“Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife does she become? For all seven had her as wife.”
— Luke 20:33 (NKJV)
This question comes at the conclusion of a hypothetical scenario the Sadducees present to Jesus. They describe a man with six brothers who marries a woman and dies childless. According to the law, each brother in turn takes her as his wife, yet all die without leaving offspring. The scenario is not offered to understand the law, but to challenge the belief in the resurrection.
As previously observed, the Sadducees miss the picture of God’s grace that is embedded within the law itself. They overlook the divine care and provision the law was designed to express for God’s people. What they treat as a logical problem was given as a means of preserving a brother’s name and inheritance within Israel.
They also miss a deeper dimension of the law that Jesus later articulates: that all the Law and the Prophets are summed up in loving the Lord your God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself. These commandments form the proper lens through which the law must be understood. The law directs the heart back to the greatness and glory of the one true and living God.
At the same time, the law requires a man to consider his brother, placing himself in his brother’s stead and even surrendering his own rights so that his brother’s name would not be blotted out of Israel. This is the command to love one’s neighbor embodied in practice.
The legalism of the Sadducees leads them into a fallacy regarding the resurrection. They reason using human logic and philosophy in an attempt to handle the eternal law of God. In doing so, they reduce the law to a question about marriage and ignore the eternal truths embedded within it—love for God and love for others.
Their question addresses only the point they wish to attack: the supposed error of believing in the resurrection of the dead.
The lesson for us is the necessity of handling God’s Word as holy and refusing to draw conclusions apart from what Scripture itself reveals. We are reminded to hold firmly to the truth of Scripture and to depend upon the Holy Spirit for understanding.
Amen.
By Christopher L. Walker at myfathersestate.com
