Good morning. And before I forget this last time, this next time, I do believe Lucy Wake is here. Yes, I missed it the first time because my head was in a fog, but Lucy is in the back there, and so this is her second time in church, and that is something to be very excited about, this new life in the church here. So, welcome Lucy. And it actually fits well with what we are going to look at this morning. There's new life all around. I see a number of visitors this morning, and that's great. I hope you worship with us again. But we are actually on our second last Sunday at this location, which is hard to believe. Drove by there yesterday. It's just unbelievable what God just dropped on our lap out of the blue. So we also look forward to new life in a new location for this church. And new life is, in fact, what we want to examine from the mouth of Jesus this morning in Matthew 22. Turn there, please, Matthew chapter 22, and we're gonna look at verses 23 through 33 this morning. And once you are there, then I would ask if you would please stand in reverence as we read God's inerrant word. And these are the sufficient and the authoritative words of the living God. The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, Teacher, Moses said, if a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring, left his wife to his brother. So too the second and the third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her. But Jesus answered them, you are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God? I am the God of Abram, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not God of the dead, but of the living. And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching. And may God bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. Many of you know that in our family, we just came through a funeral that was very close to us. And so the topic of resurrection is very close at heart right now. And I think we've discussed this in Sunday school a number of times, the confusion that evidently abounds at funerals about the resurrection, about the afterlife. Tanya and me have discussed it a number of times where both of us had an extremely unclear picture of what happens after death. And I think many evangelicals are confused on the same points that we were. So, for example, my perception of the afterlife was always something like this, that finally the soul is released from the body, where it now dwells eternally, disembodied with God, and that is heaven. In my conception, the resurrection was the soul being freed from the body. Tanya says that her understanding was similar, but there was always this thing about seemingly people coming out of the grave, and yet because the world was destroyed and everything was floaty, what's the point of physical bodies in a floaty thing? And my guess is, based on the number of evangelical funerals I have been to, the vast majority of evangelicals are desperately confused on this point. We speak of the release of the soul from the body as though it's a good thing. And it's not. The shortest verse in the Bible says that Jesus wept when he found his friend Lazarus was dead. The separation of body and soul is unnatural. It is absurd and it is the result of sin. The body was never meant to be apart from the soul. That's what sin and death introduced is this unnatural and temporary divorce of body and soul. And when it says that Jesus wept, what it means is Jesus went nuts. Jesus lost it. The man, the very one who created, the word of God, who authored life on this planet, knew that body and soul were designed to live together forever. They were never ever meant to be separated. And hope in the future resurrection points to the fact that body and soul are remarried. In the final end, Heaven is physical. Heaven is material, and frankly, heaven is right here. When the new Jerusalem comes down, when heaven and earth are remarried, it will be different in many glorious ways that we do not understand. But ultimately, the new creation is just as physical, just as material, just as concrete as this one. The divorce of body and soul, in theology we call it the intermediate state. It was never meant to be that way. And our loved ones who are gone are in a temporary place. They are not yet at the final chapter of how things will be. The resurrection is yet future. And the reason I think we are so confused on this point is because of how frequently we talk about these disembodied souls doing things with their hands and their feet that they frankly don't have right now. Those hands and feet are in the ground. As much as my grandma loved her garden, guess what she's not doing right now is gardening. She's got no hands to garden with. As much as my grandpa loved his Model D tractor, he's not working on it right now, because right now where he is, there are no Model D tractors. What's happening right now is that the body is apart from the soul, and this is temporary, and it awaits the restoration of all things, the regeneration, the resurrection, so that all things are put back to right. I do believe that the continuity between the new heavens and the new earth, the world that is to come, is much, much closer. There's much more continuity than many of us assume. The new Jerusalem comes down. God does not say that he makes all new things, but rather that he makes all things new. So if you could hypothetically drop a pin on Google Maps on this spot where we are right now this morning, that location will continue to exist in the new creation. How is it going to look? I have no idea. But it's physical, it's here. The world is made new, the world is restored, the world is renovated. Some who are more clever than me have quipped that we need to remember as Christians that there is life after life after death. None of our departed loved ones are in the final state of affairs yet. Christ has not yet returned. Those bodies have not yet been resurrected. And so I trust that they are, whatever their experience is right now, they are remembering that heaven is not their home. They're just a passing through. They're waiting for the restoration of all things on this planet that God is not throwing away. but that he is restoring. And if that sounds odd, this is what all Christians of all traditions have always confessed. There is actually no disagreement among Christians on this point. Amazingly, we have forgotten this. But every creed, every confession of the church, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, believes in the physical resurrection. It is our own time that has become confused on this matter. Hope in a physical future, physical resurrection is also why one way that you can track the spread of Christianity is by finding graveyards. Have you ever noticed? Historically, Christians do not destroy bodies at death. Historically, Christians do not burn bodies. They don't chop them up like they do in the Himalayas and feed them to the hawks and the eagles so that disease is not down in the village. Christians do not destroy bodies at death because we know that those bodies are coming back out of the ground. So one way you can see the spread of Christianity is find graveyards. People are put in the ground like a seed, as it says in 1 Corinthians 15, awaiting the future resurrection. And interestingly, traditionally, the headstones are always facing east. Because we know that the sun, S-O-N, is going to rise one last time and bring those bodies back to life and remarry body and soul together. Our hope is not that we are freed from physical existence, but that the physical world which God created and said was good is going to be restored. It's going to be regenerated. It's going to be resurrected. The grace of the gospel does not destroy nature, but restores it. That is the gospel of redemption, to redeem things, not to destroy it. Grace does not destroy nature, grace perfects nature. It is the ancient heresy of Gnosticism that speaks of death as though it is a release, as though death is a good thing, which it manifestly is not. the Gnostics, thought that the physical world was evil and that death was a kind of liberation. So our ultimate hope is that we're no longer going to be oppressed by biology, right? As though that's somehow our final hope, is that we're freed from having physical bodies, because the spiritual is good and the physical is evil, but that's a Gnostic heresy, that is not Christian theology. Christians see the physical world that God made as ultimately good, and death is a parasite that feeds on the good creation. So again, grace does not destroy nature, grace restores nature. It does not destroy it. And in fact, we do know that the resurrection is going to be better than what the garden was because in the garden, sin was a potential. We know it was a potential because it actually happened. And we know in the restoration of all things that that will not even be a potentiality. Every tear wiped dry. Everything is perfected. Sin and corruption no longer are even potential things like they were in the garden. And it is exactly on this point that the Sadducees come and challenge Jesus in today's passage. The Sadducees were the religious elites of their day. Where the Pharisees were kind of middle class people that could, at some level, relate to the everyday working man, the Sadducees were the elite. They were the top of the top. They were the religious elites, and they were, in our terms today, they were theological liberals, okay? The Pharisees were kind of a down-to-earth back-to-the-Bible movement that did run into its own problems of adding their traditions, adding their ideas to the Word of God. The Sadducees had the exact opposite problem. They parsed up the Word of God and accepted some parts and not others. They were liberals. where the Pharisees at least accepted the entire Old Testament canon. The Sadducees accepted only the Pentateuch. They accepted only the five books of Moses and nothing else. So the Pharisees introduced too many authorities. The Sadducees did not accept the authority of God's Word as being a total thing. They had too small an authority. The Pharisees added too much into their authority. The Sadducees minimized the authority of the Bible by picking and choosing which parts were truly inspired. So again, to put this in our context, the Sadducees were the kind of people who could teach theology at McGill or Harvard or at the University of Toronto. They were elite theologians. It just so happened they were unbelieving elite theologians. These people were not believers in the true God. They may have thought they were, but they clearly were not. So if the Pharisees veered, unfortunately, into a kind of fundamentalism in adding their man-made rules to the Word of God, these people didn't even accept the Word of God as a total authority. They were the liberals of their day. They were effeminate. They had a reputation for vile speech. They were lovers of themselves. We can, I think, understand that these kinds of people are in the church today. And because they were so accommodating to the powers that be, they were not a threat to the political class at all. They were loved by the Romans because if statists love one thing, it's Christians who are easy to steer. And the Sadducees were easy to steer because they did not trust the Word of God in its totality. They were very accommodating to outside authorities telling them how they ought to run things. And so the Romans liked these people. And so even though that the Sadducees were very, they were a very small class, they were, in terms of numbers, they were nowhere near the size of the Pharisees, but they got all the good positions. They got all the plum appointments by the government because the government loved these kinds of Jews. And I think, again, we can see the kinds of Christians that current powers that be also love, the kind who don't really believe in the Word of God. And so Matthew picks up the narrative in verse 23 and 24. He says, the same day the Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question. saying, Teacher, Moses said, if a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. So we start here the same day. and you've heard the word Tuesday a lot because it's still Tuesday. In fact, in Matthew's narrative, Tuesday starts in chapter 21, verse 18, and it's going to continue all the way into chapter 26, verse five. Tuesday is a big day to Matthew, and all of these opponents come to Jesus in the temple on Tuesday. It's like wave after wave after wave. If you've watched some war movies, maybe you've watched The Patriot or Braveheart even Lord of the Rings, and there's just wave after wave, and you think you finally fought off this opponent, and then there's this even greater army coming next. It never ends, but there's always a new rush of opponents coming at you. That's what was happening to Jesus in the temple. First it's the elders and the priests, then it's the Pharisees, then it's the Herodians, and now it's the Sadducees. He just keeps getting wave after wave after wave after wave of opposition as he's in the temple all on Tuesday. And the fact that he handles these people so easily gives us a glimpse into what his grandfather David wrote in Psalm 110.1, God's favorite Bible verse, that he will put all his enemies under his feet. And we see a small glimpse of that happening here in the temple already. The Sadducees are up to bat next. As I already mentioned, these were the theological liberals of their day. They did not believe in the resurrection, nor did they believe in spiritual realities like angels, for example. So where the Bible clearly teaches a physical bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust, the just going into the newly renovated new heavens and new earth, the new creation, and the unjust being dumped into the lake of fire, the Sadducees denied all of this. They believed that once a person died, their soul was annihilated. You die, you just go out of existence. That's it. Remarkably, that heresy is alive and well today in the Christian church. These were the liberals. Your soul just gets annihilated, poof, goes out of existence. They believed that the life as we currently know it is all that there is. Some have set this heretical pagan notion to music. A poet, one of our own, once said that we should imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today. That's sad you see pagan, idolatry, evil, heretical religion in the words of one of our own modern poets. These people believed that the bulk of the Old Testament was not authoritative. Only the books of Moses, only the five books of Moses were authoritative. And so while we're going to see here that even those books do teach about the resurrection, It's not as clear in the books of Moses about the resurrection as it is, we see very clear references to bodily, physical resurrection in Psalms and in Job and Isaiah and Daniel. Even in Job, which is probably the oldest book, probably written before the Torah was written, Job himself says what? Though my flesh be destroyed, with my flesh, with my eyes, I will see God. Job, writing before Moses, knows that his body will come back to life. He is going to see God with his physical body. Job has a belief in the resurrection. We'll see Moses clearly did as well. But it's not as explicit in Moses as it is in Psalms, or Job, or Isaiah, or Daniel. All books that the Sadducees rejected. And so just like the challenge of theological liberalism today, these men came to challenge Jesus by pitting one passage of Scripture against another passage of Scripture. And isn't that a common tactic to this very day? Right? We've talked about it in Sunday school. Set Jesus against Paul. See, Paul is so wrong because he has a different view of justification than Jesus or James did and such utter nonsense. That's not a new play. That's an old play. People who dislike the Word of God have always made that play. We see it in the garden and we see it with these guys here. So they're going to Moses to disprove the resurrection. So they're trying to pit Jesus against Moses here, or at least to pit Moses against the idea of a resurrection. And the place they go to is Deuteronomy 25, verses 5-10, which talks about leveret marriage. We call it leveret marriage because lever is in Latin, it's a brother-in-law. So this is a brother-in-law marriage, and maybe you are familiar with this provision. This was a provision in Old Testament Israel that if a man died without a son, or yes, if a man died without a son, that his brother was to marry his widow. And their first son in the second marriage would be credited as being the heir of the deceased husband. And this accomplished several things. First, it is a protection for the widow. She gets to keep the same in-laws. She gets to keep a familiar family to take care of her and to give her provision. Secondly, it prevents a dead man from being permanently cut off without an heir to continue his branch of the family. His brother will produce an heir for him, and that first son is credited to the first husband who has died. It also keeps the dead brother's property and wealth in the same family tree, in the same clan. And of course, there's a very well-known example of leverant marriage in the Old Testament. In Genesis 38, we read about Judah's family. Judah's three boys, Er, Onan, and Shela, who marry Tamar, or Tamar. I was corrected, I always say Tamar. Dutch people say Tamar. I don't know which is right. I'll use it interchangeably. I don't know which is the correct pronunciation. But Tamar marries Ur, and Ur dies without a son, and so Onan, his younger brother, takes Tamar as his wife, and Onan is the one who famously is punished by God for spilling his seed on the ground, because he does not want to give his brother a child through his wife, Tamar. And God strikes him dead for not fulfilling his obligations to his older brother, to his father, to his wife, and so forth. And Judah is so afraid of God's actions with his sons that he withholds the third son from Tamar, and in the providence of God ends up through sin impregnating her himself. But in a very typological sense, this points out this idea of leverate marriage is a kind of taste of the resurrection. Because it does demonstrate that through the womb of his wife, there is a very real sense in which a dead man can continue to live. This is a typological taste of what it means for a dead man to keep living forever. And we see that the heart of the earth can serve as a kind of womb as well. There's tastes of this in Jonah and of course in Christ. The earth itself serves as a womb which pushes out new life for these men. And in verse 24 in today's text, the language hints at resurrection as well. For the leverant marriage does in fact raise up, it says, a seed for the deceased brother. The dead brother is raised up vicariously through his son that is given through this arrangement of leverant marriage. And so the Sadducees are unable to see, the reason they're going to Moses is because Moses is their only authority, and they think Moses disproves the resurrection. So they're going to Moses to make this idea of resurrection seem absurd or impossible. But what they don't see is that even in Moses, there's a hint of eternal life. Even in Moses, we're going to see that dead men can live forever. And Jesus traps them with their trap, as he has done all the way along. In verse 25 it goes on, and here's their absurd scenario that they're giving. This probably didn't happen, this is probably a hypothetical scenario, just to show the absurdity of the idea of physical resurrection. So here's how they trap Jesus. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring, left his wife to his brother. So too the second and the third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her." And so, in the world of logic, you'd call this a reductio ad absurdum, where you take your opponent's view and you reduce it to absurdity. You make his view so extreme that everyone just laughs at it, and that's what they think they've done. Oh, physical resurrection. Okay, so seven brothers marry the same woman. She doesn't give any of them a son, so none of these brothers have more of a claim, so to speak, on this woman. They're all dead, they're all childless. So whose wife is she going to be? And they're all snickering, ha ha ha, can you believe some, you know. Some redneck from Galilee believes in future bodily, physical resurrection. The fact that this scenario could happen is proof that the resurrection is an absurd concept and we should all laugh it out of court. What they're trying to do is make the Bible contradict itself. Peter Lightheart, in his commentary, describes the scenario here quite well. Torah prescribes leverate marriage if a brother dies. But Torah also prohibits polyandry, the practice of one woman marrying several men simultaneously. If all the brothers and the woman are all alive at the same time in the resurrection, then the law is nullified in one way or another. Either the leverant marriage law is annulled, or the prohibition of polyandry is annulled. If you believe in resurrection, you cannot believe in eternal, inerrant Torah. See what they're doing here. Moses says, your brother has to marry this widow, but Torah also says that a woman cannot have multiple husbands. They've used Moses to trap Jesus. You're going to have to give up on this silly notion of a resurrection, Jesus, because if you believe in it, this scenario could happen, and somehow or another, Moses' law is going to be violated. They are pitting scripture against scripture. So Jesus is in a trap now. He's either going to have to deny the resurrection and anger all of the Orthodox Jews who do believe in a physical resurrection, Or he is going to have to deny Moses and the Torah, which is going to make everybody angry. So Jesus has the choice here of making everybody angry or only making the Orthodox Jews angry. But someone's going to be angry. They think they've trapped Jesus. And so again, before we consider Christ's response, let's remember that these guys are the soft, effeminate, professional, lisping theologians. These are the soft men of their culture. They've graduated with all the highest honors from all the greatest unbelieving seminaries throughout all Israel. These are the men who get to do talk shows as the voice of Old Testament religion. They get to go on The View, they get to go on Colbert, they get to be the voice of the greatest Old Testament scholarship. because they're not a threat to anybody. And that's why, to this very day, those types of shows love to get fools to speak on our behalf. They know what they're doing. These are the elite theologians of the time, and they are used to being addressed in very respectable terms. And verse 29 says, but Jesus answered them, you are wrong. Because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. Jesus just cuts right to it. There's no soft talk, there's no prepping. Well, I see what you're saying here is... No, you're wrong. He just cuts right to it. You guys are wrong. You deny the power of God, you don't read the scriptures, you have no idea what you're talking about. You're wrong. Jesus is not saying, well, this is a very nuanced discussion and I look forward to scheduling an interfaith debate with you folks where we can discuss our various traditions and land at some place. Surely it will be some kind of third way, you know, between these extremes of resurrection and non-resurrection we can find. No, you're wrong. You don't read the Bible. You don't trust in God. You're evil. You're unbelieving hypocrites. You're wrong. And in case I can't make it clear enough for you, you guys are wrong. Jesus said that. Jesus just said, you're wrong. You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. Jesus told the elite theologians that they don't understand the word of God. Ouch. Their pride was hurt. Their way of doing theology was all about respectability from the powers that be, from the Romans, about cultural accommodation to whatever the spirit of the age was, and about being sure to include whatever the latest development in Roman philosophy was to work into their system so that everybody loved them. And Jesus is showing here he is no respecter of persons. The downside for Jesus is this also means he's running out of friends. Nobody is his friend. The elders are turned against him, the chief priests are against him, the Herodians are against him, the Pharisees are against him, and now the Sadducees are against him. Jesus' plain speaking style is making enemies. And yes, there's people in the crowd who are delighted at what he's doing, but the powers that be, sure are not. He's upsetting the very theological and political tribe that has come to trip him up yet again. And notice how he does it. He does it with scripture. This is God the Son who could speak very much on his own authority, provide new revelations, so forth, and he would have every right to do that. But how does he prove them wrong? He's asking them the by what standard question. And then he says, by this standard. This is how we're going to settle the matter, guys. You've got this all worked out, you've got your little system, you've got your accommodations. Here's how I'm going to settle this. Sola Scriptura. By the word of God alone, we're going to settle this. The Son of Man says that. Can we improve on that? Is there a higher court of appeal we could go than the Word of God itself? Jesus settles this by pointing to the sufficiency and the inerrancy of Scripture, getting right down to a verb tense, as we're going to see. Jesus is so committed to the authority of God's Word that the tense of a verb settles this matter in Moses. It's incredible. Jesus opposes this rationalistic, unbelieving theology by taking them back to the Word of God. And he opposes their setting apart of Moses from David and Isaiah and Job. He opposes their unbelief in the resurrection of both man and nature. And he does it by the standard of God's Word. And he goes on in verse 30, it says, in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And so it's clear here, in heaven, in the resurrection, we no longer have marriage. It says that in this regard we become like the angels. Okay, so note this. Here was another misconception in my idea. Maybe some of you grew up too. Someone dies and they got their wings because they turned into an angel. I don't know if anyone else had that confusion. I did. Not helped by Ray Charles and Willie Nelson because the seven Spanish angels took another angel home. Unfortunately, they're just people. It's just a man and his wife. They're not angels. They never will be. No one in this room is ever going to be an angel. No angel alive today was ever a person. These are different classes of creation. This is another way of saying that at the resurrection, the number of people who exist is a fixed number. It's no longer growing. All the people who are going to be created have been created by this time, both regenerate and unregenerate people. It's a fixed number, it's solid, it's not growing anymore because there's not marriage on the other side of eternity. And so that points us to the importance of one of the chief purposes of marriage today is childbearing. And it is a great honor and privilege of the Christian to take part in this work of dominion, of being fruitful and multiplying and populating the kingdom of God. And that is a genuine mandate, that is a genuine calling from the garden on, is to be fruitful and multiply. And that's not limited to children, but it certainly includes children. The production of human people is a great privilege and a great honor for those who know the Lord and know our calling in the world. And I think we tend to not think that way anymore. I think we tend to think of children as an optional add-on. And in fact, some advice that Tanya and me were given before we got married is that a husband and a wife is a complete family. And of course, there is truth to that. Some people are not able to have children, and they are no less married than a family that has eight children. So in one sense that's true, but in another more important sense that's incredibly misguided advice. Children are not optional add-ons like accessories, like a coach bag that you can have or you cannot have. Children are integral to the purposes of God in marriage. God made marriage to produce children. At least that's one of the true purposes of marriage. So from creation on, marriage is God's ordained means of being fruitful and of filling the planet, of populating the kingdom of God. Tanya and me both wanted children because we enjoyed them, but neither of us can recall, despite growing up in the church, despite growing up in Christianity, neither of us can recall ever learning a theology of children. This idea of populating the kingdom of God is something I learned after we were done having kids, to my great shame. So young people, improve on what I knew. Children are to populate the kingdom of God. That's why God loves children. And that's why he has ordained marriage, is to produce them. And the church has been very silent on this matter for a number of years, and so we just follow the world's assumptions into childlessness, into slowly killing ourselves with 1.7 children per woman. And by the way, two is not replacement, because not all children make it to adulthood, and not all of them will get married. So we need more than two even to just replace ourselves, much less make headway. But the fact that we have forgotten about the purposes of children in marriage, and what marriage is for, made it very difficult for Christians to make any kind of consistent argument in the early 2000s when so-called same-sex marriage, what I prefer to call same-sex mirage, was being debated. Because if children are no longer integral to marriage, why can't two women get married? Why can't two men get married? Because children are just a side effect that some choose and some don't choose. So who's to say? We lost our voice on a whole bunch of other things when we lost our voice about what marriage is for in the first place. We cannot recover this piecemeal. We need a robust view of marriage of children all the way down if we are going to make positive changes in this. We cannot follow the world into reducing sex into a recreational indoor activity. And if you want to get a piece of paper from the government saying that that's what you and your partner do, great. If not, just do it anyway. What an absurd reduction into something that God made good and beautiful and life-giving. Marriage is so much more than that. So the whole superstructure that has made the family possible, that has made civilization possible, is at stake here. As Christians, we need to hold to a faithful and biblical view of marriage. And we ought not to intentionally delay it. And again, this is something that we frequently just follow the world into without thinking. Well, I'll get married once I'm done my college degree. Well, I'll get married once I have money. I'll get married after I travel the world. Everything's more important than marriage and children. Me, me, me. Once I'm done this, then I'll get married, and then I'll settle down and have children and so forth. And I think that all feeds into our low view of what marriage is designed to do. When Jesus says that there's no more marriage in the new creation, he's not saying that marriage is unimportant. Rather, he's saying that by the time of the resurrection, marriage will have completed its purpose. It will have served the purpose for which it was made, and now we are moving into another chapter of history in which there is no longer marriage. Marriage will have produced enough new image bearers of God until God's full measure has been reached, and after that, it has served its purpose and it terminates in to the new creation. but that ought not to diminish our view of marriage in the meantime. If anything, it ought to promote it more, because this is the only chapter in history in which marriage and making children is gonna happen. You won't be able to do it in the new creation, so do it now. Now's the time to get married, now's the time to have children, now's the time to populate the kingdom of God, and not just to produce these children, but to teach them. It's good, it's the norm. God does call some to singleness, and he providentially withholds children from others. And we need to leave room for that. But the norm for most people will be a future with marriage and children. And so we ought not to delay it. Every young man knows that at a certain point in his development, his body screams at him that it's time to get married. And to purposely deny that is only to ask for sin to enter your life. It really is. If we do things on God's rough timetable, we have the energy for children in our youth and we still have a degree of strength for our parents after our children are more or less self-sufficient. But we have to remember that 100% of the people entering the new creation, 100% of the people who will be resurrected were produced in this age of marriage. Resurrection changes things in that regard, and Jesus points us to that shift. But part of the dominion mandate that God has given us is to take this seriously. And so young men need to quit looking at porn, young ladies need to quit reading unrealistic romance novels, and you need to start preparing yourself to be the kind of person that the kind of person you want to marry wants to marry. Be the kind of person that the person you want to marry wants to marry and get serious about it. The immaturity, the eternal boyishness in our culture needs to just stop. It's sick, it's misguided, it's dumb. Grow up, be a man, take responsibility. Grow up, be a woman, take responsibility. This is good because it's not going to happen later. Now is the time. Now is the time to enjoy marriage and to see what God has made it for. There's going to be no more death in the renewed creation, and so no more replacements need to come up the ranks. So this is the sense in which we will be like angels. Angels have never married. There's a fixed number of angels. They don't die. They don't reproduce. It's a fixed number. We will be like that one day as well. And some people get discouraged by this, especially those who have recently lost a loved one. But there is evidence in the Bible that we will continue to recognize each other once we have resurrected bodies. After all, Jesus was still recognizable to a large degree to the 12. And we think, well, but marriage is the best experience I have in life. And for me, it most certainly is. I have been blessed with a wonderful wife and a great marriage. And the thought of life different than that seems a little bit scary, doesn't it? How can I be fulfilled if I'm not married to Tanya in the new creation? I think of all the things we can say, I can say this with great confidence. In a perfected world, in a perfected new heavens and earth, when I am a perfected man, even if we're not married, this much I know, I will love Tanya more in the new creation than I do right now. That's incredible, isn't it? My love will be perfect for her in the new creation, even though we're not married. And if we think about some of the other benefits of marriage, and we think, well, how can eternity be complete without that? Because after all, I love marriage, and marriage is so wonderful. And how can we be happy without that closeness, and that unity, and the openness, and the lack of shame, and the physical intimacy, and all the rest of the blessings that come with human marriage? I think it just shows that we don't understand increasing levels of joy through history. How can we top those things? Well, we can top it because marriage is just a taste of what is to come. C.S. Lewis commenting on this says, it would seem our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. As good as marriage is and it's wonderful, it's just a taste of eternal glory. We're just the kids in the slum making mud pies and we have no idea what it's like to go to the sea. That is the resurrection. That is eternity. That is living in the presence of God with perfected bodies and a perfected creation forever. And so part of the error that the Sadducees make here is that they assumed that a renewed creation, even after the resurrection, would work exactly the same as it does right now. They assumed marriage continues on, nothing has changed in the new creation. History in the future is just exactly like it has been in the past, and Jesus is showing them that that assumption is wrong. That's where they went wrong in this whole thing. There is, of course, great continuity between this world and the next. And the world doesn't mean that this planet is annihilated. We see in the Bible that there's multiple worlds. A world isn't a planet. A world is a chapter of history. And this earth has had many worlds in it, in 1 Peter. Three, it talks about Noah getting from one world into the ark and the world that then existed was deluged and the world that now exists is different. Moses lived in two different worlds. Moses built an ark Noah built an ark in one world, and he got off the ark into a different world. Same planet, different worlds. That is how I believe the new creation works. It's this planet, fully restored, new heavens and new earth glorified, restored, made perfect. God makes all things new, not all new things. So there is continuity. But history does also advance from one degree of glory to another. Jesus is able to see what the Sadducees cannot. The resurrection is more real and more solid and better and more stable than our current experience. Grace will have completely restored nature at the resurrection. The fall and all its deadly consequences are fully and finally erased. And we are going to be like the unfallen angels in this regard. So in other words, in the resurrection I will not cease to be a man. I will finally become one. I will finally know what it's like to be a man, because right now all I have is a little taste, full of sin, full of corruption, full of setback. Then I will finally be a man. My madness is not destroyed, it is perfected, as will be yours. In verse 31, he goes on, and as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God? This is an insulting thing, remember? These guys are experts on Moses. These guys are experts on Torah. And Jesus takes them back to Exodus 3, verse 6. So this is part of their Bible that they'll even accept. So he's saying, even on your own authority, even on your own assumptions that only the five books of Moses are the word of God, why don't we go there? Sadducees, and see what we find in Moses. As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read, referring to Exodus 3.6, what was said to you by God, 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. And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching. So now Jesus is going to Moses to make his point about the resurrection. He's appealing to authority that they share. They both agree that the Torah is authoritative. And he's making his case for the resurrection from there. The progress of revelation may very well show us something more clearly with time. So is this more clear in Daniel and in Isaiah and in the Psalms than it is in Moses? Yes, it is. But new revelation never contradicts old revelation. It may shed more light on it, but it never says that the old revelation was wrong. It never corrects it. Christ's commitment to biblical inerrancy and authority is so strong here that he's making his entire case about the resurrection on a verb tense that God spoke to Moses at the burning bush. Okay, so picture, you're Moses, you're at the burning bush, and God comes to talk to you in this theophany. And by the time this happens, Abraham has been dead for 550 years. So let's go from our time. He's been dead since the days of Martin Luther. Isaac has been dead for about 440 years. So Isaac has been dead as long as the early explorers to North America. And Jacob has been dead for about 400 years. These guys have been dead for hundreds of years. And then God tells Moses in the present tense that he is their God. I am their God. Not I was their God while they were living. Right now, Moses, while we're talking, 550 years later, I am the God of Abraham. These patriarchs live on despite the fact that they're dead. Yes, they are dead. Yes, their body and soul have been torn apart from one another in death. And yet their souls remain present before the Lord while they continue to wait for the bodily resurrection at the end of history, where they will be fully and finally renewed. But in the meantime, they do live on spiritually. Jesus has not only shown that Moses himself teaches the resurrection in Exodus, but he has once again swept the feet out from under his opponents. The Sadducees are left with nothing to stand on. Their assumptions about marriage and God's law and the nature of death have been eradicated. Annihilation clearly is not happening because there is a sense in which Abram and Isaac and Jacob are still living and God remains their God after their deaths. So we can make several points of application here when we put this all together. One is that we must adamantly reject the annihilationist teaching that continues to this day and is prominent in Steinbeck, Manitoba, Canada. We must reject it. It is unbiblical, it is unorthodox, it is wrong. Jesus could not be more clear. God remains the God of Abram, Isaac, and Jacob after they are dead. Annihilationism is to be rejected root and branch. There is nothing to discuss, nothing whatsoever. Further, we can see that marriage and childbearing are gifts from God which we should gladly receive. These are God's ordained means of filling creation, of populating his kingdom, and giving us an enacted reminder of what his union with his church is like. and that's another deep meaning of marriage, is to give us an enacted role play, day in, day out, of what it means for Christ to lead his church, to take care of her every need, to come to her defense, to make her more beautiful every day than she was the day before. Husbands, that is your job. Your wife should be coming more beautiful every day. if you are following Christ's instructions for what marriage is for, because he makes his church more glorious as he matures her and feeds her. And women, likewise, to follow your husband, to submit to your husband, as unpopular as that may be, is a picture of what the church ought to do for her Lord, Jesus Christ. Further, we can see that death is not natural, nor is it the final word. Gnostics may speak about the soul being freed, but the son of man goes nuts when his friend has his body and his soul ripped apart from each other. The man who created Lazarus loses it when he sees what an absurd and wicked thing has happened, that somebody would die. Somebody who was made to live forever has died. Could there be anything more unnatural than that? And I would suggest our funeral customs ought to reflect, not that we even have to make funerals fun. There's actually a great article in Modern Reformation about putting the fun back in funeral. And it is a harsh diatribe against the fact that we even make light of death in our culture. That's how frivolous a people we are. We don't even mourn death anymore. Even death has to be happy. What a sick bunch we are. Death is not happy. Jesus goes nuts when Lazarus dies. Cry. It's okay. It's okay. This wasn't meant to happen. This is wrong. Sin should have never gotten here. This should never have happened. This person was designed to live forever. And through the grace of God, they will. Again, but we don't have to make death something trivial or light or happy. It's not. It's a corruption. It's unnatural. It's absurd. And we ought to treat it as such. Not because we despair, but because we believe in the resurrection. God is the God of the living and not of the dead, by Jesus' own confession. And so we as Christians anticipate the great and glorious marriage supper of the Lamb, when all things, body and soul, heaven and earth, are put back together perfectly and made glorious and permanent. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you that death does not have the last word. Lord, we see that you have made it good that body and soul were created together, that heaven and earth were at one point together as well. Lord, and we see the great and ugly divorce that sin has caused in our bodies, in our creation all over. Lord, and we know that that does not have the last word, but we know that you are going to wrap history up with a wedding feast just like you started it. Lord, to make it more stable, more permanent, indestructible, incorruptible, that we know that when you set things right at the resurrection, it will stay that way for eternity. Lord, I pray that we would not be functional Gnostics in our thinking about the body, in thinking about death, in thinking about the corruption that still needs to be put under your feet, that persists on this earth, but that we would be people of hope, people of the resurrection, people who know that your resurrection out of the cave was just like ours, only centuries sooner. Lord, and we look to that very same resurrection power, that our loved ones too will come out of the ground. And while they wait, they are still living in a very real sense in your presence. Lord, I pray that we would place our trust in your eternal purposes to set all things right. Give us a robust view of creation. Give us a robust view of the human soul and the human body and your purposes for your good and glorious creation. Lord, fill us with anticipation as we await the marriage supper of the Lamb. We pray this all in the strong name of Jesus, and amen. Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness. All I have needed, thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me. Summer and winter and springtime and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above. Joined with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness, mercy Morning by morning, new mercies I see. strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow. Blessings are mine with ten thousand beside. Great is thy faithfulness. Great is thy faithfulness. Morning by morning new mercies I see. Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto thee. In today's text, the Sadducees attempt to show that leverant marriage makes the idea of resurrection absurd. Christ's opposition to their argument is both abrupt and insightful. The very provision of leverant marriage points to the resurrection itself. If God gave a law which provided hope that life could indeed continue for a dying childless man, hope that his name would live on, does that not itself demonstrate that God is a God of resurrection, a God of the living and not of the dead? When God binds himself to Moses, he says that he remains bound to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob even centuries after their deaths. He is a God who is faithful unto death and faithful yet again after death. Even this great obstacle to our eternal joy can never have the last word. The Sadducees do not understand the faithfulness nor the power of God. And so, Christian, your charge is to remember that the gospel of grace does not destroy nature, but restores and perfects it. In this age, we continue to taste death and to lay loved ones in the ground like a seed, but we do so in the great hope that they will come back out of the grave, just as Jesus did, having finally become fully glorified men and women. May we know both the scriptures and the power of God. And I'll leave you with the benediction from Hebrews 13, 20 and 21. Now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen, and go in peace.