Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Erickson Covenant Podcast. We are so glad that you've joined us today.
We confess that we don't have all the answers, but as a community, we seek to find and follow Jesus and to discover daily the life he has always wanted for us.
We hope this message will be encouraging and will inspire you to take the next steps on your spiritual journey.
If we can help you in any way, please connect with us.
The easiest way is through our website at Erickson Covenant Ca.
Let's get started.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Well, we're into the third round with Jesus swarmed in the ring, but no one has been able to land any blows.
By the end of the third round today, Jesus is going to deliver a knockout punch that's going to leave his opponents really remember. When Jesus arrived at the temple fresh off this triumphal entry, he was instantly attacked by men who did not like what they saw.
And Luke in The gospel chapter 20 narrates these three rapid fire bouts. Starting with the confrontational who gave you this authority? Moving on to this deceptively sly is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
And then today for this last one, an odd sounding question that is explicitly theological.
And as Jesus takes on his attackers, we learn as apprentices not only from what Jesus says, but from how he says it.
That's how it works when you're an apprentice. Watching the master today is no different.
As we watch, we will learn and Jesus will teach us how to become more convinced by resurrectionists.
So let's dive in. I encourage you to pull out your paper Bibles that you've brought with you like I asked, or the ones in your seats below, or if you have to, you can use your digital phone. But I am encouraging you to dust off the old, the old school paper Bible and start bringing it to church.
We're going to go to Luke, chapter 20. Those of you fresh into the Bible, Matthew, Mark and Luke, first three books of the New Testament. Matthew, Mark and Luke. We're in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10. 20.
Let's begin.
Some of the Sadducees who say there is no resurrection came to Jesus with a question.
This is the third bout, but let's talk a little bit about the Sadducees. You know, when you read through the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the group that most commonly confronts Jesus is a group called the Pharisees. They're a legalistic purity group, not huge in number, but some social influence, but they had very little political pull. In contrast, the Sadducees who we meet today were a very influential political sect. They were a mix of priests and aristocrats who ran the complex temple system and benefited greatly from all the giving and all the sacrifices. And they were cozy with Rome, which made them very hostile to Jesus because they felt as though he threatened their cozy positions, which of course he did. But their coziness with Rome also made them quite hated by other groups. The more spiritually intense groups like the Pharisees or the Essenes and the Zealots.
The high priest Caiaphas, who just a week from now, this story is going to be presiding over the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. He was a Sadducee and he was fabulously rich. We're told this back in the history of Josephus, but when archeologists dug up his burial box in 19, it was one of the most ornate and decorative bone boxes ever discovered in first century Israel. He was a rich dude.
That's all backdrop.
The main points for today, the relevant points are this. First, we're told right in the text that Sadducees didn't believe in the resurrection, which is why they were so sad. You see?
Yep, preachers wait a long time to use that. Okay? And then the second point is that Sadducees, a little more subtle, but it's here. They believed the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah. They only believed the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They only believed that that portion of God's word had authority. All the rest, the later writings, the prophets, the oral traditions, the rabbinic teachings, they rejected that stuff. So what question did these Sadducees have for Jesus? Here it is, verse 28. Teacher, they said, Moses wrote for us that if a brother dies and leaves a wife with no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.
Now, there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second, then the third married her in the same way. The seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too.
Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be since the seven were married to her?
Now, if this seems like a bit of an odd argument to you, you are in good company. It is an odd argument.
And they didn't conjure the question out of thin air, though. It came out of a somewhat obscure law called the Levirite law in Deuteronomy 25. You see, in ancient Jewish culture, passing along your family name, your family land, your family inheritance to the next generation was of utmost importance. And if a man died with no children, it was considered a tragedy because there was no one to carry on the family name, no one to carry on the family line or the family land.
It would be as though he never existed. And so Moses made provisions for that in the law. If a man died childless, his brother had to marry the widow and have a child with her. And that first child wouldn't be regarded as his own son, but the son of the deceased brother. So that, as Deuteronomy 25:6 reads, his name will not be blotted out from Israel.
Again, this might seem odd to us, and we're all very thankful right now that we don't have to do that, but this is all about preserving the family line, keeping the family land, ensuring the inheritance for the next generation. Now, scholars don't think anyone was using or practicing this law by the time of Jesus. The Sadducees are instead using this as kind of a theoretical gotcha question, you know, really, to show that the resurrection of the dead is a dead idea.
They figured that if the resurrection was real, then this woman would have seven husbands on the go when she got there. Because that's obviously ridiculous. Then so is the resurrection. Gotcha, Jesus.
Yeah, not quite.
First, Jesus dismantles their space time confusion.
Verse 34. Jesus replied, the people of this age marry and are given in marriage.
Jesus distinguishes between the ages, the present time, and the future that's coming.
And the marriage covenant between a man and a woman only applies to the current time frame, not to the next.
When people declare marriage is forever or marriage is eternal, like maybe some of your Mormon friends, sorry, they're mistaken.
And I hear grieving folks say quite frequently, I look forward to seeing my husband or my wife in heaven so that we'll always be together. And I really do understand that sentiment because you've lost someone so dear to you, but it's still untrue.
I mean, if your spouse placed their faith in Jesus Christ, you will see them in the resurrection.
They just won't be your husband or your wife when you do.
The covenant of marriage between a man and a woman is not eternal, it's temporary.
Jesus says exactly that for those of us who do marry, it's only for the here and now, lasting until death do you part.
When a spouse dies, then that marriage is over for good. It's no longer binding, which is why we can freely marry again when a spouse dies. So Jesus first corrects their mistaken time frames, and then Jesus goes on to provide a smidge more detail. Not as much as we'd like but a smidge more detail about our relationship status in the age to come.
Verse 35. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage.
And they can no longer die, for they are like the angels. They are God's children. Since they are children, the resurrection Jesus provides a rare glimpse here into our futures as embodied human images of God with resurrection bodies. And he tells us that the marriage covenant won't be part of this resurrection life.
It's one of the reasons why we need to learn from the godly example of our single friends today, because they, like Jesus, are already living in the now as a witness to how we will all be living in the future.
Godly singleness holds out a preview of what's coming for us all.
And so for those of you who are single, that's a very high call.
And may the Lord give you grace and strength that you need.
The only marriage in heaven will be the one that our earthly marriages were designed to point towards, the everlasting marriage of the church, the bride of Christ to her Lord Jesus. Earthly marriages were designed to reflect this exclusively loyal covenant of love between Christ and his church. You can see in Ephesians 5 for more of that.
So marriage between human beings will be a thing of the past, but relationships will not be.
In fact, we'll enjoy perfect relationship with God and with each other, relationships that are God honoring and God reflecting in ways that we can't even comprehend now. And they go far beyond what would even be the best marriages here.
So rather than couples will all be children, which means that we'll all be family under the Father, loved perfectly and loved fully.
Jesus tells us that after our resurrection, we will be immortal, that we will no longer die. And as such, procreation is no longer necessary for the life that is coming to continue.
That's the main reason for the marriage covenant and family to raise flourishing children. Even though not all couples are able to have children in the resurrection, death will have been defeated by Christ, and dying will no longer be part of anything we know or experience. Which means we'll no longer witness or experience or cause pain and suffering and death. We will live fearlessly forever. I think that's pretty cool.
Now, I realize this leaves us with a lot more questions than answers. And there's so many things we'd kind of like to have sort of like popped up in the crowd at that moment and asked you, could you just clarify a Few things.
But Jesus sums it all up basically saying basically this resurrection life doesn't include marriage.
It will all be about siblings.
It'll all be us as God's children, since we are children of the resurrection. That's Jesus opening pushback against the Sadducees ridiculous argument about the resurrection. But he's not done. Now he goes on the offensive. He using the very scriptures that the Sadducees embraced as authoritative to prove that the resurrection is true. This is Jesus continuing in verse 37.
But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise.
For he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. We read that in Exodus 3, he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.
Some of the teachers of the law responded, well said teacher. Obviously not Sadducees.
And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
What's Jesus saying here? It's quite a simple argument. The God of heaven and earth, Yahweh, the Lord himself revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, three men that had died hundreds of years before Moses was born.
But the living Yahweh cannot be the God of the dead.
He's the God of the living. For as Jesus says to him, all are alive. This means Jesus argues that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive in God and will be raised in the last day.
Boom. That's Jesus argument. Jesus proves the resurrection using the scriptures that the Sadducees trusted and the main character, Moses, that they revered and his attackers were down with nothing left to say.
Well, they are down, but Jesus is not done. He's going to deliver a knockout punch here at the end. But before we go to that, I want to highlight two practical applications for us that emerge out of this resurrection exchange.
Our first application comes from what Jesus taught us about resurrection.
Jesus teaches us that bodily future resurrection is real, based on the Scriptures.
And Jesus fully trusted the resurrection, which is important because Jesus knows that he's going to be dead by the end of the week, but by the start of the next one, he's going to be alive again.
He knows this. In fact, he's told his disciples this several times, but they haven't gotten it.
And so resurrection is not some esoteric theory to Jesus. He was fully banking on it.
As a convinced resurrectionist. Jesus was going to the cross trusting his Father's power to raise him up out of that grave.
And that trust in the Father's power gave Jesus the confidence that he needed to finish the mission that his Father had given to him. Proclaiming the good news, seeking and saving the lost. Having these conflicts, a lot of conflicts, teaching about the kingdom of God and then going to the cross to suffer and to die for the sins of the world, well, guess what? That's the same for us.
Like Jesus, we who follow him are also convinced resurrectionists.
And that conviction empowers our mission today.
The physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead, guaranteeing our physical resurrection yet to come, is at the very center of the Christian faith, Christian mission.
We live daily what we confessed during communion.
That we believe that Jesus rose again from the dead.
That we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
And that belief empowers our hope and our faith and our mission. And Christians have confessed that down through the centuries, this resurrection belief.
The reality is, without that resurrection confession, you're not a Christian.
It's that central.
To deny the resurrection is to deny Christ and to embrace nihilism.
This is what the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15. He said, if there's no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God. For we've testified about God, that he raised Christ from the dead, but he did not raise them. If in fact, the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. Get it?
There were people in the group that were sort of saying, yeah, Christ rose, but the rest of us, no doesn't. They're tied.
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you're still in your sins, then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.
If only for this life, we have hope in Christ. We are of all people, most to be pitied.
No resurrection, no hope, no resurrection, no salvation, no resurrection, no Jesus, no resurrection, no life.
But with resurrection, everything shifts.
With resurrection hope, nothing can stop us.
We trust the Father's power, like Jesus did, to raise us from the dead. And the Spirit fills us now with this fearless resurrection faith that we need to finish the mission.
So practically put. One of the greatest ways to strengthen your Christian faith and expand your Christian witness is to become more convinced and convincing resurrectionists.
You can do that by sharpening up on your resurrection facts and theology.
I wonder when the last time you asked these kinds of questions, like why do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
Why do you believe it?
How can you be confident that Jesus did in fact rise again from the dead?
What are some of the common objections to the resurrection of Jesus and how can we refute them using the eyewitness accounts as well as logical common sense?
What does it mean that we will rise again too?
And what are the implications of that resurrection for us now?
Answering these kind of questions will strengthen your faith. And for those of you who are exploring what the Christian faith is all about, you've maybe been present here for a while. You're watching online, you're exploring like, what does it mean to follow Jesus? I gotta tell you, examining the eyewitness evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is a terrific way to catalyze your exploration. There's just no better place to begin. It's the central part of the story.
Everything hinges on it. And you will be blown away by what you discover, as many others have been. The historical case for the death and resurrection of Jesus is super solid for all of you. Perhaps you want to beef up whether you're an explorer or you're a follower of Jesus. The two books that will really help you are the Case for Christ by Lee Strobel and Cold Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace. Both men were atheists whose skepticism led them to dive into the evidence, the eyewitness evidence, of Jesus, and it led them to faith.
For those of you who are a little further along in the faith, I highly recommend N.T. wright's book Surprised by Hope.
One, both, or all three of these books will really beef up your understanding and your confidence in the resurrection.
Our second application comes from how Jesus argues for the resurrection. Here I want you to notice how Jesus used the very scriptures and the very person that the Sadducees regarded as authoritative in order to make his argument.
Moses and the Torah. That was their authority.
Like we see the Apostle Paul doing when he was on in Athens talking to philosophers. He quoted Greek poets and Greek writers and applied and found common ground with the people he was talking to. Like the Apostle Peter, then reached for the prophet Joel before an audience of diverse Jews on the day of Pentecost. Jesus uses Moses, in this case, the Torah, in this case, to prove resurrection to the man who only held to the words of Moses. And there's a practical lesson here for us.
When we share the reasons that we have for the resurrection hope we have in Christ, we need to seek common ground as well. Looking for ways that we can build a case based upon what people understand to be True in the case of J. Warner Wallace.
He's a cold case detective. He was an atheist. He found that by applying the forensic expertise he had as a cold case detective to the eyewitness accounts of Jesus, that is what brought him to faith. That was his common ground.
For some, we will build on the existential dread that many have of dying.
And we will share how the resurrection hope that we have in Christ answers that deep human angst.
For others, we might end up appealing to beauty and the way that the resurrection affirms God's good creation and the future that is beautiful renewal.
For a few, we might even use stories, stories like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or other stories like that that draw heavily on themes of defeating death through sacrifice with resurrection as its climax. All in an attempt to show how the resurrection of story of Jesus is where the real magic happens.
And yet others, we will make a logical case for the reliability of the resurrection based on the solid facts of the eyewitness accounts, much like the stories of Lee Strobel and J. Warner Wallace.
So our first two very practical takeaways for us is that we need to become more convinced resurrectionists by sharpening up our resurrection theology and understanding the resurrection's implications for our lives.
We also need to become more convincing resurrectionists, asking the Holy Spirit to help us share the resurrection hope we have in ways that make sense to the people.
Well, after three bouts with Jesus here in Luke chapter 20, his opponents are backed onto the ropes with nothing left to say. And now Jesus moves into his knockout punch, asking them a question about himself that leaves them flummoxed, but leads us to a stunning conclusion. Let's see what happens next.
Then Jesus said to them, they've been asking him questions.
Now he turns the tables. Then Jesus said to them, verse 41, why is it said that the Messiah is the son of David?
David himself declares in the book of Psalms, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. David calls him Lord. How then can he be his son?
Once again, it's okay to admit it. This is a bit of an odd argument.
Didn't just jump off the page to you, did it?
At first glance, it's hard to know what Jesus is even getting at here. He quotes Psalm 110 and then, top it off, he just leaves it hanging. He didn't provide any interpretation either. Summarize the argument quickly. Jesus asks all his opponents a very specific Messiah question in order to expose their shrunken view of the Messiah. That's contradicted by Scripture itself.
He starts with what they already affirmed, that the Messiah is the Son of David. This belief was rooted in a variety of scriptures. God had promised King David that he would always have a descendant on the throne, and those with other scriptures had combined to grow into a conviction that the coming Messiah would be this promised Son of David, this promised king.
And so Jesus starts there, where they are at again, building common ground just like before.
But it seems as though their picture of Messiah had been limited to a political leader or a military commander able to deliver Israel from the Romans. And as such, though important, they believed the Messiah would be a man like other men, certainly not divine, certainly not in greater status than King David himself. Because he's a descendant of King David. He's down the line.
Jesus uses Psalm 110, which little trivia point for you, is by far the most quoted psalm in all of the New Testament.
Bet you didn't know that. It's a weird one, right? But it's all over the place. He quotes Psalm 110 in order to push back on their flawed perspective. And his logic is simple. David, who would be greater than his descendant by default calls his son his Lord.
Doesn't that imply that this son, this descendant, this naturally less than David as the one who comes after him, is somehow greater than David? In Stannis, he calls his son his Lord. And if that's the case, that the son of David, the promised Messiah, is greater than his own earthly father David, then doesn't the scripture teach us that the Messiah is more than a common man, more than an earthly king, more than just a military deliverer, more than who you think he is? David calls him Lord. How then can he be his son?
And then Jesus just leaves him hanging there.
Thank you for my mic drop, Jesus. You know, what are you doing?
It seems as though Jesus lobs this Messiah question to rattle their set beliefs, as Greg Koukl puts it, to put a rock in their shoe, in the hopes that maybe it will irritate them enough to get them to stop and re examine their own perspective about the Messiah and perhaps, just perhaps, come to see Jesus for who he is. And we don't know if it did that or not.
But for us as readers of the whole story of scripture, we're not left hanging.
We're able to see that there's a whole lot more going on than just an open ended, thought provoking question about the Messiah as David's Son.
And this might surprise you because what we see here flows directly out of the what Jesus just taught us about the resurrection.
What we can see makes us even more convinced resurrectionists.
You see this Psalm 110 quote with the whole sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet is a major, major teaching from the apostles. It's rooted in the Hebrew prophets and it details out exactly what happened to Jesus post resurrection.
After spending 40 full days proving that he was still alive, Jesus ate food and he traveled around and people touched him and talked to him and spent time with them and he was seen by over 500 eyewitnesses. This is not group hallucination. These are not imaginations gone wild. After all of that, Jesus ascended to his Father and get this, as we confess today in the Apostles Creed, sat down at the right hand of his Father, where he reigns now until the day when all his enemies have been defeated become a footstool for his feet, with the last enemy being death itself.
Resurrection, then right hand and the right hand seating is a very dominant theme. It'd be very difficult to overstate how important it is. It's all over the New Testament. Here's just a couple sample quotes from the many I could have chosen. Romans 8:34 who then is the one who condemns no one? Christ Jesus, who died more than that, who was raised to life, is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us from the Hebrews passage we read last week.
The sun is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty in heaven.
When Stephen gave powerful witness to Jesus resurrection before the same religious leadership that had killed Jesus. We're told in Acts 7 that Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
Look, he said, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. And he got stoned to death for that one, but moved on into resurrection life too. Yay for Stephen, greeted by the one who was standing at the right hand of God.
This right hand business is central to the teaching of the New Testament about the risen ascended Jesus.
It tells us where Jesus went after he rose, after he ascended. It tells us where he is now and what he is doing and why Jesus of Nazareth is currently sitting at the right hand of the Father and It's from the throne that the Son and the Father poured out the Holy Spirit on the Church so that we could be empowered as his chosen witnesses. And so that the Father and the Son who are ruling in the heavenly realms are able to be present among us by the Holy Spirit. We are the holy dwelling place of God on earth.
This sitting at the right hand is all about sovereign rule.
It's about the current reign. It's about Jesus, who was humiliated and was crucified and did die, now risen and vindicated by His Father, and as we hear in Philippians, now exalted to the highest place and given the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus, Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Jesus, the Son of David, the promised Messiah, is the risen, reigning Lord seated at the right hand of the Father.
And you know what?
So are we.
Paul points out this magnificent truth when he told us in Ephesians that because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It's by grace you've been faithful.
Then listen to this. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. So what's the point?
As we finish, we serve the God of. Of the living.
We follow a risen Lord who rules, who reigns. And by the Holy Spirit he's given to us. And I know this is a bit of a mystery, and I drop it here at the end of the message, but just hear it.
By the Spirit he's given us. We now occupy two realms at once.
The earthly realm, where we're still under the throes of pain and suffering, and our bodies have yet to die.
And in Christ, we now somehow, by the Spirit, also occupy the heavenly realm. We're seated in Christ beside the Father.
We're with him as he is with us, as he is actively working to bring all things under his feet. And there's coming a day when the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray that God's kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, will actually come true.
Read the end of the book.
And so, as convinced resurrectionists, we don't lose hope.
Things can get very tough.
We don't lose hope because Jesus Rose and we're going to rise too.
And Jesus reigns.
And in him we do too.
And until our full resurrection comes, we are able to live fearlessly by the Holy Spirit, who empowers us to finish the mission of Jesus with confidence, knowing that whatever may come, whatever may come, the risen Jesus already rose.
He's already reigning.
And resurrection.
It's in the bag.
Let's pray.
Jesus, we know that you are seated at the right hand of the Father.
Father, you are making all the enemies of Jesus a footstool for his feet. His enemies are our enemies, the enemy of death and sin, evil and suffering. You are at work to bring all things under Christ, to reconcile all things to him.
And we're excited to be part of what you're doing in the world of bringing freedom and life, bringing the good news of Jesus so that more and more people can discover the truth that you died and Rose for them.
I pray that you would help us by the Holy Spirit to become more convinced resurrectionists and that that would fill us with hope, that would fill us with joy, fill us with a kind of fearlessness for the future, knowing that whatever may happen now because of you, Jesus who has risen and is reigning because of you, we don't need to be afraid.
Fill us, Lord Jesus, with confidence in your resurrection. We pray this in Jesus name.
Amen.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Thanks for listening in today.
We hope you feel encouraged and challenged.
If you know someone who would benefit from what you have heard today, please share this podcast.
For more information or if you have questions, you can connect with us through our website, Erickson Covenant Ca.
You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Erickson Covenant Church.
