Three Mistakes of the Sadducees

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When I was a kid, my parents thought it was kind of weird. My sister and I liked going to cafeterias, which people sort of associate with old people. But we liked it because you could go and pick out exactly what food you liked.

When I was a kid, Burger King was first becoming kind of a big thing in the Oklahoma City area. I think they’d had them before. But other than Burger King, everything else was you take it the way it comes and you like it or you don’t eat.

You know, kind of like eating at home. you have two choices eat it or starve but at burger king you wanted extra pickles you could get it that way you wanted no onions you could get it that way and and we liked being able to pick and choose what we wanted to eat and and that now you can do that everywhere even mcdonald’s will let you customize your food assuming you get the right order they’ll let you customize and now a lot of places have apps where you can order from and I love that because I don’t have to stand there and annoying a human as I tell them all the specific things I want. When it comes to food, it is great to be able to pick and choose, but it can be a dangerous thing when it comes to anything related to theology, to try to pick and choose what best suits us.

The Sadducees are a group of people that we don’t talk about as much from the life of Christ as we do the Pharisees, because the Pharisees got in there and tried to mix it up with Jesus far more often than the Sadducees did. But the Sadducees were, they were around. They were kind of like the, if you’ve ever watched Shark Week, and they’ve always got those sharks that are out there on the edge swimming just out of eye shot, where they’re keeping an eye on everything, but you don’t really know they’re there.

The Sadducees were a lot like that. They were on the periphery around where Jesus was ministering, and they were always watching, and every once in a while they would come in close and try to try to take a nibble. One of the things that the Sadducees did was to try to pick and choose what parts of scripture they could believe and which parts of scripture they were willing to follow.

They practiced a kind of cafeteria religion where this part suits me, this part doesn’t, so we’re going to do this and we’re going to ignore that part. And where we’ve come to in our study of Mark, in Mark chapter 12, starting in verse 18, the Sadducees come in and try to confront Jesus, they try to trap Jesus with some of what he teaches and how they think it doesn’t make sense. And so they’re going to confront him and Jesus shuts them down.

That’s what we’re going to look at this morning. And some of the mistakes, three mistakes, as a matter of fact, Sadducees made in their teaching and in their dealing with Jesus. So if you would turn with me to Mark chapter 12, starting in verse 18, Mark chapter 12, it’ll be on the screen for you if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Mark chapter 12.

And if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to look at verses 17 through 27 this morning. It says, Then some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him, and they asked him, saying, Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves his wife behind and leaves no children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother. Now, there were seven brothers.

What they’re doing here is they’re They’re taking a passage from Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy if memory serves, and they are applying a hypothetical situation. So what do we do with this teaching in Deuteronomy if this is the case? So here’s the hypothetical. Now there were seven brothers.

The first took a wife and dying he left no offspring. And the second took her and he died, nor did he leave any offspring. And the third likewise.

So the seven had her and left no offspring. Last of all, the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be?

For all seven had her as a wife. Jesus answered and said to them, Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

But concerning the dead that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses in the burning bush passage how God spoke to him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken.

And you may be seated. So he points out that they made some mistakes here. This hypothetical situation they’re talking about, there was an Old Testament law that said because bloodline and lineage and inheritance were so important to the nation of Israel, that if a man died without having a child, that the next brother in line was supposed to marry the widow and bear children on his behalf.

So the Sadducees set up this hypothetical situation where one brother dies without children, and so the second marries the wife, the second brother dies without children, and on and on and on until all seven have married this woman, and then they die, and their question is, so who’s she married to in the resurrection? Because they think they’re going to trap Jesus. What they’re trying to do is prove that resurrections don’t happen.

And what we’re talking about here today is not the resurrection of Jesus. We’re talking about the resurrection of all the dead at the last day. They’re trying to demonstrate, because it’s not even on their radar yet, that Jesus is going to rise from the dead.

They’re trying to demonstrate that nobody rises from the dead, and Jesus is going to demonstrate where they are mistaken. And so there are three mistakes that they make in this passage. Three things that the Sadducees get wrong that sometimes we get wrong today too.

So we need to learn from the Sadducees’ mistakes as we try to serve God and obey Him. The first place where they went wrong is that the Scripture doesn’t bend to what we want to be true. Are we all pretty well agreed on that as a church?

The Scriptures don’t bend to what we want to be true. There are things that I wish were true that the Scripture says it’s not that way. But there were numerous concepts that were taught in Old Testament Scripture that the Sadducees rejected.

Now, some of the things that they rejected, this included the existence of spiritual beings. So they said there are no angels, there are no demons. They said there’s no such thing as an afterlife.

They said there’s no such thing as any kind of resurrection from the dead. What the Sadducees had done was they had stripped out most of the supernatural elements of their religion. They had taken the Jewish religion to the point of just being a list of rules like an ethical system, like Confucius taught in China.

It was a list of rules and it was a way to honor God, but there’s really nothing beyond the material world. It’s not a perfect analogy, but one of the ways that I’ve always understood the Pharisees and Sadducees is that if we were looking at somebody’s theology today, the Pharisees would be legalists and the Sadducees would be liberals. If you go to a church that strips out the virgin birth, strips out the authority of Scripture, strips out the resurrection, strips out all these vitally important aspects of our faith and still tries to call it Christianity.

That’s what the Sadducees were doing with Judaism. If you go to a church that says, in addition to the gospel, we’ve got all these rules and you have to do this, you have to dress this way, you have to read these books, and you have to check all these boxes, that’s what the Pharisees were doing. And both of these are dangerous.

Both of these are incredibly dangerous. The Sadducees rejected these ideas, and because they rejected these ideas, they rejected massive chunks of Scripture. The writings, when we’re talking about Scripture here, they had the Old Testament.

The parts of the Old Testament that we call the wisdom literature or the writings, things like Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, some of the historical books, they rejected those. The prophets, most of the end of the Old Testament, the prophets that had been sent by the Lord to speak to Israel, to draw them back to Him, they rejected the prophets as well. They looked at Scripture and said, we’re just going to stick to the five books of Moses.

And part of that was because the things they didn’t like weren’t as prominent in the five books of Moses. It’s not to say they’re not there, but there’s not as much discussion of the afterlife in the five books of Moses as there is in, say, the wisdom literature and the prophets. And so they’re saying these books of Scripture teach things we don’t like.

We’re just not going to recognize them. Well, that’s a problem. This has gone on throughout history.

One of the reasons they came up with a set list of books to be in the Bible had nothing to do with Constantine, had nothing to do with the Council of Nicaea, as Dan Brown and some popular books and movies will tell us, had everything to do with a man named Marcion who came in the 140s or so and said, you know what? This Bible’s too Jewish, and I don’t like this Old Testament God, and I don’t like these references, So he took a knife to his Bible and cut it down to basically a few of Paul’s letters and a heavily redacted portion of the Gospel of Luke. And the church looked at that and said, you can’t just get rid of parts of the Bible you don’t like.

And so they had some very serious discussions about what belonged in there and what didn’t. But this is what they’re doing. They’re saying, we don’t like what these parts of the Old Testament Scriptures teach, so we’re just going to get rid of them.

They only accepted the authority of the law. So if Scripture didn’t say what they wanted, then those Scriptures had to go. That is entirely backwards.

And it’s not just true of the world out there, it’s true of us today. If there’s something that I believe, and the Scriptures contradict what I want to believe, then it’s not the Scriptures that need to change, it’s Jared, right? The Scriptures speak with God’s authority, not me.

But here’s the thing we need to understand. even the Scriptures that they accepted taught some of the things that they denied. Jesus said that in verse 24, they were mistaken.

That word doesn’t just mean, oh, it was an honest mistake. It means they were deceived. They had been lied to.

They were propagating a deception. He said, because you do not know the Scriptures. And that’s where things always go awry is when we don’t know God’s Word.

I submit to you in Genesis 3, that’s the reason the serpent was able to trick Eve. He was able to come in and say, has God said? And Eve’s response was not what God had said.

I don’t know that we blame Eve for that, because God said it to Adam. It’s possible, I don’t want to get into all that today. But her response indicated she was not familiar with what God actually said.

And they were in the same situation. Jesus said, you do not know the Scriptures. Even the Scriptures that you hold on to and that you emphasize, you don’t know those.

In verse 26, he says, concerning the dead that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses? in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. So Jesus is taking them back to the book of Exodus.

I believe that’s chapter three here. And he’s pointing out that God did not announce himself to Moses and say, I was the God of Abraham. I was the God of Jacob.

I was the God of Isaac. I got those out of order, but he’s not saying I am the God of those who have passed on before. He says, I am the God of Abraham.

I am the God of Isaac. I am the God of Jacob. Not only is God in the present tense, but God is speaking of them as they are in the present tense.

Pointing to Jesus’s point in verse 27, they were alive somewhere. They had not simply ceased to exist. They were somewhere. Jesus said in verse 27, he is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.

And there are other places in the scripture that point to this idea. But God very much speaks of himself in the present tense and those who served him in the present tense. And God is not just the God of people who were in the past. He’s the God of those people today.

They didn’t like it, and so they tried to cut it out of the other scriptures, and yet there it still was in the book of Exodus. A hint, is that a black and white teaching that says, hey, there’s an afterlife? No, but it points in that direction.

And that’s the case Jesus is trying to make here. You don’t even know the scriptures. You’re so busy trying to cut the truth out of the scriptures that you don’t even understand what they still are saying.

So we should learn from this that we must not twist the scriptures to reflect what we believe. Instead, we must transform what we believe to reflect the scriptures. And it’s so easy to do.

It’s so easy to do, even honestly, to come to the scriptures with our preconceived ideas of what we think it ought to mean, or look at it through our modern western lens, or heaven forbid the question that I dread in any Bible study, what does this passage mean to you? I’ve asked that. And then I learned somewhere along the way, it doesn’t matter what it means to me.

It matters what it means. Now, when we’re talking about application and what we do with it, it matters what it means to my life, how I apply it. But these scriptures weren’t written for us to just take whatever we want from them.

They mean something. And so if I’m coming in with ideas and trying to twist the scriptures to fit what I want them to say, that’s a mistake. That does not lead anywhere good.

That’s where every cult and every heresy in history ever got started, was coming in with an idea and saying, I think it ought to say this. I think this is what it means. Now, how can I make it say that?

And so we’ve got to be careful about that. It’s easy to put that on the world outside. It’s easy to put that on churches that don’t think the way that we do.

But at the same time, we need to be careful about it ourselves. And we need to come to God’s word saying, what does this mean? What point was God trying to make?

And what, if anything, do I need to change in light of what God’s Word says? The second mistake that they made was that God’s power isn’t restricted by what we can explain. You see, their big objection here is that they don’t understand how a resurrection would work, so they reject it.

That’s their argument. Now, they’d already decided they didn’t like the idea of a resurrection. They didn’t believe it.

They didn’t support it. But their argument when they come to Jesus is, we can’t explain how this would work, therefore it’s not true. Now, we might try to make that argument sometimes when it comes to God, but it doesn’t work.

They present this hypothetical situation in verses 18 through 23 that they assume Jesus can’t answer about the woman who was married seven times, and all the husbands died, she died. They get to the resurrection. The Sadducees are saying the alleged resurrection, the hypothetical resurrection, and everybody comes back to life.

Well, who is she married to then? Because nobody has a unique claim to be her husband. And so they say, because of that, a resurrection can’t happen.

One thing doesn’t follow from the other. Now the Pharisees, their answer was the first husband. The first husband has the prior claims, so he’s her husband in the resurrection.

And the Sadducees would say, but wasn’t she married to all of them? So why him? Why?

Just because he was first? This is like dibs? And so they’re looking to see if Jesus is going to side with the Pharisees on this.

Because there were certain debates between the Pharisees and Sadducees where Jesus actually was closer to the Pharisees. At times, Jesus points out they’re not entirely wrong. Like when we discussed the debate they were having on marriage and the grounds for divorce.

He kind of sided with the Pharisees on that one. But they’re looking to see, is he going to fall into the same trap that the Pharisees do? And so they asked, why is this first man’s claim any greater than any of the others?

But don’t lose sight of the argument they’re making here. They’re making the argument that the truth of a concept is determined by our ability to explain it. That doesn’t work anywhere.

As a matter of fact, the only place we try that argument is in theology. We don’t apply that to any other aspect of life. I cannot explain to you.

I mean, I have a basic grasp of it, but I cannot explain to you the intricate details of how the internal combustion engine works or why it works. So I guess I’m walking home today, right? No, nobody says I can’t explain to you how that engine works so cars don’t exist?

Nobody does that, right? I really don’t understand how a series of ones and zeros and this pulsing light that moves faster than our eyes can register it, how that does all the things that our computers do. It all basically comes down to a series of ones and zeros.

I can’t explain to you how that computer knows what those ones and zeros mean. Does that mean computers don’t exist? Do we have to be able to explain something in order for it to work?

There were so many instances through the time Jojo was having heart surgery that we couldn’t explain why this worked or how or what. So I guess her heart just quit beating, right? We don’t look at anything.

We say, that’s amazing. And I may not understand how it works, but thank God it works, right? We don’t live in that world except in theology.

People try to apply it to theology all the time. Well, I just don’t understand how God can be three persons and one God. So the Trinity can’t be true.

Well, no, I don’t have to explain it. I don’t have to be able to explain it. I just know that that’s what he teaches.

And if it comes to what God says about himself versus what finite little me can explain of an infinite God, I’m going to rely on what he said about it. But that’s just me. We don’t try this anywhere but with God.

But if it doesn’t work anywhere else, if the truth of any other concept cannot be determined by what we are able to explain, why with God? Why would we look at it and say, Well, I don’t possibly see how a resurrection could happen. I don’t see how it’s possible to work out all these little logistical details in connection with the resurrection.

Therefore, it’s impossible. And yet people do it today. Well, there’s this unanswered question about the resurrection of Jesus.

So it can’t be true. No, no, I’m sorry. We’re going to negate this mountain of evidence over here because you have an unanswered question.

Again, we don’t do that anywhere else. That’s what they were trying to do with Jesus. I’m going to get off my soapbox about this.

We’ll get to some of that when we get to the resurrection part. So Jesus points out that God does not simply work within the realm of what they can explain. And thank goodness that’s true because we’ve all had experiences in our life that we can’t explain how God did it.

We can’t explain the timing that it happened in, but we’re just thankful that he did what he said. And he said again that they were mistaken, they were deceived because they do not know the power of God. These people who were supposedly religious leaders, a lot of the Sadducees were the leaders in the temple.

They were supposed to be the ones that knew God and walked with God, but they were clueless about the power of God because they had already decided God was limited by what they could explain. For all the things I’ve learned in life, I’m not that smart compared to God. And I am very thankful that I do not serve a God who is limited by what I can explain.

Jesus makes the case here that God is going to create something new. God is going to do something different. God is not bound by their multiple choice options that they’ve given here.

God is doing something that is not even on their test. he says in verse 25 when they rise from the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven because there’s going to come a time in the resurrection when there’s no longer a need for marriage there’s no longer a need for procreation there’s no longer a need for all of these things and we can discuss the the ins and outs of of heaven so I get a lot of questions about that I got questions about that in the truck the other day and I finally had to tell madeline baby there’s a lot about heaven I don’t know I just know jesus is there so I want to go. All right. I can, I can research.

I was tired. It was the end of the day. I can research the answers to your questions, but bottom line, a lot of it’s just speculation.

All I know is Jesus. All I really know is Jesus is going to be there. And that’s enough.

That’s where I want to go. But there’s not going to be a need for those things in heaven. So he says, it’s going to be completely different.

And so they were trying to limit God to just what they could explain and what they thought was going to happen. And Jesus is saying, you don’t know the power of God. He’s so much bigger than that.

It’s going to be totally different in the resurrection. So what you and I take from that is we need to resist the urge to doubt what God says just because we can’t explain how he’s going to carry it out. And we do this with God all the time.

God, I don’t understand how this health situation is going to work out. God, I don’t understand how these financial numbers are going to add up. God, I don’t understand how you’re going to do this or that.

And so often we just conclude that a situation is hopeless rather than realizing that God is not limited by what we can explain. And thankfully he’s not. And the last thing that we need to understand, the last mistake the Pharisees made, I’m sorry, Sadducees, not the last mistake they ever made, but the last mistake we’re going to cover in this text, is that our hope is not limited to this present life.

You see, their view of the world, as I’ve already said, eliminated most of the supernatural elements taught in Scripture. They believed in God, but there’s almost like a deistic view of God that He’s like the watchmaker who makes the watch and winds it up and then steps back and lets it run and doesn’t do much. They had stripped out most of the supernatural elements taught in Scripture.

They’d gotten rid of the spirits, the spiritual world. They’d gotten rid of the afterlife. They’d gotten rid of the resurrection.

They’d gotten rid of most of the incredible stuff that God does. Anything that they would look at and say, we’re so intellectual that we just can’t believe those things they’d gotten rid of. And they had reduced God’s word into a system that they were supposed to follow, or rules to check off, so that they could have the best life they could here and now.

And so Jesus says in verse 28, you are greatly mistaken. There’s that word mistaken again, deceived. But this time he says they are greatly mistaken.

You’re not just mistaken, you are spectacularly mistaken. You just won the gold in the Olympics of being mistaken. Because Jesus taught there was something far beyond just this life.

And that our hope does not simply rest on the thought that things might improve here. And a lot of people will dismiss that and say, well, it’s pie in the sky. It’s something that’s promised later on that we have no proof of, we have no evidence of.

But again, as I tell you all the time, when somebody dies and comes back from the dead. I’m going to listen to what that guy says. And if he told us he went to prepare a place for us, I believe him.

Do I have the blueprints? I do not. I was not consulted.

I’m not on the planning committee for this. Can I answer every aspect of what that’s going to look like? I cannot.

Can I tell you the timing that all of it’s going to take place in? I cannot. Neither can anybody else.

The next time somebody pops up and says, oh, it’s going to be such and such date, they don’t know. Okay? They don’t know.

I don’t know. They don’t know. All God’s children don’t know.

but from this one who conquered death from this one who spoke with this authority that they’d never seen from this one who did supernatural things that they could not replicate and could not explain he told us that he conquered death for us he told us that his very reason for coming here was to seek and to save that which was lost it was not simply to make a better life here for us on earth it was not simply to make us healthy wealthy and wise here on earth but it was to reconcile us to a holy god It was to give us a relationship with a holy God that not only sees us through our best days and worst days here and comforts us and guides us through all of that, but a relationship with a holy God that lasts into eternity, that draws us into his presence so that there is hope beyond the grave.

And we know there’s hope beyond the grave because Jesus demonstrated it, because he was in the grave for three days and then he rose again just like he said he would. So the ultimate refutation, The ultimate disproval of what the Sadducees believed is that Jesus died on the cross. He was absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, dead.

He was placed into a tomb. Three days later, that tomb was empty, and he was seen walking around Jerusalem by hundreds of people that are recorded in four different eyewitness accounts, plus the historical records of other writers who didn’t even believe in him. We have ample evidence that Jesus Christ conquered death, and that tells us that our hope is not limited just to the idea that things might get marginally better here on earth.

Because even when life gets better here on earth, doesn’t it kind of stink sometimes still? He came to bring us something more. He came to bring us eternal life and a resurrection so that we might live with the Father.

And that’s the ultimate mistake that the Sadducees made that we have to avoid, is thinking that all there is is what we see in front of us, and that our hope is limited to just the idea that things might get better here. Our hope is built solidly on the foundation that the one who defeated death for us promised that we would go to be where he is with his father. And if you’ve never trusted Christ as your savior, that is how we have this relationship with the father.

Jesus Christ is how we have this relationship with the father, how we have this assurance of eternal life, simply by recognizing that we have sinned against a holy God and that our sin has separated us from him. Every time we’ve disobeyed God, it has been to put God at arm’s length. And the only thing that you and I can never do anything to undo the wrong that we’ve done, the only thing that will ever make us right with God is the fact that Jesus Christ came and took responsibility for our sins, shed His blood on the cross and died to pay for those sins in full and rose again three days later to prove that He could forgive our sins and to prove that He had conquered death.

All we have to do is believe that He did that for us and ask God’s forgiveness on that basis.