Matthew-084

The Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection

Let us continue to study the Word of God, and today, we turn to Matthew 22:23-33. Here we have the Sadducees asking the Lord Jesus a question about the resurrection, and the reason is the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. They were a Jewish party which became a significant political power in Israel, but unlike the Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection, the Sadducees were mostly the aristocrats, as well as the government officials of the Jewish society. They did not believe in the resurrection.

Now the Sadducees had one peculiarity. They based their faith essentially on the first five books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, called the Pentateuch, so that was the supreme document of authority for them. They maintained that since they couldn’t find any explicit teaching on the resurrection in those first five books, they did not believe in it. They put the question in a kind of “trick” manner that if the resurrection were true, impossible situations will arise such as the one that they are about to describe to the Lord Jesus. The Sadducees hoped that by asking a “knock-down” question, they would really silence all opposition. This is the background to this passage, Matthew 22:23-33.

The Lord Jesus states that marriage terminates with death

Here you find the answer by the Lord Jesus was two-fold. First, he talks about whose wife this woman would be. When the seven brothers got to heaven, all of them would be claiming this woman as their wife. Perhaps they will have a real fist fight in heaven and cause a great embarrassment in the heavenly courts, where seven people will be arguing which one will have the right to have her as his wife now because they all have been married to her at some stage or other.

This was part of the Law of Moses that if the eldest brother died leaving no heir, that line of descent would be halted, and there would also be no heir to the lands that he inherited. This was regarded by the Jews as unacceptable. Therefore, the brother would marry the wife of the brother who died, and he would raise children for his brother, and those children would be heirs to his brother. It was the duty of the brother to continue the line of his brother. Then hypothetically, what would happen if the second brother also died without leaving any children to the brother who died before him, and so on to the seventh? This would create a great embarrassing situation in heaven where you would have seven men arguing whose wife she might be.

So the Lord Jesus said, “The state of affairs in heaven is simply that no one gets married to no one, that marriage ends with death. In heaven, you are not someone else’s wife anymore in any kind of a legal sense. Therefore this question simply doesn’t arise.”

To know the Scriptures is to know God’s mind and power

Secondly, the Lord Jesus said in Matthew 22:32, “You say that the Pentateuch is the final authority to you, then let me show you something from the Pentateuch. In Exodus 3:6, when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, he said to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Then the Lord Jesus said in Matthew 22:29, “You are wrong because you under­stand neither the Scriptures nor the power of God”

This is a startling statement because they certainly considered themselves as knowing the Scriptures very well. When the Lord Jesus speaks about “knowing the Scriptures,” he doesn’t mean how many years did you spend in Bible school? You can spend an awful long time in Bible school but not know the Scriptures. It’s hardly surprising that you can have studied theology and not know the Scriptures.

When I was in the Bible institute, someone who graduated from Oxford came to study at the Bible institute. So we all asked him, “Since you graduated from theology at Oxford, what are you doing here at the Bible institute?” He said, “I came to study the Bible. When I studied theology at Oxford, I didn’t know the Bible. Now I want to know the Bible.” But you can spend all the time at a Bible institute and simply not know the Scriptures either. To know about a lot of things the Bible says is a different thing from understanding what it means.

When the Lord Jesus says “know the Scriptures,” it is to understand what it says, not simply to have a lot of knowledge about it. A professor of theology may know a lot about the Bible. He can tell you facts and figures, and the background of this and that, but it doesn’t mean that he knows the Bible. To know the Bible is to know the mind of God. You can study the Bible as literature. In fact, you will find in many bookshops a book that is actually entitled, The Bible As Literature, and you can know the Bible as literature very well. That doesn’t mean that you know the Scriptures, that you understand the spirit of what is being said.

The second thing immediately related to it is the power of God – “You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” Now one important thing in knowing the Scriptures is to know the power of God, and to know the power of God has to do with experiencing his power. A professor of theology may not really know the Scriptures at all because he doesn’t know the power of God. If he doesn’t know the power of God, then his knowledge of Scripture is basically knowing Scripture as literature. The Bible does also contain history and it does contain a “philosophy of religion,” if you like to call it that. It contains all of these things. You can also study it from the point of view of archaeology, linguistics, and philology. And these experts of philology, archaeology, and history, can all claim to know the Bible quite well from their point of view. That is not knowing Scripture. Knowing Scripture is inseparable from knowing God’s power. Knowing God’s power has to do with having a living relationship to God, and when you don’t have this living relationship to God, how can you know his power? If you don’t know his power, neither will you know the Scriptures.

Know the Scriptures by living in a living relationship with God

This means that the best way to study the Scriptures is not in a theological seminary, but in the everyday life of day-to-day circumstances, putting God’s Word into practice. There is nothing wrong with studying something about history and something about archaeology in a seminary, and many of us have done all this, and we came out deeply realizing how ignorant we were of the Scriptures. When I came out, I realized that I was so ignorant of the Word of God! I have studied the linguistics, I have studied the archaeology, I have studied the history, I have studied the philosophy, and I still didn’t know the Word of God. If you ask me where such and such a passage is, I could probably tell you where it is. I knew the Scriptures “externally” pretty well, but I did not understand what was inside it. It was this that caused me agony, and I began to search how to understand the meaning of Scripture by understanding the spirit of it. Then I realized that the way to know his power was to live in a living relationship with God.

For example, in Acts 8:26, God said to Philip, “Go along the road that leads from Jerusalem down to Gaza, the desert road.” Now how can you understand this academically or linguistically? You can’t under­stand the spirit of it at all because unless God has spoken to you, you don’t understand what it means about God speaking to the prophets, about God telling Philip to go here and there to meet someone in the wilderness. You know what the words mean linguistically, you can study the Greek grammar of it, you can study about what eunuchs are like, you can study about what happened to the church in Samaria, but you still don’t understand what it means when God said to Philip, “Go and meet this eunuch.” You have no idea what this means because you have not experienced it.

What does it mean that the Spirit of God came down at Pentecost? You don’t understand what it means by studying the history or the Greek linguistics of this. What does it mean that God’s Spirit came into someone’s life? You have no way to understand this unless you have experienced God’s power coming into your life.

Or what does the resurrection mean? How are you going to expound it from the point of view of history or linguistics and so on and so forth? You can argue about the historicity of the resurrection, and there are many people who do this. But even when you have agreed that the resurrection is historically true, you still don’t understand it, do you? We have not yet entered into the spirit of it. We still don’t understand.

But when God takes you, a spiritually dead person and raises you up to spiritual life, transforming you into a new creature, you are on the way to understanding what resurrection is about, because now you have experienced resurrection to become a new person by God’s power. When you experience that, you understand resurrection better than any professor of theology, who hasn’t experienced the power of God to make a new person out of him, isn’t it? That is easy to see. He knows Greek better than you do, he knows the Bible in terms of externals better than you do, but because he has never experienced God’s power to change him, to raise him up out of spiritual death and enter into spiritual life, he doesn’t understand resurrection. For him, resurrection is something one can argue about on the philosophical level. He can only do that because he hasn’t experienced that. Resurrection then is something that we have to experience within us in order to appreciate what its power is like. Then you can go on to see what it means to be raised physi­cally.

A brother, a medical doctor, told me how God raised a physically dead person through him, through his pleading and intercession! This dead person rose again! Now that brother can tell you what resurrection is. He saw it with his own eyes! As a doctor, he knows when a person is dead. Other people may not know when a person is really dead or not, but he knows. But through praying, pleading with God, he knelt beside this person and wept and pleaded with God. And lo and behold! That person rose from the dead, having been dead for something like an hour! People like that who have experienced God’s power know what resurrection is about. Now that doctor understands resurrection far better than any professor of theology because a professor of theology, sitting in his academic tower, has not experienced it yet.

The Lord Jesus is saying, “You don’t know the Scriptures because you don’t know the power of God.” The Scriptures and the power of God are inseparably bound together. You cannot just study the one and hope to understand it like that. The Word of God has to do with life, and to experience God’s power in our daily life is the path to knowing the Scriptures. The more you walk with God, the better you will know the Scriptures. Many humble people who have walked with God, but who have never been to these academic institutions, know the Word of God better than many a preacher or professor. This is very important. Now I am not saying that it is unimportant to understand archaeology and history and so forth. There is a place for all that, but these things don’t lead you into the full depth of the Word of life until you walk with God.

The other thing we notice when it comes to speaking about the resurrection is the Lord Jesus’ profound insight into the Word of God. So profound is his insight into the Word of God that the exegete often has great problems in expounding the teaching of the Lord Jesus. The teaching of the Lord Jesus is not easy to expound until you can enter into the way the Lord Jesus thinks, because he understands his God and Father’s mind. I find that I understand God’s Word better as I learn to walk closer to him. That is the way to understand God’s Word better.

Does “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” prove resurrection?

We will concentrate on verse 32 today. Notice these words in verse 31:

The Lord Jesus says to the Sadducees, “These words of the Lord God in the very book of authority to you, the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, are addressed as much to you as to Moses.”

In the burning bush, God appeared to Moses and said, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” There is the resurrection in those very words! I am sure you have looked at it many times and wondered, “Where is the resurrection in that? I don’t see it.” He simply said, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” You can see then that sometimes, there is a depth in Scripture that we simply fail to see. We look at it back and forth, and we simply don’t see any resurrection in there. And yet, the Lord Jesus even without explaining himself says to the Sadducees, “Don’t you see that there’s the resurrection in what God said?” I wonder if the Sadducees saw it.

Now how are we going to understand this statement? This has often challenged my heart, and I would say it is one of the more difficult passages of the Lord Jesus’ teaching to understand and to expound. We have great difficulty in seeing this because of our spiritual blindness. What exactly is being expounded here?

The Early Church’s explanation: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob are still alive

Already way back in the Early Church, it was explained in this way: “I am the God of Abraham” and so, the stress is in the words, “I am the God of Abraham…” not “I was the God of Abraham…” If they have died, one would presume that God would have said, “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Therefore, “I am” indicates that they too are still alive. This exegesis was already used in the Early Church, but it is really not satisfactory for two reasons.

First, the Hebrew does not have the word “am.” In the Hebrew, it is “I, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” You can have that in Hebrew but you can’t have a sentence without a verb in Greek, which is rather like in English. So the Greek New Testament, the Septuagint does translate “I am,” present tense. Clearly, you have to translate a verb in there, and the Septuagint may be justified into translating it with a present tense. That is a translation. The Hebrew which is the original does not have it.

Secondly, the reasoning itself is faulty if you argue in this way. To say that “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” proves thereby that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive really does not follow, does it? I can say, “I am the father of X, Y and Z,” and the statement would not be wrong even if X, Y and Z are not alive. I am their father even if they are dead. I don’t have to say, “I was their father.” Have you stopped becoming their father in the mean time? “I am the father of X, Y and Z” only proves that I am alive; it doesn’t prove they are alive. So the statement, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” would prove that God is alive. It does not logically prove that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive, does it? So the argument doesn’t work that way. Too many exegeses are simply rather faulty because of faulty reasoning. We think we have proved a point when we haven’t really proved anything at all.

If we cannot work with “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” then where is the resurrection to be seen? How do we approach this? This is precisely where the problem is and this passage has given the commentators no end of headaches seeing that they cannot come up with really much explanation of it.

Why believe in God if the godly and ungodly both die?

Let us approach it from another way. Supposing we read the statement for a moment as “I was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” what would that leave us with? And so God says, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” and the sentence would then mean “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when they were once alive. I am the God that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob once knew.” That is more or less the sentence we would prefer.

Now that kind of statement would bring a stinging rejoinder like this: If that is the case, what good did knowing God do Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? “You are telling me that you are the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when they are all dead and buried, so what good is it to have had you as God?” If we could put it like this, reasoning rather irreverently, nevertheless we pursue the truth of the matter. If believing in God ends in death just as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did, what difference does it make whether you believe in God or not? That is the crucial question that we are coming to now. If the godly perish just as the ungodly do, then there is no point in believing in God, is there?

Would it mean that believing in God simply makes life a little bit easier? Well it doesn’t, does it? I don’t think being a Christian is an easier life than being a non-Christian. In the Old Testament too, it has never been an argument that being a Christian means that life is easier than being a non-Christian, because you only need read the Psalms to see that the godly are constantly persecuted by the un­godly, that the righteous are constantly under affliction and distress in this life. The righteous don’t have it any easier in this life than the unrighteous. In fact, too often, and it is also seen in the Psalms, the ungodly seem to have a better existence. They seem to get away with everything while the godly are constantly made to suffer. So what is the point in believing in God? The Lord Jesus said in Matthew 5:45 that the Father in heaven makes his sun rise on the evil and sends rain to the unjust, and he sends exactly the same to the believer in terms of well-being. What advantage is there in believing in God?

And so the point comes back to this, when God says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob,” what exactly is he saying? All that he has said is simply, “God is the God of several dead men.” And what is the point of my knowing that? Or you can say God is the God of several righteous men but they are all dead and buried anyway. It leads you to the problem that believing in God becomes optional, therefore the statement is left hanging in the air with no particular meaning.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob looked to God to fulfill his promises to them in the heavenly country

What is more is that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did not inherit the promises that God gave to them. So they ended up precisely with nothing! We read this in Hebrews 11:13,

Abraham (v. 13), also Isaac and Jacob (v. 9), died without getting their promises because they were seeking promises beyond this life.

Verses 8-10 read:

Then verses 14-16:

They did not look for earthly promises. They looked to God to give them their promises in the heavenly country. They were sojourners and foreigners on this earth. They had left behind the earthly inheritance, so they had no inheritance in this world. They did not own any piece of land in “the Land of Promise,” as the Israelites later called it. Abraham owned nothing except one piece of ground where Sarah was buried in the Promised Land. He had nowhere to bury his wife, Sarah, so he asked if he could buy just one small plot of land to bury his wife. He did not want more than that. He had no other land that he could call his own. Therefore what did he get out of following God? He left his own country, went somewhere else as a sojourner, and received no Promised Land. But he looked for the heavenly city, namely, the New Jerusalem.

Sadducees must choose: God is God of the dead or God of the living

Now if God is the God of Abraham, and if Abraham did not get any kind of inheritance, what is the point of saying, “Abraham’s God” is revealing himself to Moses? What is Abraham’s advantage of having God as his God? What did Abraham get out of being in covenant with God? You can say all he got was death; he died too, like everyone else. And that was the end of it. Therefore at some considerable time later, for God to stand in front of Moses to say, “I am the God of Abraham” when Abraham is no more, is a meaningless statement. Can you see any point in it?

The understanding of the Lord Jesus’ words hinges on one important reasoning: What did God proclaim to Moses and to Israel as a whole when he said, “I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob”? The reason becomes apparent once you see it. Simply put, either Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive or they are dead. There are only two possibilities, so take your choice.

The Lord Jesus is saying, “According to you, Sadducees, they are dead. If they are dead, then what God proclaimed is this: “I am the God of dead Abraham, the God of dead Isaac, and the God of dead Jacob.” God proclaimed himself to be God of the dead. Is that what God said? Is that the God you believe in?” You begin to see the insight, the depth of the Lord Jesus’ words.

If God is God of the dead, is he unwilling or unable to raise the dead?

We can take it still further and see what the Lord Jesus is saying: “If you, Sadducees, believe in the God of the dead, seeing that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are dead, then let me put it to you like this: Either God is unwilling or God is unable to raise up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You have only two choices. You think that by telling me there will be an embarrassing situation in heaven as to whose wife this woman who married seven brothers will be, let me tell you your position is an awful lot worse because you believe in the God of the dead. And if God is God of dead people, there are only two possible reasons; there isn’t a third alternative. It’s either he is unwilling to raise them up, or he is unable to raise them up. And either of these choices will leave you in a hopeless position.”

If God is unwilling to raise up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then he is neither the God of compassion, nor is he the God of justice. What kind of God is this who enters into covenant with the ones he loves, and simply loses them in death? Do you call that compassion? And he is not the God of justice because it’s simply unjust that the godly and the ungodly receive exactly the same end. Therefore, there is no point in being godly since their end is exactly the same as the ungodly.

This is precisely where the ungodly hope to triumph: “If you believe in God, that’s fine, but your end is going to be the same as mine: We all go six feet under. You will have a little tombstone, but my tombstone might even look a little nicer than yours because I’ve been able to save more money in my time, so I’m able to afford a nicer tombstone. As for you, who are so honest and paying all your income tax, returning the excess change people give you, you are simply nutty! No wonder you deserve to have a worse tombstone than me! I will also have a nice, big piece of land, and even have a gardener to grow nice flowers, but you can’t afford it.” So the ungodly ends up being better off than the godly. So what is the point to believe in God? Either God is unwilling to raise Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—treating the godly and ungodly alike, so he is neither the God of compassion nor of justice—or he is unable.

God is just, merciful, willing and has the power to raise the dead

What do the Scriptures say? The Scriptures tell us that God is compassionate and just. Therefore if you know the Scriptures, you have to rule out that possibility that God is unwilling to raise up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That leaves us only one alternative: He is unable to raise Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is so compassionate and just; he would like to treat the godly and the ungodly differently, but he hasn’t got the power.

That is where the Lord Jesus says, “You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” He said to the Sadducees, “If you knew the Scriptures which tell us that God is compassionate and just, you would not have accused God of being unwilling to raise the godly. And if you knew his power, you would not have said he is unable to raise the dead because that is to say God is not the Almighty, for he cannot overcome death, he cannot raise the dead.

Now you can see the significance of the resurrection of Christ. It is to show that God is just and merciful as well as all-powerful, that he is willing and able to raise the dead.

There is within the words of the Lord Jesus an intricacy and a depth of insight that he states so plainly and walks away. If you don’t have the insight to see what he means you are stuck. What is he saying? Now you begin to see that these words mean as the Lord Jesus explains: Either God is the God of the dead or he is God of the living. Therefore he concludes the statement with these words: “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” Do you see the beauty? The Lord Jesus gives the key of what he says simply in those words. You have to make a choice: Either God is the God of the dead, or he is the God of the living. And he is the God of the living, who is both willing and able to raise those who trust in him namely, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Can you see the resurrection in there? Now it becomes clear. There are only two ways in which you can take the Scripture, and according to your faith, you will take one or the other. The Sadducees believed in a God who is God of the dead, since they believed Abraham and the others to be dead in a permanent sense, there being no resurrection. But the Lord Jesus points out if that is the case, there is no point in believing in God at all.

This is exactly as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “If there is no resurrection, if death is final, then we, servants of God are of all men most miserable. What did we endure all that suffering for? What did we turn our backs upon the world for? For nothing, because it all ends finally in death! Everything is finished!” So Paul quotes Isaiah 22:13 in 1Corinthians 15:32, “Let us rather eat and drink and be merry.” Let’s enjoy ourselves in the world in sin to maximum capacity. Let’s sing and dance! Let’s visit the prostitutes! Let’s play our lives away! At least we will die happy! (Maybe!) Let’s enjoy as much as you can, and not be like these Christians. There’s all this good food and they don’t eat it because they are fasting and getting thinner; wearing out their trouser legs in praying; walking to church as they spend their money on buying Bibles; and believing in God who is the God of the dead! Who wants to read this kind of stuff? Why end up with glasses on your face from reading the small print in the Bible? The whole thing is meaningless! That is what Paul is saying, “If there is no resurrection, we are utter fools!” And so by implication, the Sadducees are fools to believe in the God of the dead. What do you want to believe in him for? You can buy materials and build houses for the people instead of a big temple for the God who is God of the dead.

Godly and wicked are accountable to God of the resurrection, God of the living

You have to make that choice today. What is your God like? Is your God the God of the Sadducees? Or is your God the God of the Lord Jesus? Is your God the God of the dead, or is your God the God of the living? Which is yours?

Frankly, I have said many times to people who are Christians, either God is real, so you walk with him and serve him, or God is not real, then pack it up! Forget the whole business! Don’t go to church anymore. It’s useless to use religion as an opiate to give yourself some comfort which is pure hallucination, because if God is God of the dead, what comfort can you get in the end? It’s an absolute waste of time! This kind of religion is not worth the effort or the time! It’s a pointless thing! All you get is guilt complexes. Every time you sin, you feel so guilty. When the person who has no conscience sins, he is still smiling and happy! He says, “I stole money and I am richer now!” “I don’t like this guy, I’ll just pay some gangster a few hundred bucks to bump him off in the middle of the night, and get peace of mind. I don’t have to see that guy again. That is really marvelous!” You don’t have to let your conscience bother you with these endless guilt complexes which are wearing your life out. Sin and enjoy it! Eat and drink for tomorrow we die! What does it matter?

Therefore if there is no resurrection, you and I are the biggest fools. We shouldn’t be sitting in church wasting everyone’s time. Look at the nice sunshine! Go for a walk in the park. Get the fresh air and vitamin D from the sunshine. You may be thinking: “This long-winded fellow rambles on for one whole hour getting me utterly exhausted! I have worked the whole week and now I have to listen to him for one whole hour!” Clearly, we are fools if there is no resurrection! You have to get this very straight in your own mind: Is God the God of the dead or the living? Because if he is God of the dead, even if he exists, it really doesn’t matter one way or the other. We don’t have to be atheists; we can say, “Sure, God lives,” just like the Sadducees. “There is a God, indeed there is. That still classifies me as a religious person because I believe in God. But he is God of the dead so it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

Or this is the other alternative. God is the God of the living. And because he is God of the living, we must face him. The Scripture says that indeed, he will raise not only the believers, but even the unbe­lievers will be raised to face the Judgment. That is the Scriptural teaching. Every man will die but every man will be raised up to face the Judgment of God. There is no escape from his judgment.

In fact, in the parallel passage in Luke, the same concluding statement is made in Luke 20:38,

What does “for all live to him” mean? The statement here in the dative case put in a nutshell summarizes the fact that all the issues of life are in God’s hands. Your life is in God’s hands. You will live or die not because death is too powerful for God to handle. Not at all! Life and death are in God’s hands. He justly raises and will justly put to death.

This is what the Lord Jesus said to the disciples in Matthew 10:28,

Don’t be afraid of people, for they cannot do any more than kill you physically. God is the One who holds all the issues in his hands. Life is not in the hands of death but in the hands of God. He is the One who determines who lives and who dies. All live accountable to him – “all live to him.” So the Scripture tells us that even the wicked, even the gangsters, even the Mafia bosses will not get away with what they do because even the wicked will be raised to answer for their actions.

We read in the Revelation that there are two resurrections: the first resurrection and the second resurrection. You will read about the first resurrection Revelation 20:4-6, and the second resurrection in Revelation 20:11-13 when God will raise all these people, great and small, to answer before him, because we all live accountable to him. God is not only going to raise the righteous, but he will also raise the wicked because the wicked will not get away with their actions. This is so important to understand. He is the God of the resurrection! He is the One who holds all the issues of life in his hands. I hope by now you have begun to understand what the Lord Jesus is saying in here that God is the God of the living.

Eternal life: Obey God’s commands by his power; be spiritually alive

Furthermore, we must understand another principle in Scripture: To know God is eternal life. To know God, to have eternal life means to be in a covenant relationship with God as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were. That is a basic principle in Scripture.

Do you remember when the rich, young ruler asked the Lord Jesus, “How do I enter life?” What was the Lord Jesus’ answer to him? “You know the commandments. Do them and you shall live.” Now the commandments of the Pentateuch are the commandments of life. Those who live by God’s grace and power, by his Holy Spirit, can live in his Word, and there will be life. We cannot do it in our own strength.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were people who lived according to God’s Word. They lived as in Deuteronomy 8:3b,

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who lived according to God’s words, knew God, therefore, they will live, because to know God is eternal life. The apostle John says in John 17:3,

Faith knows nothing in life or death can separate oneself from God

As we close, let us consider this: Death indeed will separate us from our loved ones very decisively, but death cannot separate God and man. The moment the Christian dies, he goes to be with God. Death has not been able to separate him from God for one split second. Isn’t that marvelous? The apostle Paul says it beautifully in Romans 8:38-39:

Here is a fundamental principle. Death cannot separate God and the man who stands in that covenant relationship to God, as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did. Neither can “life”, that is, nothing in life, no matter what happens, can separate God from us. There is nothing that can come between you and him, and tear you away from him against your wish.

I hope that by now we fully and clearly understand the teaching of the Lord Jesus, and also learn how to penetrate more deeply into the Word of God. I confess that as a young Christian, I looked at this verse and I could not see how these words could prove the resurrection. Indeed, some scholars go so far as to suggest that the Lord Jesus uses a rabbinical kind of argument for the resurrection. Clearly, by saying that, they show that they don’t understand what the Lord Jesus is saying. Once you understand what the Lord Jesus is saying, the meaning is so profound that there isn’t even another alternative you can turn to. We only have two choices: Either God is God of the living or he is God of the dead. The man of faith knows the power of God. He knows that God is the God of the living!

Blessed are you, if like the apostle Paul, you can say,

I have entrusted myself to him and I know that he will raise my physical body at the last day. More than that, even at the moment of death, I shall enter into his presence immediately. Death will not be able to separate me from him for so much as a split second because I know he is the living God. May you know him too on this resur­rection day, Easter!

Let us be quiet before God in prayer.