Jesus Christ faced various opponents who sought to undermine His mission. During the final week of His earthly ministry, a group of Sadducees challenged Him on the resurrection.
The Old Testament prophet Daniel had prophesied a future time when those who sleep in the dust would awake—some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting contempt (Daniel 12:2). This belief in a future general resurrection of the dead was widely held among first-century Jews. Not only did Jesus affirm the future resurrection (John 5:28–29), but His own assignment in Jerusalem that would soon come to fruition involved betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection on the third day (Luke 9:21, 43-45; 18:31-34).
However, the Sadducees denied the resurrection of the dead (Luke 20:27) along with doctrines about angels and spirits (Acts 23:8). According to the historian Josephus (Antiquities 18.1.4; Wars 2.14), they disbelieved in the soul’s existence beyond physical death.
This post will take a closer look at Jesus’ encounter with the Sadducees concerning their expressed skepticism about the future resurrection.
A Marriage Conundrum in the Afterlife?
The Sadducees initiate their challenge to the doctrine of the future resurrection with a twofold introduction: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother” (Luke 20:28).[1] This is a reference to the commandment on levirate marriage from Deuteronomy 25:5-10.
Next the Sadducees bring up an extraordinary case of the widow of seven former husbands: “Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died” (Lk. 20:29-32). The scenario parallels “the story line from the Jewish book of Tobit, wherein the jealous demon Asmodeus killed righteous Sarah’s first seven husbands.”[2] Despising of levirate marriage brought calamity upon Onan the son of Judah (Genesis 38:6-11). But the spirit of the levirate statute is honored by Boaz in taking Ruth as his wife (Ruth 3-4; see especially 4:5).
“In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?” the Sadducees asked, “For the seven had her as wife” (Lk. 20:33). Their question implied that if the resurrection were true, it would lead to a most absurd situation—a woman with seven husbands in the afterlife. Such a scenario, they presumed, would be unthinkable, since polyandry would be scandalous to first century Jews. Of course, their aim was not sincere inquiry, but mockery. They posed the question to trap Jesus and discredit Him publicly.
The Best is Yet to Come in the Resurrection:
Jesus teaches that the marriages of this present age will one day give way to a new and greater order of relationships in the age to come: “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage,” said the Lord (Luke 20:34–35). His words point to the future resurrection of the righteous into everlasting life. Just as a caterpillar sheds its former life to rise as a butterfly, so too will the world we know — with its familiar patterns of marriage (Genesis 2:4–25) — be transformed into a glorious new reality, where relationships will be deeper, richer, and full of wonder beyond anything we can now imagine.
Procreation takes place in the present age, ideally within the bond of marriage (Genesis 1:28; 9:1, 7; Hebrews 13:4). But the present moment for breeding eventually comes to completion. Yet, in the age to come, resurrected humanity will encounter relationships of even higher intimacy and surpassing ecstasy.[3]
Jesus expands upon the uniqueness of the people raised to everlasting life: “for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36). God’s people will be raised immortal, imperishable, and incorruptible. The problem of sin and death will be fully and finally resolved. They will be like the angels. Not that that become angels. Nor that they metamorphize into ungendered bodies. Gender differentiation between male and female continues in the resurrection. Rather, the resurrected saints will share similar attributes with the angels. In this instance, both neither die nor marry and procreate.
Those who receive resurrection to everlasting life will be fully actualized “sons of God.” Leon Morris points out
There is a sense in which believers are already sons of God. They have been born again; they have been adopted into the family in which they can say ‘Our Father.’ But there is a sense in which their sonship will not be consummated until the age to come…The absence of marriage does not mean, so to speak, a levelling down of relations so that life is on a lower level. Rather it is a being taken up into the fullness of life in the family of God.[4]
The Christian experience of being sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father will be fully matured in the age to come. The believer’s future intimate union with God will far surpass experience of the present age. The best is yet to come.
God is the God of the Living.
Lastly, Jesus makes a shrewd observation about resurrection from the Old Testament patriarchs: “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. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him,” says Jesus (Luke 20:37–38; cf. Exodus 3:15).[5] Although Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob died long ago, it makes perfect sense to regard them as very much alive, for they are presently with the God of the living. Moreover, they will be among those who rise to everlasting life.
Conclusion:
Death is the enemy—an unwelcome consequence of the fall that continues to ravage humanity. In our desperation, we search for ways to escape its shadow. Some try to romanticize death as part of a natural “circle of life,” but this only masks the sorrow it brings.
Others pursue symbolic immortality—striving to leave a legacy through good deeds, philanthropy, or lasting achievements, making significant contributions to science, industry, technology, social justice, and the arts. Yet, the bitter reality is the most significant legacies are forgotten over time.
We even attempt to extend our lives through the best science available, hoping to add a few more years, but even these efforts offer no guarantee. Death continues to rule despite our best efforts in the science of longevity.
But death is defeated through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The promise of a future resurrection is not wishful thinking but is grounded in the historical reality of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection in Jerusalem. Through Christ’s triumph over death, the Christian gains a secure and lasting hope—one that extends beyond this life. It is in Him that we look forward to not merely escaping death, but rising again to everlasting life. This is our confident expectation: death does not have the final word—resurrection does.
— WGN
Notes:
[1] All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), unless noted.
[2] Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), Lk 20:29–32. See Tobit 3:7-9.
[3] C.S. Lewis points out, “The letter and spirit of scripture, and of all Christianity, forbid us to suppose that life in the New Creation will be a sexual life; and this reduces our imagination to the withering alternative either of bodies which are hardly recognizable as human bodies at all or else of a perpetual fast. As regards the fast, I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer ‘No,’ he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it. Hence where fullness awaits us we anticipate fasting. In denying that sexual life, as we now understand it, makes any part of the final beatitude, it is not of course necessary to suppose that the distinction of sexes will disappear. What is no longer needed for biological purposes may be expected to survive for splendor. Sexuality is the instrument both of virginity and of conjugal virtue; neither men nor women will be asked to throw away weapons they have used victoriously. It is the beaten and the fugitives who throw away their swords. The conquerors sheathe theirs and retain them” (“Miracles if the New Creation” in Miracles [New York: HarperOne,1947, 1974], 260-261).
[4] Leon Morris, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: Luke, vol. 3, ed. Leon Morris (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 318-319.
[5] The Lord, likewise, affirms the tradition of Mosaic authorship of the Book of Exodus.
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