Mark 12:19 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Mark 12:19

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They ask a question, which doesn’t so much seem to be a plot to trap Christ, to have him prosecuted, as something intended to catch him out. They come with a quite different type of question. They are very proud people. The Sadducees were evidently very rich people. They feathered their nests, they controlled the temple. They were the main people who took the profits from all the buying and selling that went on there. They are resentful at what he has done, and now they just want to humiliate Christ. It is a long question, probably one that they have used for many years on the Pharisees, who did believe in the resurrection, and they go back to Moses, to Deuteronomy 25:5. ‘Master, Moses wrote unto us,’ – this has the authority of Moses – ‘If a man's brother die.’ Actually in Deuteronomy where this law is given, it particularly refers to a situation where everybody is dwelling in the same household. So the case that they put will be this: there is a house, and there are seven brothers in it, and the first brother marries a wife, and he dies. Now here is the provision that was given through Moses: ‘If a man's brother die, and leave his wife behind him and leave no children’ – she is childless, she is a widow – ‘that his brother should take his wife and raise up seed unto his brother.’ So ideally, the brother should marry the wife, and the idea behind this is that the inheritance of the dead brother will continue through that a child born to the living brother. Now, if he didn't want to marry his brother's wife, then he could refuse to do so, and there was a certain amount of shame due to him for that, and there was a little ceremony whereby he accepted that element of shame, and he went his way, freely. As the population grew and the original need for this provision was reduced, this system had fallen out of use. Certainly it wasn’t being practised in the time of Christ. But the Sadducees take this highly theoretical situation. The case they put is that there were seven brethren. The first took a wife. The brothers all die in turn without any of them having children through this woman. We have no idea what the lady did to them, or didn't do, but they all die in turn. So the question is this: When she dies, whose wife will she be? Will they all be her husbands in heaven? After all, they were all married to here on earth; they are all equally entitled to call her their wife. Well, that would be impossible of course. It would be quite wrong for her to have seven husbands in heaven, just as it would be on earth. So what's behind the question? What's behind the question is, do we believe in Moses, or do we believe in the resurrection? The rules of Moses regulating life on earth do not work if there is a continuation of life in heaven. Do we believe that God is dealing with us only on this earth (as the Sadducees taught), or do we believe that we are all going to heaven, and there's a resurrection of the body? Is the focus of our religion on earth, or is it heaven?

Application

The spirit of the Sadducees shows itself today whenever the focus of religion moves to this life. ‘What is the good of being a Christian?’, some ask. ‘Ah, I've got it. The purpose of being a Christian is, we are here to reform the world. It is to make the world a better place, and we should be expending our energies, on reforming the world: getting involved in politics, the arts, culture.’ Well it is a good thing if you can reform terrible injustices and oppressive things. It is a very good thing if you can be like some of the great social reformers of the past, who took the boys away from sweeping the chimneys, who stopped child employment in that way, and the abuse of people. Yes, that is all a very good thing, but is it our primary role to reform the world? ‘I can't think’, some people say, ‘it's worth being a Christian, if there isn’t a benefit in this life. I'm embarrassed’, they say, ‘if people say, “You Christians, you are only concerned with the salvation of your soul. Why aren’t you concerned about reforming the world?”’ And some people say, ‘I can't bear that question. Yes, I must be involved in a social gospel.’ It's a similar thing, really. The Sadducees said, ‘Isn't it best to focus on this life? Besides which some of the provisions of Moses don't work if we transfer them into heaven.’ ‘No,’ says God, ‘this world is doomed world. We do what good in it that we can, while we can, but we can't reform it totally.’ ‘Ye have the poor with you always’, says the Lord. Do what you can, but it will always be a doomed world in which there is violence and meanness and cruelty and oppression. It will always be there, because it's a world of sin and alienation from God. Your first task – while you do good wherever you can – is to win souls, to bring people to salvation, to bring them into union with God, to bring them on the road to heaven and to glory. We are looking there; that is our objective.

Questions

The Scripture cannot be broken, and the purposes of God are fully consistent with themselves. For that reason, there are no difficulties of the sort that the Sadducees were asking. All such questions can be answered, and there was never any apparent problem that Christ could not resolve. We may not know the answer, but there is one. If we find ourselves faced with something that is difficult, we must pray and search the Scriptures.

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Mark 12:19 Commentary and Bible Study