Recreate Church, Pastor Michael Shockley—Service, Sunday, February 18, 2024

Truth Demands Transformation.

Today, Pastor Michael is covering the last of Jesus’ earthly ministry, engaged in a topic entitled “Truth Demands Transformation,” meaning if you are receiving the word of God and it doesn’t prompt you to become someone different, someone closer to God, you are missing a huge part of the banquet laid out before you.

Here, the Sadducees were the rivals of the Pharisees and came from wealthy, powerful political backgrounds.  Even though far fewer than the Pharisees, they wielded more power.  They believed in only the first five books of the Bible and didn’t believe in anything supernatural, no heaven, no hell, no resurrection.  If spiritual truth were a banquet, these guys were picking at the rolls in the baskets!

The question they asked of Jesus was about a man dying and his brother remarrying his wife.  And it wasn’t as simple as one of them remarrying, but many brothers remarried her, and none left offspring.  So, in the Resurrection, the Sadducees asked, “Whose wife was she?”. 

Jesus tells them, “Are you not therefore mistaken because you do not know the scriptures nor the power of God? “   He is calling these men out for not believing in spiritual things, for they accepted spiritual things that made them feel good, but they believed in God on their terms.

Jesus affirms two truths here, neither of which the Sadducees believe in: the existence of life after death and the reality of a bodily resurrection.

And this makes us realize that truth demands transformation, something the Sadducees never embraced.   

(CSB Notes) The Sadducees approached Jesus with a situation based on the books of Moses. Specifically, the case involved the levirate (or brother-in-law) marriage law (Dt 25:5-6). This law obligated a male sibling to marry his deceased brother’s widow in order to preserve the family name and inheritance. Based on this, the Sadducees presented a scenario designed to make the doctrine of resurrection look absurd. Their question assumed that the future life will be like the temporal life, Jesus declared that the afterlife will be different from life on earth. In heaven, people will not marry or be given in marriage. By going to the book of Moses, specifically Ex 3 and the passage about the burning bush, Jesus used the part of the OT that the Sadducees recognized as Scripture. The point of the OT quotation is that Abraham . . . Isaac, and Jacob were long dead by the time God spoke to Moses, but God declared he was their God. Since God is not the God of the dead but of the living, they must still be alive.

Verses can be found in Mark 12: 18-27.

Scripture quotations marked CSB have been taken from the Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.