1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The
message from God’s Word today comes from the Gospel of Luke 20:27-40. In
our Gospel lesson today we are given Jesus’ response to the Sadducees about the
resurrection and eternal life. This
makes us wonder, “Is There Life After
Death?” We understand from the
Sadducees in our text that man’s reason denies it (vv. 27–33), but our Lord
Jesus describes it (vv. 34–36), and the Holy Scripture teach it, dear brothers
and sisters in Christ.
2. “God is not a God of the dead.” This
doesn’t mean that God is indifferent toward human beings who are already dead.
God hasn’t forgotten them. In fact, death is an enemy to God, and overcoming
death is for God as important as defeating sin.
3. “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55) With these words, Paul rejoices
with thanksgiving for the victory of God in Jesus Christ over the powers of
death. But, Paul’s statement isn’t meant to support the idea that death doesn’t
really exist. Instead, we have to take seriously what our living Lord Jesus
says in Revelation 1:18: “[I am] the
living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the
keys of Death and of Hades.” These keys are only in the Lord’s hands and
never in our hands. If we are Jesus’ followers, then we follow the one who has
these keys in his hands.
4. It’s this living Lord who is
encountered in today’s text by some Sadducees, a group of modern intellectuals
of that time. The Sadducees refused the idea of a continuation of life after
death. According to them, everything comes to an end with death; therefore,
life is to be lived as fully as possible within the boundaries of earthly time.
Because their belief is in great contrast with what Jesus teaches about
survival after death, the Sadducees set a trap for him, hoping his answer will
show that his teaching about the resurrection of the dead is absurd.
5. The Sadducees say, let us imagine
the case of seven brothers who marry their brother’s widow as prescribed by the
law of the time. If there is eternal life, upon the death of all the brothers
and the woman, to whom will the woman be married? This imaginary scenario is
meant to make fun of Jesus. But, Jesus takes them seriously, and he makes this
one basic point: After their death they will no longer marry or be given in
marriage, for they are now like angels, children of God, and will remain so
forever (vv. 34–36).
6. What Jesus points out to the Sadducees
is that eternal life isn’t simply the continuation of mortal life beyond death.
Whatever eternal life is like is on the other side of earthly life, we should
not think of it as a continuation of our current earthly life that affords us
an opportunity to complete still imperfect works. We humans have to do now what we can do for the good, such as
help the needy and work for the improvement of mankind, resist tyrannical
threats to fellow human beings and other creatures. “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today’ ”
(Heb. 3:13a).
7. The point that Jesus makes to the
Sadducees is this: Death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of
everything. Our death is not the end of God. In a German hymn Paul Gerhardt
writes, “Everything passes away / but God
stands / without faltering; / his thoughts, / his word and his will have
eternal ground.” We are living in a certain time, but God “alone is
immortal” (1 Tim. 6:16 NIV).
8. When this is quite clear for us,
then we are allowed to make a further step. This God is not a mere god. This
God does not release his creatures. In his compassion God puts them in his
heart, and they will not ever be excluded from it. God’s mercy is unending toward those to whom
he is merciful, towards those who repent of their sins and turn to Him for
eternal life. As they were, so they are now in God. Because they are in God,
this means that they are now healed from their illnesses and cleansed from
their evils.
9. In the hours of the last evening
of his life, the theologian Karl Barth was working on a lecture. In that last
lecture, he wrote of God as the God of the living in these words: “All live to him, from the Apostles to the
forebears of yesterday and the day before yesterday. They do not have only the
right, [but also relevance in the present] to be heard also today.” These
sentences call our attention back to the text, to the sentence about the God of
Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob (v. 37b) and the assertion that to God all of these
ancestors are alive (v. 38).
10. What does it mean to say, “to him all … are alive”? This means that
all the saints of God who believed in the promises of God in Jesus Christ who
lived before us and who are now not among us are living “to God.” Because of
that connection with Jesus, they are also not dead to us. They have not only
spoken in their former times; they still speak today. We do not live without
them. Through our Lord Jesus, who is the
resurrection and the life, we are connected to our loved ones who have gone
before us and died in the Christian faith. The members of the first elected
people of Israel, the members of the Christian church who believed in Jesus as
their Savior—none of them has passed away. We are today, together with them,
the complete people of God.
11. Man is created with body and
soul. Though the soul continues to exist when the body dies, man is meant to be
body and soul. Body and soul are reunited in the resurrection. If Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob would remain in the grave, then Yahweh would be a God of dead
men. This is impossible. He is a God “of
the living.” Jesus reminds us that
when God spoke to Moses, he spoke as the God of the covenant. Our Lord Jesus is
the “Keeper of promises,” the “I AM” of the Bible. He faithfully brought us our
salvation through His cross and empty tomb. And our Lord Jesus will faithfully
bring us into his glory. He is our God in this life and into eternity. Amen.
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