Daily Devotional for Friday 28th June
Our Living Hope
The resurrection is central to the Christian faith: it is our ‘living hope.’ Yet there are many today who dismiss it as silly and preposterous. This opposition is not new. The Sadducees were a conservative set of Jews who held only to the first five books of the Old Testament – the Law. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead (v 18) and were the latest leaders who tried to discredit Jesus and His teachings, this time by showing the doctrine of resurrection to be incompatible with the Law. By using an exaggerated example of levirate marriage (the marriage custom in which a man marries his brother’s widow), they tried to make belief in the resurrection seem absurd (vs 19 – 23); so which of the seven husbands would remain the woman’s true husband at the resurrection?
Jesus makes it clear that the Sadducees’ doctrine is in error, not His (vs 24 – 27). First, they do not know the Scriptures (v 24). The idea of the resurrection was present in the wider Old Testament (e.g. Daniel 12:2; Job 19: 25,26). Jesus even uses a portion of the Law (Exodus 3:6) to refer to the resurrection (v 26): years after the deaths of the patriarchs, God said to Moses: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He remains their God and: ‘He is not the God of the dead, but of the living’ (v 27). Note also that marriage on earth, so much part of our existence, does not feature in God’s coming kingdom (v 25).
Then, second, the Sadducees are in error because they do not have faith to believe that God has the power to raise the dead. For those of us who are already convinced that God can raise the dead, we might have the opposite problem: we perhaps need to be aware that as we are so used to the doctrine we can overlook just how mighty the power that God needed to exert in order to overcome sin and death in raising Christ – and one day us – from the dead.
Time to reflect…
Look up Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, chapter 1, and verses 18-20. Meditate on these verses and praise God for His resurrection power and the living hope it brings.
Pause to pray…
Praise be to you, loving Father for in your great mercy you have given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Amen
