, they saw themselves as masters of their own fate. They boasted that they were above all the superstitions that perhaps the Pharisees and other “Bible believers” might hold to.

So like today’s modern theological liberals, they had a secular worldly view of life but they also liked to throw a little religion on it to affirm their viewpoint. Is it not true in today’s world when we see some of the most vile and perverse things being promoted and practiced in our culture, it’s not unusual for them to come right back and say, “Yes, we promote that and we believe that but we’re Christians. We believe God made it all this way.” That would be somewhat akin to the Sadducees of this day, just classic liberalism. By the way, when these folks come along with new thought and new ideas to progress us, it’s just more of the old rot and error that’s been around forever. It’s not new. Man’s wicked fallen sin nature has come up with nothing new, just old stuff repackaged to look new.

So where you have the Pharisees who have been the constant attackers of Christ, they are motivated and this is a simplification, I don’t think it’s an oversimplification, but they are primarily motivated by the love of power and control. The Sadducees are primarily motivated by the love of pleasure and self-indulgence. “Leave me alone. Don’t tie me down with your rules. I don’t account to any God. I just want to be my own man, do my own thing and enjoy my own lusts.”

Verse 27 says here are the Sadducees and they deny the resurrection. “It’s corny and its old,” but the Sadducees deny the resurrection, that’s why they are so sad, you see. It’s bad, isn’t it? But of course these guys deny the resurrection. Of course they deny the resurrection. I mean, because the moment you embrace the doctrine of the resurrection, you embrace the doctrine of the judgment. You embrace accountability to another God, someone greater and higher than you and they certainly are not going to do that because they desired accountability only to themselves. They desired to yield to no one. They were the freethinkers of the day which actually means they were the false thinkers or the false teachers of the day and, again, these guys are nothing new; bold, brash, unblushing skeptics have been around since Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Now, in our modern world, again, we see the same indulgences all around us. We live in a culture where I want to shout to the culture, “Are you sure you want to throw off all of the restraints of the Judeo-Christian ethic? Now think, culture, think, society, are you sure you want to abandon these things that has given us the greatest nation on the earth?” But their viewpoint is, “Yes, we do.” That’s somewhat where the Sadducees would have been.

You know, we just always come up with new names but the same old evil. Immoralities today are alternative lifestyles; unbelief today is now called being progressive. That’s oxymoronic.

Now, as for the doctrine of the resurrection, sacred Scripture has always supported that so let me just give you a brief run through of Old Testament texts that show that the saints of God of the Old Testament fully held to the doctrine of the resurrection. So these Sadducees knew this was clearly taught in Scripture. 1 Kings 17, the son of the widow of Zarephath lives again. 2 Kings 13, the man who is thrown into Elijah’s grave comes back to life. 1 Samuel 28, Samuel comes back from the dead. 1 Samuel 2:6 says, ” The LORD kills and makes alive; He brings down to Sheol and raises up. ” Job 19:25 through 27, “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God; Whom I myself shall behold, And whom my eyes will see and not another. My heart faints within me!” Psalm 16:10, “For You will not abandon my soul to Sheol; Nor will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay.” Psalm 49:15, “But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol,” that’s the realm of the dead, “For He will receive me.” In Ezekiel 37, we have the dry bones coming to life. Daniel 12:2, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.” So person after person, prophet after prophet, showed that they believed in the resurrection of the dead.

So there is a real point of application here. The issue is when you indulge in your lust and your sins without repentance and without restraint, then what you do is you become a blinded, callused, hardened unbeliever. That’s where these guys were and when you become the victim of your own callused, hardened unbelief and you become enslaved in these sin strongholds, then naturally you look for philosophies and a theology that affirms your immoralities. Did you hear me? A man’s morality will always dictate his theology. Amen? That’s why you see all these wacky twists on Christianity today because men want a “Christianity” that affirms their fallen sinful immoralities and that’s the problem that the Sadducees had. They were just hardened unbelievers but, my friend, be reminded, now listen, unbelief is not a weak thing, unbelief is a wicked thing. You are an unbeliever because you love your sin, not because intellectually you can’t wrap your minds around it. John 3:19 and 20, what a powerful and clear truth this is, ” This is the judgment, that the Light,” Jesus and his truth, “has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.” Why do they not come to Christ and embrace the truth? Because their deeds are evil, not because they say, “Well, intellectually I have studied this and I have rehearsed and gone over all the writers of antiquity and all the learned men of the ages and I don’t believe I can quite believe that Jesus is who he says he is.” Hogwash and slop. That’s not the point. That might be what they say. What they’re saying in reality that God exposes is, “No, you do not embrace the light of Christ because you embrace the darkness of sin that you love in your own life.” Every man that does not believe, does not have an intellectual problem, he has a sin problem.

Verse 20 of John 3, ” For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” You cannot embrace Jesus Christ without acknowledging you are a wretch. You are offensive to God. You are a lawbreaker and you are a sinner in need of divine salvation and men will not deal with that nor repent of that. Now listen to me: not one. Not one will come to that resolute conviction and turn to Christ apart from the aid of the regenerating Spirit of the living God. He won’t do it.

II. These Sadducees are just another stripe of liberal religious unbelief. II. Notice the resurrection riddle and rhetoric. So they’re going to throw this question at Jesus and I call it the resurrection riddle and it’s just empty rhetoric is all it is. They’re trying to catch Jesus here. Verse 28, ” and they questioned Him, saying, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote if a man’s brother dies, having a wife, and he is childless, his brother should marry the wife and raise up children to his brother.” Now, first of all, what we have here is great arrogance. These guys, these Sadducees, see themselves as the learned and the elite of the age. As a matter of fact, they looked down on the Pharisees and they perceived to “school” the ignorant Jesus.

Now, in verses 29 through 33, they are talking about the doctrine of the kinsman redeemer. God had a statute in Israel whereby if a man died and his wife had not bore for him a male child, that the brother would take the wife, marry her and the firstborn male son would take the name of the deceased brother so that his name would continue on in perpetuity in Israel. It was called he was redeemed from being lost from Israel. Of course, that in itself is a doctrine of the resurrection because it’s a doctrine of the endless existence of God’s people. You need a name to carry on in Israel so it was called the kinsman redeemer.

So they bring this question before Jesus that if a man dies and then his brother takes that wife and another brother takes that wife all the way down to seven, then whose wife will she be in the resurrection because seven different men were her husband? So here these Sadducees are trying to question or catch Jesus and really embarrass him and exalt their own superiority over him. Again, you can’t take away from the fact that the root issue in all men’s hearts before God redeems them is power and control. They want power and control in Israel and the Pharisees saw power and control getting away from them. Jesus is being esteemed by so many of the people as being a wise master teacher so that’s bringing elitism, if you will, or power and control away from these Sadducees who considered themselves the intelligentsia elite of the age. Now, their question was not like the Pharisees’ question. The Pharisees tried to make Jesus either an enemy of the people or a violator of Jewish law. The Sadducees just aren’t that concerned about the Bible. They simply wanted to exalt themselves over him and assert their supposed intellectual superiority.

So that’s the resurrection riddle. Whose wife will she be in heaven? She had seven husbands here on the earth. Well, let’s go to III. let’s note the Master’s wisdom. The Master’s wisdom. If you will there, look at verse 34, ” Jesus said to them, ‘The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage.” Verse 35, “but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

Now, I want to pick up on that statement “considered worthy.” He said those who are considered worthy are going to have a new life one day in this resurrection era and this refers to those who are the redeemed by the blood of Christ. While all will be resurrected, as a matter of fact Acts 24 teaches us that there is a resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, so all are going to be resurrected but some are considered worthy to be unto this resurrection Jesus is specifically referring to here that’s a resurrection unto eternal life and blessedness and hope and life and pleasure forever and ever and ever. Jesus says in verses 34 and 35, when you get to that new state, if you’re one of those considered worthy and you get to that resurrected order, you’ve got to understand the family unit as we know it now will be replaced at that point. The family unit as we know it now does not exist in heaven. It will be replaced by higher spiritual union, one that is far better and far greater than what we know now. 2 Corinthians 5:17, “All things have become new.”

Now, the moment you are converted, you begin the pilgrimage of learning and embracing the new. You see through a glass dimly. You see things as a shadow now but one day you will see face-to-face. One day you will know as you have been fully known. So the new is just beginning. We’re just beginning to taste the new. When you are resurrected and glorified one day with Christ in heaven, you’ll drink in full the new, the new order God has ordained.

So, everyone who is considered worthy, Jesus says, will be a part of that resurrection. “Well, pastor, who is considered worthy?” The worthy ones are those who look for it and those who long for it and those who find in their hearts a growing despise for this present world. They find increasingly that this world is just not all it’s cracked up to be. “I finally got that car. I finally got that position. I finally got that $10,000 raise. I finally got whatever it is and do you know what? It’s just not all it ought to be but I’m finding more and more Jesus is more than I thought he would be.” Those are the ones that are considered worthy. Those are the ones that have had their hearts changed by the power of God and in the Gospel.

Colossians 2:20 speaks of all of those who have died to the elementary principles of this world. Now, often you’ll look at a text like that and you’ll think, “That means that I have died so that I don’t sin anymore.” No, no, no, it means that in your heart of hearts you no longer embrace living for this world, the pleasures of this world, the principles of this world, the pursuits of this world, as most important to you. That’s beginning to die off in your heart and you’re seeing Christ and his kingdom being the most important thing. By the way, that’s a sanctification process but at least there is the germ of that in every true child of God and we want to water that and nourish that and help that to grow.

Verse 36, Jesus continues on in says, not only does he say you’ve got to be considered worthy to attain to this new resurrection, there is not going to be any marriage or giving in marriage there, then in verse 36, “for they cannot even die anymore, because they are like angels.” When Jesus says here one day you’ll get to this resurrected state and you’re going to be like an angel, he’s not saying you’re going to have wings and fly around. He’s not saying you will become angels. There is an heretical doctrine in some quarters about that. That’s totally false. You never were an angel, you’re never going to be an angel. But he says, you will be like angels which means you will be entirely spiritual. From the top of your head down to the tips of your toes, you’ll be a spiritual being. I don’t mean you won’t have a physical body, but you will be a fully spiritual being. You will be a perfectly holy being like the holy angels. Christ will have clothed you in his righteousness. You will have immortality. You will never, ever die, and you will be eternally happy. Again, 2 Corinthians 5:17, we are a new creature. We have just started on this process and it’s going to come to the full when we get to heaven one day, but the old things have passed away, and new things have come. That means a new future has come for us in Jesus Christ. We will be a part of this considered worthy resurrected order one day. Christ, as the Scripture says, was made for a little while lower than the angels to the end that he might one day make us like the angels.

Now, one of the things that happens and this is one of the things that separates truth from error in religious realms, and that is when we become as angels, we cease from being sensual beings, from being sinful beings. We cease from being mortal beings. Now, compare that to the Islamic faith or even the Mormon doctrines of the everlasting life. Really what they teach is eternity is just a higher state of being sensual. There is this sensuality, you have all these virgins as your sex partners the Islamic faith teaches when you die if you’re a good Muslim. The Mormon church teaches you’ll have a bride and you’ll perpetually have sex with your bride and you will populate your own planet. Now, again, these false religions, what do they do? They take the sensual things we find pleasure in this world that are not necessarily wrong or evil if they’re done for God’s glory and the way God has ordained, and they just take it to a higher state. Christianity says, “No! No! No! No! As wonderful as those gifts are in this earthly life, they are not worthy to be compared with the pleasures we will know with God when we become fully spiritual beings. These pleasures as wonderful as they are are nothing compared to the pleasures we’ll know one day in eternity.” Aren’t you glad you have begun, now listen to me, I’m going to be just frank and bold: enjoy sex. Enjoy it in the bounds of marriage, for the glory of God, but rejoice mostly that that is not to be compared with the rich blessings God has given us in Christ Jesus for eternity. What a vile, corrupt doctrine to just say that heaven and eternity is just a little better form of sexuality. What a bunch of vile, vulgar, worthless rot. Don’t you love Jesus? Don’t you love the truth of the Bible? Lifts us above the base and the sensual into pure spiritual pleasures.

So the new birth that occurs in our hearts when we are born again gives us a desire, now listen to me, it plants in you that seed that begins to desire to be parted from the base and the sensual worldly pleasures and it gives you a new desire to begin to enjoy the infinitely greater spiritual pleasures of God that one day we will enjoy in the full. And as I have said to you many times, when you get into heaven, you will not have an infinite mind but you will have a perfect mind. You will not have infinite emotions but you will have perfect emotions. And so for all eternity, you will continually and increasingly take in the superior pleasures of God because God is infinite and it never, ever ends. Pleasures, pleasures, pleasures, pleasures. Better than any of these pleasures forever and always increasing. That’s a pretty good deal, isn’t it? And sex too while I’m down here because God made it and he blessed it, just not to be compared to that. Not to be compared to heaven’s pleasures.

Well, contrast the Sadducees and that ilk, that group of worldling lust monsters who say, “Give me the pleasures of the world. I don’t care much about anything else.” Compare that with Paul’s view on things in Romans 7:23 through 25. Paul, testifying of his own struggles and how he hates what he sees down here, he says, ” but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.” He said, “My heart and my mind, my inner man has been transformed but my old body still wants the base, lust pleasures of this world. So he concludes, verse 24, “Wretched man that I am!” I’m a Christian. I’ve learned to hate this continual drawing to these low, base pleasures. “Wretched man that I am!” Paul says, “Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.” He said, “The day is coming when I’ll know the superior pleasures of God and that alone.” Aren’t you glad that when God saves you he promises to one day save you completely from you? You are your worst problem and, you see, if you’re walking in the Spirit, when you look in the mirror, not literally but when you think about yourself you think, “I hate me. One day I’ll be purified and glorified and I’ll love what I am because then I will only long for Christ and his pleasures.”

He says in verse 36, you will be like the angels, angelic in your hopes, desires, in your passions, but also, he says, “you are sons of God.” What he means there is you will be fully, eternally, spiritual beings that are wrought of God, for there is neither womb nor birth, there is neither mother or father, but in heaven God is the Father of all. We can’t see it yet, 1 John 3:2 says it has not yet appeared. It has not yet appeared what we’re going to be, but when we do see him, we will be like him.

Then in verse 37 he says to these Sadducees, “The Bible that you claim to embrace Moses wrote, the Pentateuch, the first five books, he has shown us by the passage of the burning bush that he believed in the resurrection.” Verse 37, “where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob and he’s not the God of the dead but of the living for all live to Him.” So to these resurrection rejecters he in effect says, “You quoted Moses to me, have you listened to Moses? You quoted Moses to me about the kinsman redeemer about a man can take another man’s wife to bear up a son for the deceased brother’s name to be in perpetuity in Israel, but have you read all that Moses said? He taught the resurrection.”

Verse 38, ” Now He is not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live to Him.” If God is God, then God is eternal, Jesus is saying. Our forefathers, like Moses, lived unto him and Moses made it clear that after the grave, they lived eternally with him. While living, they lived under him, after death, they lived eternally with him. And the point of Jesus’ argument is: if God’s own children die, then God himself is not everliving and he’s not God.

Verse 39, ” Some of the scribes answered and said, ‘Teacher, You have spoken well.'” Now this is a new group. The Sadducees were doing all this questioning now the scribes, who are the scholars of the Pharisees, step in and say, “You put them boys in their place.” Now, these scribes enjoyed that Jesus had silenced one of their competitors, one of their enemies, the Sadducees. When these scribes say to Jesus, “You have spoken well,” trust me, it’s not because they loved Jesus and loved truth but because at least for this moment Jesus has helped affirm their opinion or their doctrine over that of the Sadducees.

Then verse 40, ” For they did not have courage to question Him any longer about anything.” So we come back to silence. God the great silencer. You know, one consistent thing about fallen man is they are always opening their mouth in self-justification. It’s just inherent in being a fallen sinner. We always open our mouths in self-justification. There is going to be a final silencing of all of God’s enemies and that’s going to be at the great white throne judgment. On that day, the last false caricature of Christianity will finally have been presented. On that day, the last perverse twisting of our doctrine will finally have been advanced. By that day, the last railing and mocking of Christ, his church and his true Gospel will have finally been uttered. On that day, the last denial of God’s moral absolutes will have ended. All the man centered, Scripture perverted, lust serving, self- exalting doctrines of the worldlings will be silenced, even down to their final end doctrine that they embrace and that’s the doctrine of annihilation, that we are not spirit beings, we just die and it’s over.

Suddenly on that day, a cataclysmic burst of power and light will hit the departed bodies of all the non-elect. Like a blade of grass blown by a hurricane, their bodies will be resurrected and flown to a bar of justice; a bar of justice that hangs in inestimable space; one that stands in seemingly infinite darkness. They will stand before the throne of the Lord Jesus Christ and as he sits on his great white throne of judgment and, by the way, he sits because what he is about to do requires little effort on his part. His robe and his vesture are white as snow. His eyes are a flame of fire. His scepter is a rod of iron. His holy dignity, power and brilliance far exceeding that of any star or any sun. There they stand. They have no power to move and they utter not a word. His presence seals them to silence. They cannot speak. They dare not speak except perhaps to fulfill Philippians 2:11, “Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Out of the utter silence, they drop to their knees and to their own guilt and condemnation they speak and they are compelled to utter before him, “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Broken under the sheer weight of his holy presence, they dare not speak again and dare not lift their heads and they cannot bear to look upon him. Then these words come from the mouth of the Lamb, the only words they will ever hear him speak, “Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Then as suddenly and uncontrollably as they were summoned from the grave, they are swept away by the force of God never to die again but to live eternally in God’s wrath and in God’s punishment and in their torture and in their anguish, their voice will never, ever again be heard. They are silenced.

That’s your fate unless you’re one considered worthy for the resurrection of the righteous.

Let’s bow together in prayer.