In his sermon titled 'Round 3: The Pharisees vs. Jesus,' Peter Allison examines Luke 20:27-40, highlighting the Sadducees' attempt to trap Jesus with a question about marriage and resurrection. The Sadducees, who deny the resurrection, use the Leverett law from Deuteronomy to challenge Jesus, asking whose wife a woman would be in the resurrection after having been married to seven brothers. Jesus responds, emphasizing that marriage is temporary and does not persist after resurrection, where individuals are like angels. He further argues for the resurrection by referencing the burning bush passage, illustrating that God is the God of the living, not the dead. Allison explores the differences between Pharisees and Sadducees, noting their varied beliefs about fate and the supernatural. The sermon stresses the importance of logic in interpreting Scripture and warns against a non-literal hermeneutic that dismisses foundational Christian doctrines like the resurrection. By referencing historical figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Allison underscores the enduring challenges to core Christian beliefs and the necessity of upholding them through reasoned faith.

Please turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 20, and be reading verses 27 through 40. Then some of the Sadducees who denied that there is a resurrection came to him and asked him, saying, Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man's brother dies having a wife and he dies without children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers, and the first took a wife and died without children, and the second took her as wife, and he died childless. Then the third took her, and in like manner the seven also, and they left no children and died. Last of all the woman died also.

Therefore in the resurrection whose wife does she become? For all seven had her as wife. Jesus answered and said to them, The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are counted worthy to obtain that age and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, nor can they die anymore, for They are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But even Moses showed in the burning bush passage that the dead are raised when he called the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

For he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him." Then some of the scribes answered and said, Teacher you have spoken well, But after that they dare not question Him anymore. May these commandments be our delight even when trouble and anguish overtake us. Heavenly Father, as we continue to worship this morning, we ask that this word that we have heard might be mixed with faith that and that through the preaching of your word Lord may you build us and strengthen us and equip us and lead us to to love you more. I pray that you would preserve me from error and sanctify my lips. In Jesus' name, Amen.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the scribes, the Jewish leaders have been trying to trap Jesus all week. They've been trying for a lot longer, but they are intensely trying in this week that began when he entered Jerusalem on the Lord's Day, what we call Palm Sunday, which is the day that the Passover lamb was selected on the 10th day and sacrificed on the 15th. The Pharisees, and Jesus has been teaching in the temple each week, going out to the Mount of Olives in the evening, coming back in the morning. And Each day they have been seeking to trap Him, to catch Him, to make Him look foolish, to diminish His respect and in the eyes of the people. Somehow if they can break the people of their admiration for His teaching, then they feel that they would have made progress.

Obviously, they were not for Christ, but against Him, His own church, His own people. But whatever they had tried so far, Jesus has turned the tables on them, tongue tied them, and even gotten them to admit ignorance. So instead of wisely recognizing the folly of their path, they redouble their efforts and they try to send spies to catch him and trap him. According to Matthew, this question on taxes and resurrection happened on the same day. The Pharisees had asked Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar and Jesus hoping to either get him in trouble with Rome or get him in trouble with the people.

And Jesus cleverly turned the tables on them and made them look foolish. And so the Sadducees stepped up and they were going to try to trap Jesus after the Pharisees had failed. So the Sadducees and Pharisees were united in their desire to destroy Christ, but they had some pretty significant differences among themselves. For example, the Pharisees, Josephus tells us the Pharisees say that Some actions, but not all, are the work of what they would call fate. And some are fate and some are in our power.

The Essenes, which is another sect, believe that fate governed everything and that nothing befalls man but what is according to this fate, determination. As for the Sadducees, they took away fate entirely and they say there is no such thing and that the events of human affairs are not at the disposal of fate, but they suppose that all our actions are in our own power. That we ourselves are the root and the cause of what is good and receive what is evil from our own folly. So the Sadducees, you could say, were rationalists. And they denied the resurrection, as Luke reminds us here, they denied the resurrection and angels, spirit beings.

They couldn't see them. They must not exist. They couldn't be proven by the scientific method to exist, so they must be not true. And so they thought that they could trap Jesus on the resurrection, which is something they didn't believe. Now you might wonder, well how could religious leaders, these are the members of the leaders of the church, how could religious leaders deny the resurrection?

Well that's not so unusual actually. The resurrection is a cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith and believe it or not, many respected religious leaders in our day or in the 20th century have denied the resurrection. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a good example. He's a 20th century German theologian. He's famous for his participation in an attempt to assassinate Hitler.

He was martyred, killed over that. He went to prison over that. But he's favorably quoted by many evangelical Christians today. I see people quoting him all the time. He believed the resurrection was a myth.

You see, in his day being the era of World War II, the first half of the 20th century, liberals thought, and I say liberals, I'm talking about that in a technical sense. These are people defined by their theology, what they believed. They believed that we had to separate the myth from Scripture, from the Word of God, which was also in the Scriptures. So the Bible contains myths and things, and also has the Word of God in there, and it's up to us to try and sort it out and remove the myth and find what's the Word of God. Now he differed from those liberals because he thought that the myth should be kept in the Scriptures.

It was all important to keep it. And we don't want to pull the myths out, because through those myths there were important things that were taught. And speaking of one liberal in particular who wanted to demythologize the Bible, he said, quote, my view of it today would be not that he went too far as most people seem to think But that he did not go far enough. It is not only the mythological Conceptions such as the miracles the ascension and the like which are not in principle separable from the conceptions of God, faith, and so on. It is not only the mythological conceptions, such as the miracles and ascensions, that are problematic, but the religious conceptions themselves.

You cannot separate God and miracles, but you do have to be able to interpret and proclaim both of them in a non-religious sense. He goes on to say, I am of the view that the full content, including the mythological concepts, must be maintained. The New Testament is not a mythological garbing of universal truth. This mythology, resurrection, and so forth, is the thing itself. But the concepts must be interpreted in such a way as to not make religion a precondition of faith.

Not until then will liberal theology be overcome. And at the same time, the question it raises be genuinely answered." And he says that's not the case in the positivism of revelation maintained by the confessing church. So he's saying only with his way you're going to be able to answer the liberals. Those who believe in the positivism of revelation can't answer the liberals. See, the positivism of Revelation is his language for the Christian and biblical doctrine that the Scriptures are the Word of God, that they are not myths that somehow communicate a truth.

They aren't merely the words of men, but they are words of God that God breathed out. God Himself breathed out. I think it would go without saying that to call the resurrection a myth is to deny Christ and make the Gospel meaningless. That's what Paul said. Our faith is in vain if the resurrection isn't true.

You see, the Sadducees held to a liberal hermeneutic, a non-literal hermeneutic. The Sadducees rejected the idea of angels. And yet angels appear all over the Bible in the Old Testament in the Pentateuch. But they had a non-literal way of interpreting the Bible, so that those angels weren't actually angels, they were something else. And that abounds with us today, even among so-called reformed parts of the Christian church.

People who say the same thing about Genesis 1, well that's just a non-literal. That's not telling us about how the world was made, that's telling us something about redemption. It has nothing to do with the history of the creation of the world, when obviously Genesis 1 and 2 is about the history of the creation of the world, when obviously Genesis 1 and 2 is about the history of the creation of the world. So don't think the Sadducees are unique in their rejection of the resurrection. They had a non-literal hermeneutic that enabled them to ignore anything in the Scriptures that they didn't want to believe.

They just made it, well that's just a figurative, that's just a myth. And in that myth some truth might be communicated, but it's not true. It's not true in a factual or historical sense. So these people come to Jesus. They're just like people today.

Just like the liberals today. Just like the people today that don't believe the Word of God. And they pose this problem. This man has a wife, and he dies without any children. Then they cite this Leverett law.

And this is that the brother of this man who died is to marry his widow and raise up children. So the Leverett law is given in Deuteronomy 25. It's in the Pentateuch. This is how Deuteronomy, this is the Leverett laws. It's stated in Deuteronomy 25.

If brothers dwell together and one of them dies and has no son, the widow of the dead man shall not be married to a stranger outside the family, but her husband's brother shall go into her, take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her. And it shall be that the firstborn son which she bears will succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out in Israel. But if the man does not want to take his brother's wife, then let his brother's wife go up to the gates to the elders and say, my husband's brother refuses to raise up a name to his brother in Israel. He will not perform the duty of my husband's brother. Then the elders of the city shall call him and speak to him.

But if he stands firm and says, I do not want to take her, then his brother's wife shall come to him in the presence of the elders, remove his sandal from his foot, spit in his face, and answer and say, So shall it be done to the man who will not build up his brother's house. And his name shall be called in Israel the house of him who had his sandal removed. It's Deuteronomy 25 verses 5 to 10. That's this law that they are referring to. You notice that even in this situation There is still liberty over whether to marry or not to marry.

Now there was attached to it a disgrace, not a curse, but a disgrace. His sandal is removed, spit in his face, and he is to be known as one whose sandal is removed. So there is a social consequence, but there's no legal consequence for this. It's not a, it wasn't a, there was no other punishment attached to it. He had a choice to marry or not to marry.

There were several examples of this in the Old Testament. Boaz and Ruth is one example. Ruth's husband died childless. And Boaz as the kinsman-redeemer marries her. And you remember the story, there was one person closer, and they went through this same process with him.

And then when he didn't want to marry her, Boaz married her. And from that marriage, David was descended. Obed, Jesse, and David. Or another example in the scriptures was was Tamar and Onan. Onan was the son of Judah who is the son of Jacob and the grandson of Abraham.

So this is even before God gave this law in Deuteronomy. This was the practice. Judah's son Ur, his firstborn, married Tamar. Ur died childless when God took his life because he was wicked. And so Tamar was given to Onan, his next brother, to be his wife.

And God took his life because Onan was wicked. He refused to obey the Leverett law and to raise up an offspring for his brother. He broke his vow. He violated the dominion mandate to be fruitful and to multiply. He didn't want to have any children.

And so God takes him too. So Judas lost his first two sons through this woman Tamar or what he believed is through this woman Tamar. So instead of giving his third son to Tamar as he ought to have. He said, well, you just go be a widow in your father's house and let my third son grow up because he was afraid of losing his third son as well. And you remember the story how later on Tamar realized that this son was grown up, well past marriageable age, and he had not been given to her.

She had been waiting, remaining, waiting. And so she, through her contrivance, managed to get Judah himself to raise up a son. And that son came through that son is The line of David and Christ. The lever of law even plays a part in our salvation. Adam was sinful and there was no way possible for him to give birth to a sinless son.

So the race is doomed. But I think in an amazing application of the Leverett Principle, Mary became pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit when the power of the Holy Spirit came upon her. And so Jesus was the legal heir of Joseph but not the biological descendant of Joseph. Jesus then became that, Our kinsman redeemer. Well, what's the answer to Sadducees question here?

Whose wife is she in the resurrection? They thought, well, this is a conundrum. This is a problem. And Jesus first instructs them about marriage. It should have been something they knew, but it wasn't.

He said marriage is temporary. It is only until death. Now we might think that's pretty permanent, but in Jesus' view, It's temporary. Because death is not the end of our existence. The family is not the ultimate relationship.

It's just not. Some people say that, but it's not. The church is the ultimate relationship. Marriage is the closest relationship we have on earth. That one flesh union, but it's passing away.

You won't be married to your spouse in heaven. Because marriage is a type. Marriage is a type of the relationship that we as the church, the bride of Christ, have with Christ the Bridegroom. And once we're in heaven, we will enjoy the fullness of that relationship. We won't need any types any more than we need sacrifices of bulls and goats because Christ has come as our Passover lamb.

In heaven, we won't need this type of marriage. This picture of Christ's relationship to His bride. The reason for it will pass away. The purpose of marriage is also procreation. It's to be seen as a type of Christ's relationship to His church, but the purpose of it was also for procreation.

And in heaven there's no more procreation, so there's no more further need of marriage for that reason. It's one of the other reasons that marriage exists, although it's certainly after the fact, because God ordained marriage before the fall, but it's also to avoid fornication. Well, that's not going to be a need in heaven either. So there is no need of marriage in heaven. But you see, our relationship as brothers and sisters in Christ, that relationship will continue into eternity.

We will still be brothers and sisters in Christ in eternity. We will, Christ's bride, the church will be there in the and experience the fullness of our relationship with Christ. We'll experience it in glory. So this relationship here in church that we have as members in Christ's body, covenanted to each other, that ultimately is even more enduring. It's more fundamental.

More fundamental. So marriage, first part of Jesus' answer is that marriage is temporary, it's not eternal. The second part of his answer is that there is no more death after the resurrection. Those worthy of the resurrection, a worthiness that is based on Christ's obedience by which His righteousness is imputed to us, cannot die anymore. Those worthy of the resurrection cannot die anymore.

They are equal with the angels, Jesus said. They are equal to the angels and are sons of God being sons of the resurrection. So he's saying there's a change in our body. We will have a spiritual body, a resurrected body. Not married and not giving in marriage.

But then Jesus goes on to deal with this question of the resurrection itself. And he picks a very interesting passage. If somebody asked you to prove the resurrection, or where the Bible teaches the resurrection, I dare say that we wouldn't pick the burning bush passage as the clearest place to go to teach the resurrection. But this is exactly the passage that Jesus went to. There were many other passages in the Old Testament that spoke of the resurrection.

Job 19, Job said, For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth, and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold and not another, how my heart yearns within me." He didn't use that passage. Or Daniel 12, 2, And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. He didn't use that passage. That clearly teaches the resurrection. Even teaches the resurrection of the just to everlasting life, and the unjust to shame and contempt.

Or Psalm 16, Therefore My heart is glad and my glory rejoices. My flesh also will rest in hope. For you will not leave my soul in shield, nor will you allow your Holy One to seek corruption. You will show me the path of life in your presence is fullness of joy at your right hand, our pleasures forevermore." Or Psalm 49. Like sheep, they are laid in the grave.

Death shall feed on them. The upright shall have dominion over them in the morning, and their beauty shall be consumed in their grave far from their dwelling. But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave, for He shall receive me." Or Isaiah 26, your dead shall live, Together with my dead body they shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust, for your dew is like the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead. Our bodies shall awake.

Or in Ezekiel 37, the vision of the dry bones coming to life, or 2 Samuel 12, where David says after his son that was conceived through the adultery with Bathsheba, but he is dead now, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?" David said, I shall go to him? I shall go to him. He recognized he would see his son again. He shall not return to me, but I shall go to him.

So there are many other passages that speak very directly about life after this death and God resurrecting our bodies. Yet Jesus didn't go to any of those passages. He went to a passage in the Pentateuch, because that was the section that the Pharisees had brought to him. This lever at law came out of the Pentateuch, out of Deuteronomy. And so Jesus went right back to the Pentateuch to show that they were wrong about the resurrection.

Jesus uses logic. I think this is a very important point. Jesus uses logic to prove the resurrection from the Old Testament. This is one of the places where Scripture teaches the if-then logical syllogism. Here's Jesus' argument.

In the burning bush passage, God said he was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now how does that prove the resurrection? God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus says it proves the resurrection because if God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus says it proves the resurrection because if God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and God is not a God of the dead, then therefore Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living.

That's the argument. Even Moses showed in the burning bush passage that the dead are raised when he called the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him." Moses didn't say that in that passage, but that God is not a God of the dead, but a living, but that is a truth. And when you put those two together, the logical conclusion is that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living. In the parallel passages, Jesus rebukes the Sadducees in the Matthew 22 passage.

He said, You are mistaken and do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. You see, the Sadducees were the rational, scientific mind of their day. And scientifically, resurrection of the dead is impossible. There's no proof of it. You can't conduct an experiment.

You can't apply the scientific method and prove the resurrection. And so they being the rationalists of their day, What we would call that idea that truth is proven by the scientific method. They said well, scientifically impossible, it can't be true. Had to be wrong. You see their view of truth was based on what they could prove with the scientific method and some many people's view of truth today is the same.

Many Christians in the early part of the 20th century denied the virgin birth because it was scientifically impossible. They denied the resurrection. They denied the miracles of the Bible because science couldn't prove them. So therefore they must not be true. But you see, Jesus didn't commend them for their level-headed, rational seeking of the truth.

He rather said, you don't know the power of God. And Mark adds that Jesus said, you are greatly mistaken. This error, their failure to apply logic was not a minor error. Their rejection of the truth of Scripture was not a minor error. He said, you are greatly mistaken.

So what can we learn from this passage? Well, I think we can, I have three things, we probably can learn many more, but one is that we can learn that logic is important in studying the scriptures? We need to, when we study the scriptures, we need to apply all the logical skills that we have if we read the burning bush passage and we are not seeing the resurrection there then we're not reading the Bible for all it's worth We're not studying it the way Jesus expects us to study it. He expected the Sadducees to know from the burning bush passage the resurrection. That tells us there's a lot in the Bible, right?

We're probably missing a lot. Because I certainly wouldn't get the resurrection out of the Burning Bush passage without the leading, without this example, without Christ teaching this. How many other places are there in Scripture where we can read the passage and be oblivious to all the truth that is being taught there? We have to go beyond simple proof texting of the Bible, and say, well, if there isn't a verse that says thus and so, then the Bible doesn't teach it. Jesus' example here proves that Logic is necessary.

We must apply logic. Logic is our characterization of the way God thinks. He thinks in an orderly way. And we are to think His thoughts after Him. And God thinks logically like this.

The Scriptures demonstrate this. And they teach us that we need to use logic to rightly understand them. The second thing I think we can learn from this is that every word of the Scriptures is important. Every word of the Scriptures is important. Major doctrines can be taught from, and Paul uses just one letter in one case, the presence of a plural to make a doctrinal point every word of scripture is important and where where the Doesn't say exactly what we would expect it to say it doesn't say exactly what our system would want it to say then we need to re-examine our system.

Because oftentimes that passage may have the truth that we're missing in our system. We have to pay attention to every word of scripture and to the implications of every word of Scripture, every letter in the Scriptures. God has preserved His Word infallible. And His Word is truth, as we heard this morning from Psalm 119. His Thought is truth.

And thirdly, truth. We need to use logic in our study of the Scripture because truth can be established from the logical implications of Scripture. Truth can be established from the logical implications of Scripture. And this idea is also rejected by many evangelicals today. There are many things like government schools, women in civil office, where people will say, well, show me in the Bible where it says you can't send your children to a government school.

It doesn't say that anywhere. And you can multiply countless examples. Well, we would say absolutely the Bible teaches that. But yes, you do have to apply logic to the scriptures. We have to study the scriptures and look at what the logical implications of the Word of God are.

And so we can go down all these different examples of government schools. Well, we're to teach our children as we walk by the way, as we lie down, as we rise up, we're to teach them about God. And if we send them to a government school that teaches that God is dead or that God is not the creator, we're not doing that. And so we can say very clearly that that's wrong. Or women in civil office, where does the Bible forbid that?

Again, we can go to the Scriptures to see what the Scriptures say and what the logical implications of those passages are. Even abortion. At one time there were many evangelicals who didn't see anything wrong with abortion because there was no verse in the Bible that said you shall not abort a baby. But there are many verses in the Bible that speak about about life beginning at conception, that God knows people in the womb. He calls people in the womb.

And it is life comes from God. And these unborn, the Scriptures have always considered unborn children to be people. That God knows. John the Baptist leaps for joy in Elizabeth's womb when Mary came. Because He is a person.

And He was experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit upon Him. And so when the Bible says that you shall not kill a person, then we can easily see the logical implications of that. And thankfully, many, many, many, most, I would say, Christians today do see the logical implications of that. But that wasn't always the case. There were many even reformed leaders back in the 60s and 70s who argued for acceptance of abortion.

And we can praise the Lord that That view has been changed through the through applying the logical implications of scripture To our views mother we could multiply many many examples But the principle is what's important this morning that truth can be established from the logical implications of Scripture. May the Lord give us His grace to be able to read His Word, to read the passages like the burning bush and to understand the significant and important doctrinal implications of those passages. And may He grant us obedience to the things that we learn in His Word. Let's pray. Almighty Heavenly Father, We pray that you would keep us from learning the truth about your word so that we can ignore it and not practice it.

We ask, Lord, that you would teach us your word and all that it entails so that we might walk obediently before you. We of this in Jesus name, Amen.