Text: Luke 20:27-38
Focus: Resurrection
Function: To tie together PO-MO and MO in the hope of the resurrection
Form: GOK
Intro:
Well, isn’t it great that the elections are over? Praise God we aren’t subject to all that negative advertising! I hate the way they play with our emotions with sound bites that are neither provable, or defendable. It makes me sick.
People feed on negativism. The true wickedness of gossip is the way it is supposed to make a person look better than another by comparison. But the gossip has already lost.
In this passage, the Sadducees are trying to make themselves look good by making Jesus look bad.
My twin brother called me this week about some advice about his Church, were he serves as Board Chairman. It is a pretty conservative Nazarene Church. The pastor is under attack. I have met the pastor, he is sort of a jerk. My brother admits it.
And Pete’s position is that he is Pastor, God called him there and he is going to support him in spite of his personality.
The Nazarenes are pretty conservative. If you drive into Bourbonnais, Illinois where there big undergraduate School, Olivet, is you will see a lot of women without any jewelry, all in skirts, no makeup, long hair, and a lot of men, who although they are married, they don’t have a wedding ring on.
It is a pretty conservative denomination. And yet, the College Church has come under attack for being too liberal.
Now, liberal to them means that more and more women are wearing jewelry, pants and cutting their hair. I am not mocking different dress codes, or people whose have dress codes that are so conservative they are obviously affiliated with some sort of religious group. I am not mocking it, but because it goes on in a “college” town, people are concerned that their children are being corrupted by these modern ways.
It is becoming such a controversy among the Nazarenes that my other brother, who attends a Nazarene Church in Colorado Spring won’t let his daughter attend a Nazarene school.
So my twin was regarded with suspicion in his church until they got Pastor Ray. Pastor Ray, is heavily involved with Mt. Vernon Nazarene College, where Zach Patterson just graduated from. I am pretty sure that his children and Zach attended there together.
Now, so we can see how silly this fighting is (SHOW WEDDING RING) wearing a wedding ring has become proof that someone has become liberal. Now, consider Zach Patterson. He graduated that school with a tremendous passion for mission. He is full-time serving Christ. I would say his spiritual development in one of those so called “liberal schools” has been tremendous.
And of course, liberal for Nazarenes, and Liberal for us Brethren mean something completely different.
But here is the point, just as our nation is divided, stymied from any forward movement, stagnant to the point that recovery looks impossible, there will always be liberals and conservatives. And they will always fight.
And that is exactly what is happening in this passage. There were two groups of leaders in the Jewish Religious community. The Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees managed the system of teaching points called the synagogues. The Sadducees worked primarily alongside the priests in the Temple.
So, in order to understand Jewish culture at this time, they had this centralized official place where Jehovah was worshipped and it included both conservative and liberal theological elements. But it was primarily liberal because in the synagogues, the Pharisees would not tolerate the infidelity of the Sadducees. Rabbis, by the way, were teachers involved with both groups and they aligned themselves with whatever theology their identifying group was.
The Pharisees were the fundamentalists. Most of them missed Jesus as the Messiah because they had done so much studying about how the Messiah would come, they had argued it till their faces were blue, they missed the mystery of God’s word. But since they had such a heart for the OT Scriptures, some of them become believers in Jesus. Nicodemus, from John 3 and Gamaliel are two of them.
The Sadducees believed only in the First 5 books of the Bible, the writings of Moses. Those books are also called the Pentateuch (Pente – 5 books) or the Torah.
So, at the time of Christ, it was like the Jews had their own sort of New Testament and Old Testament.
The Pharisees, in the synagogues used the entire Old Testament, but the Sadducees, and the priests used only the writing of Moses.
The same traditions go on today, even here in Dayton. There is a Jewish Temple, downtown and several Jewish Synagogues.
The Temple is going to be the more liberal group and the synagogues are divided into other sects of Judaism. Almost like Christianity with Baptist, Brethren, Methodist, and etc.
I grew up in the Jewish section of Fort Wayne. I went to school with the children of the Rabbi’s from both the Temple and the Synagogue. Most of them lived in the same area, the area around the Synagogue, because they weren’t allowed to drive on the Sabbath, so they had to walk.
Rabbi Gephardt was the Rabbi at the Temple, Rabbi Weller was Rabbi at the Synagogue. Rabbi Gephardt’s daughter, Rachel was a friend of mine and invited me to her bas-mitzvah.
A few years after High School, I had occasion to be in their house. I was doing service work for them. I had this great big belt buckle “Jesus Saves.”
Mrs. Gephardt took one look at it and started in preaching at me.
She said this: “Eternal life has nothing to do with life after death. Eternal life is simply having children, and your children having children and their children having children.” It wasn’t any different that the “Circle of Life” idea that we saw in the movie “Land before time.”
Rabbi Gephardt is a modern day Sadducee.
When Jesus made enemies of the religious leaders, and those were the only enemies He made, He made enemies of those who were either extremely liberal, or extremely conservative.
Maturity, can only be demonstrated by having obtaining balance with both.
And Jesus is attacked by both extremes.
Do you know people who just refuse to believe? This group of people did not believe in Heaven or Hell, angels or demons. To them, all of that religious stuff was just superstitious nonsense.
And we thought that idea was just a modern one. We remember that in 1962, Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead. He didn’t meant that anybody had killed God, he meant that the idea of God, man’s need to worship something that they couldn’t’ explain had been replaced by mankind’s newfound ability to learn and observe through the scientific method.
Listen, I praise God for what we have learned. My son walks because of radical new therapy designed to treat a birth defect that no had ever successfully treated before. When my youngest son had brain surgery, the doctors literally woke him up and placed electrodes on brain mass and showed him pictures of things. If he could identify them, it was tumor they were stimulating, if he couldn’t it was brain tissue. Wow! The Bible declares that mankind’s ability to learn will increase in huge amounts at the end and people will be able to travel with ease. And it is true.
But doubt in God, disbelief in an afterlife, disbelief in a God who cannot be proven by the scientific method is nothing new. It happened then, and it happens today. Even Pilate asked the question of Jesus “What is truth?” He was asking a question we hear today, a question we hear a lot today, and that question is this: “Can anyone really know truth?”
These Sadducees were brilliant men. They were so intellectual that they decided that religion was superstition, so they rejected anything miraculous.
And they thought they had a convincing argument. They bring up what they think is an illogical proof that the resurrection cannot be true. A question designed to trick Jesus. They said, if a woman marries 7 brothers, whose wife is she in the resurrection? Now the history of that question comes from this. If the firstborn brother dies, and he was to have inherited twice the amount as the other brothers, then his younger brother was to marry his widow and the children would belong to the deceased elder brother.
So, they thought they had tricked Jesus. And Jesus gives them a clever answer. In heaven, we won’t be married or given in marriage, but we will be like the angels, with no need to reproduce because we will live forever.
And then Jesus goes back to the first 5 books and tells them how out of those first five books, the idea of the resurrection is assumed. God spoke of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the ancestors of Moses as if they were still living. And they are living, in heaven. My niece’s husband is a Priest in the Orthodox Church. I was talking with her last week and she said, “We believe that the saints in heaven are still part of the Church. We see them as still very much alive.”
Jesus speaks about it in John 8 when He tells the Pharisees, not the Sadducees that He had a conversation with Abraham, the father of all the Jews about what was going on with Abraham’s children here on earth.
We reject the idea of praying to Saints because we have direct access to God, through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, we don’t need a mediator, not a man, not a priest, not a pastor, not a person living or dead, all of us have a direct line to God.
But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t aware of us. It isn’t a piece of theology that we are comfortable with, but the fact is, we are connected. It isn’t just a kingdom to come, it is God’s kingdom here and now.
God’s Kingdom transcends both planes. About the mature, sacrificial Christian life, Jesus said: 19-21"Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it's safe from moth and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.
I think the Sadducees had an excuse to disbelieve Jesus, and His warnings about the way they were living because to them, nothing here really mattered.
The Pharisees had an excuse to disbelieve Jesus, and His warning because only the things there really mattered.
Proverbs says: “The one who lends to the poor, lends to the Lord.”
There is a problem with preaching only about the fact that we are going to heaven.
By so doing, we can forget that Jesus left heaven to come to earth to teach us how to live here on earth, and then to provide the sacrifice to get us to heaven.
If Jesus didn’t care about how we live here on earth, He would have came, died and left, real soon. But instead, He spent 3 years teaching us, and 3 days saving us.
Because He saved us, rescued us from sin, we have the hope of heaven.
But the problem is, if that hope in heaven becomes an excuse to not care for the least of these, then we missed the point.
So He said to these men, there will come a day when you have to answer for how you treated others.
We know it is true because Jesus died and rose again.
I think our culture begins to understand that now. We are grateful for science and reason, but there is more, inside of us that connects on a Spiritual basis to God our Creator.
And that God chooses to define Himself with the word: “Love.” God is Love. The one who loves, knows God, the one who does not love his brother does not love God.”
Sometimes, I think flippantly about heaven. I can shoot 7 under par in golf, but then where would the fun of competition be? I can build a perfect hot-rod. I can play the bass saxophone. I can sing the lead in the Music Man. I can eat Fettuccine Alfredo to my hearts delight and not gain a pound. I can spend a couple of thousand years with each and everyone of you some afternoon.
I had a youth pastor who up and quit on me one day. I said, “I’m gonna short-sheet your bed in heaven.” He responded with “I won’t tell you where I live.”
All of that is there, waiting for us. Jesus said, “I go to prepare a mansion for you, that where I am, you may be also.”
Imagine that! He wants us up in the big house with Him. It is a real place.
But He wants us focused on the here and now. I ask myself, how many people does petty quarreling keep out of the Kingdom?
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