Hope and Resurrection, Matthew 22:23-33
We are continuing our study of this period of confrontation between Jesus and the religious leaders in Israel. And it is extremely important as we look at this to understand the context, to understand that this isn't one of those passages that is going to make us feel all worm and fuzzy. It is not one of the passages that are going to focus our attention upon the cross; it is a series of encounters with one of the most insidious and evil groups of people ever to populate the planet.
Most people don't want to think about the religious leaders of Israel in quite those stark terms, but that is what Jesus refers to them as. He calls them evil and wicked, and uses a number of extremely harsh adjectives to describe the depths of their depravity. Whenever someone is teaching something the end result of which will lead to the eternal destruction of those who follow them, what could be more evil than that? That is what we find in the basis of this confrontation. As a result of this we see this building up of intense opposition to Jesus through the series of questions, parables and questions as we go through this particular section.
The focus of this particular encounter in Matthew 22:23-33 is on resurrection. Whenever we talk about resurrection and the truth of resurrection this is something that indeed does give us hope.
By way of review, starting in Matthew 21:28 which is the second day that Jesus is in Jerusalem after His triumphal entry, He teaches three interconnected and interrelated parables. As He teaches them He is pronouncing judgment on the religious leaders, which they understand very clearly. Each of these parables develops a subtle answer to the question they had asked Jesus: “By what authority do you teach these things and perform these miracles?”
Each of these parables involves a father, a son or sons, and the rejection of the father's authority. Then each parable is addressed to the unsaved and their judgment—these unsaved religious leaders, not the multitude. He is announcing judgment on them and they understand this. Each one builds the case for God's rejection of the religious leaders of Israel, even as they are rejecting the Son. They know that He is talking about them but they fear the multitude. They know that He is condemning them and they are reacting in anger and resentment.
The three parables are followed by three questions from Matthew 21:15 on. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” They are trying to create a question that puts Jesus on the hot seat. And if they frame it so that if He answers one way He is in trouble, and if He answers it the other way he is also in trouble.
One of the lessons we should learn from that is that not every question someone asks us when we are talking about spiritual things or the gospel is it necessary to answer. Sometimes we get caught in that trap. The answer sometimes is to say: “Let's rephrase the question; let's talk about what is really going on”.
But Jesus is remarkable sophisticated in how He answers, where He creates a new structure for the question in His answers.
It is important to understand that what we see here in the intensification of their opposition to Jesus is the building up of hostility. It is a deep, profound hostility to Jesus and to the truth, and the more He answers and turns the tables on them the more intense their opposition becomes.
Matthew 21:45 NASB “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they understood that He was speaking about them. [46] When they sought to seize Him ...” That implies that they had a plan and an agenda. “... they feared the people, because they considered Him to be a prophet.”
We need to think about who these Pharisees and chief priests are. If you looked at them and didn't know anything about what was going on you would think that they were fairly good people. They are very religious, very active in their religion. They are going to the temple on a regular basis, are profoundly involved in the practice of carrying out of all the rituals in the temple. The Pharisees are teaching the people, and in that culture the Pharisees were the most biblically centered, the most righteous looking, the most moral looking group. They looked good, they had good arguments for their positions, and you would not think of them at all as being evil.
We have similar kinds of people in our culture. We have people in our world today who seem to want good things. They seem to have good arguments sometimes for what they want and they have political agendas. We need to understand that then, as now, the real agenda is not always evident to people. They cloak it in deception; they use good-sounding words, and in our culture they have all sorts of sophisticated communication skills.
Politicians are especially adept at saying things and knowing what people want to hear, and saying it in a way that makes it sound acceptable and sound. Other people are critical of some things and you wonder how they could be critical of whatever that policy is, because it sounds so helpful and so compassionate. So it calls for a level of discernment to understand what is going on.
What we see in the Scriptures is that God the Holy Spirit is exposing the internal motivation of the thinking of the Pharisees and the others involved.
In 22:15 after Jesus gives His third parable, the Pharisees get together to conspire and plot how they can entangle Jesus. Someone comes to them, and on the basis of Greek grammar they received a plot. They were already thinking about how they could kill Jesus; that had been going on for at least seven or eight months. How moral is a group of people whose ultimate desire is that they take their enemies murdered or executed.
If we listen carefully to the dialogue that is going on in our political culture today we will discover that there are those, especially on the left, who continue to talk about infringing the freedoms of those on the right who disagree with them. There are attempts to stifle anyone who disagrees with them on any number of issues. There are attempts to float legislation to somehow punish those who disagree in issues from global warming, environmentalism, to issues related to sexual identity, gender identification; all these different things. Basically what they want to do is completely do away with the first amendment because this kind of speech in their view is dangerous, because it is dangerous to their agenda. Ultimately they want to get rid of any kind of opposition and shut it down, even to the point of imprisonment.
Mark 3:6 NASB “The Pharisees went out and immediately {began} conspiring with the Herodians against Him, {as to} how they might destroy Him.”
The question we should ask: What is it that generates this kind of anger, resentment and hostility?
But Jesus goes right to the heart of the issue. In Matthew 22:18 NASB “But Jesus perceived their malice ...” These moral religious leaders, these outstanding examples of Torah obedience are identified in Scripture as being evil. It is the mask of human good that is worn by those who are intensely antagonistic to the plan of God and the Word of God.
We see examples, as in Romans 1:18, 19 in a broad sweeping review of history, where the apostle Paul is talking about how God's judgment in time works its way out. He calls that the wrath of God. “For the wrath of God is revealed ...” That present tense is showing its continuing action. “... from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness ...” This is the basic orientation of the fallen part of the human mind: opposition to truth.
Jesus said: “I am the truth”. Jesus identifies the Word of God. In His high priestly prayer to the Father He said: “Sanctify them in the truth; thy Word is truth”.
So what people in their carnal, fallen state have in the depths of their soul is an agenda to suppress the truth of God, to suppress the living Word of God and to suppress the written Word of God. They despise it.
What has happened in our culture over the last fifteen or twenty years as we have gone further and further down the road to moral relativism, and further down the road of licentious living and accepting just about anybody's life style what we see is the people who have been in the shadows suppressing the truth are coming out of the shadows. They are becoming more and more open and are networking. They are coming to understand as they advance their agenda that they have a certain political power base that has really coalesced in the last seven or eight years in Congress. They have had decisions that have been made in the courts by various justices that have legitimized their positions, and as they become more and more legitimate they become more outspoken about what their agenda is.
Take for example the LGBTQ movement. A lot of people think they may have a point, that there are certain rights where homosexual couples have been living together a long time and have been sharing their income, and that they should have certain rights, and that this makes sense. If one of them becomes ill and are in the hospital their health needs and issues should be communicated with their partner, and that this makes sense. This is the starting point of this kind of argument.
But if we think that that is all they want, that is only the first step; that legitimizes it. They operate on this view of incrementalism. That is their agenda and the process in their methodology. Mark my words, the goal of the LGBTQ community is first of all to be able to get out of the closet, and secondly to suck the Christians into the closet. They want to tear down the Bible because the Bible says that what they are doing is a sin.
We understand that the Bible doesn't single out homosexuality as some super sin. It is one of numerous sins that are listed in a number of sin lists that we find in Scripture, sin lists that include such things as gossip and slander, sins that are more extreme, like murder, but also divisiveness, and enmity. It is another sin of many sins, so we don't look at homosexuality as some super sin. It looks that way because that is the point at which the fortress is being attacked. So when it comes to that particular sin it looks like that is what we are focusing on, but that is only because that is where the attack is. If they were trying to legitimize slander or gossip or defaming somebody's character, or something like that, then we would have to fight that as well because we understand that to legitimize sin of any kind is destructive to the whole society and the whole culture. There has to be an ultimate standard of what is right and what is wrong.
The point being made here is that we have to understand that when truth is at stake and it exposes the agenda of those who are truth suppressors, what they want to do is annihilate the source of truth. And that is what is happening with these religious leaders. These are not the licentious rebellious crowd; these are the good people, the moral people, the ones who look good. And their idea is to destroy Jesus. Jesus hasn't done anything wrong, but He has exposed the hypocrisy of their teaching and so they wish to kill Him.
Today we live in a world that has been dominated for too many decades by the encroaching philosophy that is sometimes called liberalism, but more accurately called progressivism. Progressivism is built on a presupposition that human beings are basically good. The reality is, and the Bible teaches, that people are basically evil and they need to have authority and a government that restrains evil. That is why God initiated government as one of one of the divine institutions—to restrain evil, and in the case of criminality to punish evil.
Within the worldview of progressivism we have deeply held convictions about the nature of man. Because they believe that man is basically good they have to reject anything and everything that comes out of a biblical worldview which is grounded in a specific creation story in Genesis chapter one that speaks about the origin of evil that corrupts the human race. They have to reject that, and therefore have to come up with an alternative theory of origins. And so they are committed to evolutionism and are ultimately committed to globalism because this was the attempt after the Noahic flood in order to bring unification to the world against God, and it was manifest at the tower of Babel. God intervened and divided up the languages so that men could not talk together.
But there has always been this focus in the human heart manifested in empire building in the ancient world and in the middle ages, and now it is manifested in the doctrine of globalism. Through computer languages and through trade and many things we find ourselves more and more being spoken about as a global community. Those who hold to progressivism basically want to tear down borders, which is destructive to nations. But the Scripture clearly says that God has established the borders of nations. God's purpose for man is to maintain national distinctions and national identities. And so they are anti-nationalism; they are globalists.
We see this when people of the upper echelons of the business elite are trading internationally because that is what is good for their business, and they have more loyalty to globalism than they do for the country that made it possible for them to build and develop their business and their wealth.
They are committed to the eradication of sexual agenda identity. After all, if there is no creator and apparent sexual distinctions we have physically are just the result of time plus chance then why can't we as human beings figure out a way to make that fluid so that you can be whatever you want to be and you can identify with whatever gender you want to identify with, no matter what day of the week it might be.
Also it comes down to climate change. We want to control the climate. What man has done is to elevate himself to the position of God. Once you remove God from being the creator you have created a vacuum and so something has to move into that vacuum. So the intellectual elites have developed these theories where man basically can control everything and redesign creation according to his own likeness.
At the very core of this is opposition to truth. When you are denying truth you have to create an alternative “truth”, an alternative explanation of everything in order to promote your agenda. What this leads to is a conflict that is manifest throughout our culture today. Many have spoken of culture wars that are going on, and these culture wars are grounded in people who are committed to radically opposing worldviews. That is what we see with Jesus and His opposition from the religious leaders.
Jesus is proclaiming that God is a God of grace and a God who will solve the sin problem through an alternative solution known as a sacrifice, and He will be the fulfilment of that symbolism that has been carried on through the Old Testament; He is the one who will go to the cross as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. And the people are saved by grace because they can do nothing to save themselves.
But that doesn't bring and accumulate power to a religious elite. Even in Christianity there are those who are committed to legalism because it builds power in their frame of reference, whatever their church or denomination might be. It builds power, it holds power, and it holds a threat over people. There is always this conflict between grace and legalism.
This is what is happening here. The chief priests and scribes have come along, then the chief priests and the elders, the chief priests and the Pharisees, the disciples of the Pharisees, the Herodians, and now we have the Sadducees who come to confront Jesus. Again, it is still the same confrontation of human authority versus divine authority. They have rejected divine authority in the way they have constructed their view of the world.
The Sadducees were the religious liberals of their day who still held to a form of morality but they had denied the truth of Scripture. They had also denied most of the Scripture. The Pharisees in contrast were the religious conservatives of the day, but they too had also rejected the true meaning of Scripture and substituted their own meaning and interpretation on top of Scripture.
Matthew 22:23 NASB “On that day {some} Sadducees (who say there is no resurrection) came to Jesus and questioned Him ...” That is an important details, because most readers later on wouldn't be familiar with the somewhat esoteric philosophy and theology of the Sadducees. They did not believe in a resurrection. Acts 23:8 NASB “For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor an angel, nor a spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all.”
The Sadducees were materialists. They didn't accept anything beyond the Pentateuch; they had an abridged view of the Bible and that is important here. When they raise this question about resurrection, which they don't believe in, Jesus answers them from the Psalms or Daniel that would affirm resurrection because they didn't accept those books of the Old Testament as authoritative. Jesus understands the people to whom He is talking. When we are witnessing to somebody we need to understand what he or she believes.
The Sadducees come along and set up a hypothetical situation as if it were genuine. Matthew 22:24 NASB “asking, 'Teacher, Moses said, ‘IF A MAN DIES HAVING NO CHILDREN, HIS BROTHER AS NEXT OF KIN SHALL MARRY HIS WIFE, AND RAISE UP CHILDREN FOR HIS BROTHER.’”
This sounds like a somewhat odd custom but this was what was known as levirate marriage. It is encapsulated in the Mosaic Law in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, but it was also a custom that preceded the Mosaic Law. This was an issue with one of Jacob's sons. The point is to preserve the inheritance, the property that is owned by the family so that it stays within the family and the inheritance goes on to the next generation.
But the Sadducees are going to build this really extreme scenario. Matthew 22:25-27 NASB “Now there were seven brothers with us; and the first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother; so also the second, and the third, down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman died.”
Then they ask the question, which is facetious for them: Matthew 22:28 NASB “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had {married} her.” They are setting up this scenario that wouldn't really exist, and they don't even believe it themselves because they don't believe in the resurrection.
Matthew 22:29 NASB “ But Jesus answered and said to them, 'You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God'.” He just slaps them in the face ands says they don't know the Scriptures. That is not a tactful way to handle it but it is from divine viewpoint. Notice that Jesus isn't in-your-face like this with the tax collectors and the prostitutes. Jesus only gets this way when He is dealing with those who are dead set against Him and in opposition to Him, and who have thrown down the gauntlet. They have already exposed their hostile stubbornness. He says first of all that they don't know the Scriptures and then secondly, “nor the power of God”. They don't have an adequate view of God's omnipotence.
They are like many Christians today and nearly everybody outside the Christian sphere who don't have an adequate understanding of God the creator. If God could take from the dust, from the chemicals of the soil, mix it together and create a human body with all of the complexities that we have come to learn in the last 150 years related to the human body, and then breathe into the nostrils the breath of life so that this becomes a live human being with an immaterial soul and spirit, capable of inventiveness, volition, learning, growing and developing all kinds of things, then can't God bring that dead person back to life and then give them a new body?
When you start with a small God that you have restricted by your intellectual arrogance, then it is very easy to construct a theory against Him.
Matthew 22:30 NASB “For in the resurrection ...” The phrase “in the resurrection” that they both used is a term that relates to the fact that in the future there is a judgment (Daniel 12:2). It is interesting in this conversation to be reminded that the Pharisees had completely different understanding. They believed in resurrection, but this question that the Sadducees are asking Jesus is a question they would often throw at the Pharisees.
“... they neither marry nor are given in marriage ...” The question always comes up by people who love each other, have been married 40, 50, 60 years: “Does that mean that when I am in heaven I won't be with my spouse?” Notice that the text doesn't say that they neither love no are loved. It is talking about the divine institution of marriage. The divine institution of marriage was created for a specific purpose and part of that purpose involved protection of sexual activity, to keep it within marriage, so that in procreation the children would be in the marriage where there is a father and mother and where those children would be reared in the context of the biblical concept of family. And the biblical concept of family is the training institution for the next generation. In the resurrection there is not a need for those divine institutions.
Just as there will be no volition in heaven because once we are in heaven there is not going to be an opportunity to sin, we will be sinless, we can't choose not to sin anymore; that is just in this life. So divine institution #1 is out, as are #2, #3, #4. These are not part of what the society in heaven will be like; it will be a total transformation.
Also we should note that this phrase “to marry” and “given in marriage” was part of the language related to the initial coming together of a man and his wife in marriage, and their sexual union which begins that particular marriage. So it indicates that the physical sexuality in this sense is not going to be part of our resurrection bodies.
“... but are like angels in heaven.” Some people raise the issue of the incident in Genesis chapter six where the “sons of God”, if you take that term to be angels, “took the daughters of men as their wives”. And they had children. If angels don't have sexuality, how did they do that?
Angels are created with an immaterial body and an immaterial body isn't going to procreate. Angels took on material bodies in the Old Testament. Angels accompanied the Lord to visit Abraham. Abraham fixed a feast for them, we are told that they rested, they ate, they walked, and they had all of these functions. They didn't look like angels. Abraham thought they were people. So angels had the ability to transform their spiritual-immaterial bodies into physical bodies like a human being that had all of the properties, apparently, of a human being, but they weren't related to Adam.
This verse isn't about marriage or sexuality; it doesn't apply to that.
Matthew 22:31-32 NASB “But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God: ...” Here He is going to quote from Exodus 3:6. “... ‘I AM THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” By the time of Moses at the time God says this, around 1450 BC, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob have been dead for at least three or four hundred years. But God is saying He is still their God. He is the God of the living.
There are three responses. First, the response of the multitudes. Matthew 22:33 NASB “When the crowds heard {this,} they were astonished at His teaching.” They were astonished at the teaching because He has given an interpretation of the passage that no one has ever heard before. They had never thought of that: that they are still alive, though not resurrected yet.
There is a reaction from the Sadducees. Luke 20:40 NASB “For they did not have courage to question Him any longer about anything.” They had been using this as a “gotcha” with the Pharisees for decades and now they have been got back! They don't dare question Jesus anymore.
The third reaction probably was from the Pharisees. They were probably sitting in the corner saying, “Yeah, that's the answer. Jesus got 'em!”
Behind this we see the affirmation of resurrection: that resurrection is a reality. It is our hope. This is what Paul says in Acts 23:6 NASB “... I am on trial for the hope and resurrection of the dead!”
He connects two important ideas: hope and resurrection. It doesn't matter what is going on in this world, we can have hope because this world is temporary. We are in a war today because we are in the midst of the angelic conflict, the overall cosmic conflict, but it is a war that is not going well in our culture wars that are attacking us.
We want, as 1 Timothy 2:1, 2 says, to pray for our political leaders so that we can live in peace and tranquillity and carry out our God-given mandates. There is a war going on and the only way we can survive that war is to fight with the spiritual weapons of warfare that we have—Ephesians 6:10ff as well as 2 Corinthians, that we are in a spiritual warfare and our role is to learn the Word of God so that we can tear down these fortresses of human viewpoint ideas.
At the root of this the motivation is that we have a destiny, and so much flows from this. 1 Peter 1:3 NASB “... according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”