Mark 12:26 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Mark 12:26

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But the main point of the Pharisees was that there is no resurrection of the dead. The passage Christ chooses to quote to prove the resurrection is one that they knew perfectly well, but they had never given it the careful attention it deserved to think through all its implications. How original the Lord was in all his reasoning! ‘And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in the book of Moses,’ – it was one book originally; we have divided into five books today – ‘how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ That is very ponderous language, but it is intentional. ‘I am the God of Abraham,’ – I deal directly with Abraham – ‘and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’. Why doesn't he just say, ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’? To make it clear to our minds that God is relating in a living way to each one in turn. They are all still alive because they are in glory. It is of course a remarkable thing that the Lord condescends to call himself by the name of men. He is the infinite, everlasting, omnipotent, omniscient God, who dwells in the highest heaven. We are puny, short lived, sinful, mortal men and women who believe in Christ. And yet God chooses to be known by the names of these three patriarchs who believed in him and worshipped and served him during their lives. Christ’s logic is flawless. How could God make himself known to subsequent generations by associating himself with those who were once alive, but who are now dead and never to rise again. God is not simply referring to past history when he does this, as if he is reminding the Jews of those who worshipped him in the past when they were alive on earth. Christ’s words are irrefutable – ‘He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living’ – even the Sadducees would not have denied this. God does not carelessly name himself by those who are now dead. He has life within him; he created physical life; he is the source of spiritual life. The dead have no place in his kingdom.‘Ye therefore do greatly err’, and that little word ‘err’ translates the Greek for wander. You wander and stray far from the truth, he tells them. Human thinking is erratic and liable to go off in all manner of directions which are unprofitable and lead nowhere. In all our thoughts we need to be tethered by the word of God which sets proper boundaries to our thinking. This was not a small error but a great error, and yet they made so much of it.

Application

The Sadducees did not believe in an after-life or a resurrection. We do! But we can make the same mistake as the Sadducees. We can greatly err, greatly wander, and this is how. By believing in heaven, the paradise and then ultimately the new heavens and the new earth, the bodily occupation of it, we can believe those things theoretically, without allowing them to mean much to us, without thinking about them very much. Seldom do they play a significant role in our thinking, and that is tragic, because if it were the greatest imaginable mistake for the Sadducees not to believe in heaven at all, we are not far behind them if we believe and yet we do not anticipate heaven and reflect on it.

Questions

Some people object to this. They say, ‘The Lord’s answer wasn’t so very good after all for two reasons. God speaking in that way out of the burning bush may have meant, ‘I was the God of your patriarchs, of your fathers.’ But, no, you can’t say that because it’s in the exactly the same passage where God gives to Moses his name: ‘I am.’ There is no question, that when he says ‘I am the God of Abraham,’ that is exactly what he means. He shortly after that pronounced himself to be the ‘I am.’ The ‘I am the God of Abraham’ and so on clearly implies that they are still alive, just as he is alive.

A second objection is this: Yes, but this doesn’t prove the resurrection. It at best only proves that the patriarchs were at that time alive in spirit, as souls in the presence of God. That is true: the patriarchs were not in resurrection bodies at this time, but with God as disembodied souls. It is a sufficient answer to say that God created man as body and spirit, not spirit only. If his soul is alive with God, then God will raise up his body also. But there are also specific promises that are not yet fulfilled that prove the resurrection. The Jews knew that God had made land promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Every time God mentions the covenant with Abraham, he says, ‘to thy seed’, to your descendants, will I give it. Now Hebrews tells us that Abraham did not see those promises fulfilled during his earthly life – ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off’ (Hebrews 11:13) – and yet those promises still stand, and they were made to him personally. Hebrews solves the problem for us: ‘he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10)’; and ‘if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. ¹⁶ But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city’ (Hebrews 11:15-16). The land promises will be fulfilled in a newly created and glorified earth. But what is the good of restoring the earth and rejuvenating it and making it a glorious place, if there isn’t going to be a physical occupation of it with resurrected bodies? The land promises to Abraham imply that he will have a physical body to live in that land.

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Mark 12:26 Commentary and Bible Study