In my reading through Luke 20, one passage leapt out at me with two fascinating thoughts from the Savior. One involves his view of Scripture. The other involves his explanation of God’s view of the living and the dead.
Luke 20:37-38 – 37 But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.”
In a conversation with the Sadducees, Jesus needed to correct their thinking. This group opposing Jesus did not believe that there would be any future resurrection from the dead. So, they tried to use the principle of levirate marriage to disprove the biblical expectation of genuine life through resurrection after death. In the verses above, Jesus deals easily with the argument and makes some important claims.
First, on the issue of the Scriptures, notice that Jesus cites the words of Moses as an authoritative text to refute the teaching of the Sadducees. Unlike modern theological liberals, the Lord Jesus displays that he believed that Moses was speaking unerringly about the Lord. If Jesus did not think so, there is no way that he could base an entire argument about the resurrection on a single word.
Theological liberals have, since the 19th century, argued that the Bible is a good starting point for religion just as Jesus is the ultimate beginning of the faith, but they then go onto argue that the faith and revelation evolves. Liberals suggest that the Bible contains a husk of truth that we, evolved from the simplicity of the first century, build on to grow to a higher truth.
But look at how Jesus used Scripture. He did not leave any room for Moses to have misunderstood the words of God. Nor did Jesus leave any room for an evolved understanding. The Lord used a specific biblical passage, including grammar and verb tenses, to display absolute truth through Scriptural revelation. Jesus trusted that Moses spoke genuine truth that did not change over nearly a millennium-and-a-half. Jesus did not believe in or teach an evolving truth. And thus, we can say that the Lord Jesus is not on the side of the theological liberal.
If you do not believe that we must think about the way theological liberals handle Scripture, stop to consider the way that so many today twist and even flat reject biblical teaching on issues that are frowned upon socially in our day. Whether we are talking issues of marriage, gender roles, sexual ethics, homosexuality, or any other hot-button issue, the common practice among some who claim the faith is to say that Scripture’s teaching on those topics is outdated or irrelevant. The modern move is to assume that we have come to a place of truth that the biblical authors did not understand or simply got wrong. And this is exactly the opposite of the view of Jesus and his handling of Scripture. Jesus handled Scripture as perfect, inspired, and authoritative, and so must we. We must do so, even if that trust in and faithfulness to Scripture does not make us popular.
A second thought that grabbed my attention in the verses above has to do with the Lord and the dead. As Jesus pointed toward a future day when the dead would be raised, he reminded his listeners that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Then Jesus said, “for all live to him.” Stop and let this sink in. God does not see any person as dead. Those who have died, faithful or unfaithful, believer or nonbeliever, saved or judged, all are alive to God. They are not artifacts of the past. They are not pieces of history. Rather, they are still souls, aware and spiritually as real as you and I are in our bodies on this earth.
That would mean that Moses and Abraham are alive. These men of old who die millennia ago are in the presence of the Lord. they are not simply words on dusty pages of history. They are men awaiting their resurrection bodies while they are rewarded and comforted by God. Similarly, Goliath and Judas Iscariot are also living souls. They are suffering spiritual “death” in the fact that they are not in any form of paradise or heaven. Instead, they are suffering torment as enemies of the Lord who died under his judgment. They are now aware of the wrath of God for their rebellion against him and his perfection. But they are not gone. They await the day of judgment when their ultimate sentences will be carried out.
This principle, the fact that all are alive in the eyes of God, reminds me that eternity is a very big deal. Those who have gone before us are not gone forever. Those who have loved the Lord in the past are not simply footnotes in history books or entries on our family tree. Instead, they are living, comforted saints in the presence of God who are looking forward to a new life with resurrection bodies. Even those dear family members of ours who slip from our minds unless something stirs our memories are not gone from the eyes of God. He knows them. He sees their living souls, even if we forget that all humans everywhere are going to exist before the Lord forever.
I’m not sure if there is a clean way to tie those two thoughts together. They made sense in Jesus’ argument with the Sadducees. What I see is that Jesus fully trusted Scripture, and so should we. And Jesus saw us as beings who will live eternally, and so must we. These two truths dramatically impact our worldview.
Pastor Travis Peterson 