About the Afterlife

Now let's continue our series Debating Jesus. Grab the message notes that are on the inside of your bulletins. We are going through the 12th chapter of the Gospel of Mark. There are three straight debates with Jesus in this chapter, and the second one we're going to look at today is a debate about the afterlife. And the question Jesus is asked here is so relevant to every single person here today because last I checked, 100% of us are going to die, so this is very intriguing to us.

And consequently, this is a subject people love to talk about these days on talk shows and on TV and in books and movies: what happens after death. This is actually a New York Times article from last weekend. This is a very hot genre right now in books. Heaven is for Real, a huge best-selling book and movie. Proof of Heaven, First Phone Call from Heaven, Inside the Other Side. These are just a few of the afterlife books that rank high on the New York Times bestseller list right now. And there are lots more.

A quick search I did online this week revealed these titles. You ready for this? To Heaven and Back, Nine Days in Heaven, 90 Minutes in Heaven, A Glimpse of Heaven, My Time in Heaven, Waking Up in Heaven, What You Really Want to Know About Heaven, A Vision from Heaven, My Journey to Heaven, Flight to Heaven, Appointments with Heaven, Hello from Heaven, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Revealing Heaven, plus others whose titles don't include the 'h' word like I Saw the Light, Saved by the Light, Embraced by the Light. And I better take a breath now or I will soon be in heaven myself.

But lots of people are apparently claiming to be experts on heaven, while others are saying, you know what, I don't believe in heaven. Like Woody Allen, who was at the Cannes Film Festival just last week looking very joyous here, as you can see. But an article in USA Today says Allen was at his morose best during a long twisting answer at the press conference on the meaninglessness of life. He said, quote, "No matter how much the philosophers talk to you or the priests or the psychiatrists, the bottom line is we're all going to wind up in a very bad position one day: dead." And he said one role of the filmmaker was to try to show people that life does have meaning, but he says you can't really do that without conning people because in the end it has no meaning.

You're living in a random universe; you're living a meaningless life. Everything you've created in your life or doing in your life is going to vanish, including you. He said, "While I'm sitting in a movie house for an hour and a half, I'm not thinking about my death, about the decay of my body, but then when I come out of the movies, I have to face that reality." Now why bring all that up? Well, believe it or not, there was a huge group of people in Jesus' day who basically believed what Woody Allen believes: that there is no afterlife, that it's all kind of an atheistic existentialism, that life is just about what you do with it, but there's nothing that comes after life.

People believed that 2,000 years ago, and in today's passage, we see them debating Jesus. And listen, Jesus Christ's vision of what is on the other side is so absolutely opposite of the grim vision that existentialists like Woody Allen have that it is breathtaking. My prayer is that your breath will be taken away by Jesus Christ's description of what happens next.

Now for some background, here's what was happening in Judaism at the time of Christ. Most of the Jews in the first century believed in the resurrection and an afterlife. They started by believing in an earthly national resurrection of the nation Israel, and they were convinced of that by Ezekiel 37. In Ezekiel 37, there's a vision of the valley of dry bones, and I always loved this part because all the imagery that's associated with it is just so freaky. As a kid, I was just like, this is like a monster movie, this chapter, because in Ezekiel 37, the prophet Ezekiel has this vision of dry bones rising out of the ground and coming back to life and having their flesh knit on them again, and then their armor, and they're dressed for battle. That's a vision of the symbolic Israel, which is breathed on by God, and those bones are brought to life. That's a picture of the resurrection of national Israel.

And now by the time of Christ, most Jews also believed in a personal resurrection, that they, along with all of those who believed in the true God, would be raised after death. So you gotta ask, where did this picture of resurrection, of the idea of life after death come from if they didn't yet have the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul and so on? Well, it came from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. In fact, flip over to page two in your notes. You see where it says verses from the Hebrew Scriptures about the afterlife? You see that there? This is mostly rooted in the Psalms and the prophets, and let me just go through these here and let these encourage you if you are afraid of your own death or you're anticipating or experiencing the death of a loved one.

Look at what the Bible says: Psalm 16:10–11 "For you, Lord, will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one to rot in the grave. You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever." Psalm 49:15 "But as for me, God will redeem my life; he will snatch me from the power of the grave." Doesn't that sound like a resurrection to you? And what about this intriguing verse from Job? Job says, "And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God." Or Psalm 73:24 "You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory." A couple more: Isaiah 26:19 "But your dead will live, Lord; their bodies will rise. Let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy; your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead." And then finally, Daniel 12:2 "Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt."

Now all of this is important background for the scripture we're going to look at today because the majority position in Judaism at the time of Jesus, based on these verses and a lot of others like them, was that there was a resurrection. But we are introduced in Mark 12:18 to some Sadducees, and the Sadducees say there is no resurrection. Check this out, page one, here we go. Then Jesus was approached by some Sadducees. Hit pause. We saw last week that the Pharisees and the Herodians wanted to get Jesus in trouble with Rome by forcing him to answer a political question that would make him appear like a rebel. And now here's the second wave of people debating Jesus; this time it's the Sadducees, and their goal is to make Jesus look stupid. Their goal is to make him look like a fool.

Mark says they were religious leaders who say there is no resurrection from the dead. Now hit pause again for a second because you say, how in the world could they believe that there is no resurrection when all the verses we just looked at on page two from the Hebrew Bible that they would have had at the time of Jesus clearly teach that there is a resurrection? Well, here's the background that's going to help you get what's going on here. The Sadducees were aristocratic, wealthy families, well-educated society people, upper crust, and this is crucial: they inherited the priesthood. They hadn't really come to faith personally through conversion or something. It was an inherited thing. It was associated with family money, and they only believed the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Those are the only books that they believed in.

Now do you see why that's huge? Look back at those scriptures on the next page; just flip your notes back over there and look at them. What do you notice about those scriptures? Where are they from? The Psalms and the prophets, right? You see any verses from the first five books of the Bible in those texts about the resurrection, or do you see anything about the Messiah or about the judgment? No. And the Sadducees said, well, that's fine that you say the Psalms and the prophets teach the resurrection; we don't believe those are scripture. That's not the Bible. We only believe the first five books of the Bible, and there's nothing in the first five books of the Bible about that. And that is why they actually did not believe in the Messiah or the afterlife or a future judgment day or the resurrection or angels or spirits. The Sadducees basically thought all this supernatural stuff was ridiculous.

Religion to them was mostly about having an ethical system to live your life here and now. None of this heaven stuff, none of this judgment day stuff, none of this angel and resurrection nonsense. They said that's all nonsense. Now the Pharisees, on the other hand, were the opposite of that. The Pharisees were moralistic; we would call them conservatives. Kind of middle class, you know, Bible-believing conservatives. The Sadducees were basically wealthy, educated, liberal relativists. And so get this: they're trying to trap Jesus or at least out-Jesus him because he seems pretty sophisticated; Jesus does. Pretty smart, and some of the Sadducees probably suspect he's a liberal like them. He sure acts like a liberal sometimes, but sometimes he sounds more conservative than the conservatives do. So which one is he? Let's out him with a trap question.

And so they pose this question: "Teacher, Moses gave us a law that if a man dies leaving a wife without children, his brother should marry the widow and have a child who will carry on the brother's name." Now you might go, what? This is something called levered marriage, and this is known in many societies all around the world. This has developed independently in societies like on every continent on the planet, and this is actually a very merciful idea in ancient cultures. If a woman died without leaving children to support her when she got older, she was in a very precarious position because there was no welfare system in those societies. People didn't pay taxes to social security; there was no safety net. And so if she dies, now she has no husband to take care of her; she has no kids to take care of her. In a lot of those societies, she hasn't learned any skills. What's she gonna do? She's gonna be destitute; there's no way that she can make an ethical living. And so there was a provision in a lot of ancient societies that the brother of the husband, even if he's already married, would take in this woman into his household and have children with her so that when they both got old, her children could take care of her. That was kind of the safety system.

Now obviously that exact situation doesn't apply to us today, but check this out. They asked Jesus, "Well, suppose there were seven brothers. The oldest one married and then died without children, and so the second brother married the widow, but he also died without children, and then the third married her, and this continued with all seven of them, and still there were no children, and last of all, the woman also died. Now, and here's the trap: so tell us, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For all seven were married to her." And they just kind of stand back and fold their arms like, let's just see what he says about this.

You know, like I mentioned last week, I got a lot of great stuff from Tim Keller on this, and as he points out, this is a wedge question because it is designed to make the afterlife look stupid and potentially to make Jesus look stupid. Because if Jesus sort of laughs with them and says, "Yeah, you know what? That's really absurd. How could people really believe in life after that?" because obviously it leads to crazy situations like this, then all the conservatives will dislike Jesus because he's laughing with the liberals at, you know, how stupid the afterlife is. But if he goes into some technical argument, actually it's the first husband because the rabbi so-and-so said this, he's going to lose all the liberals and they'll roll their eyes at him. So he does neither.

Jesus is so—I know it sounds stupid to say the Son of God was a genius, but he was—and he responds in three ways: a rebuke, a redirection, and a reimagining. First, a rebuke. He says, "Actually, you guys are so wrong." It says Jesus replied, "Your mistake is that you don't know the scriptures and you don't know the power of God." Now again, pause here for a second because I want you to just ask yourself what do we learn from this rebuke of the Sadducees? Because let me ask you a question: most of the time in the Bible, when there's a religious group attacking Jesus, who is it? Who is it that's attacking Jesus most of the time? The Pharisees, not the Sadducees. That's a totally different group. And most of the time when Jesus is attacking a religious group, who is he attacking? The Pharisees. The Pharisees really despised Jesus, and Jesus really hated the religious hypocrisy of what we would call the hyper-fundamentalist Pharisees. But here, the enemies of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, are not embraced by Jesus either; he rebukes them too.

You know the enemy of my enemy is my friend, you've ever heard that? But the Sadducees were the enemy of Jesus, the enemy of the Pharisees, and they were not Jesus's friend; he rebukes them too. And this is so important because listen, the gospel is not a derivative of conservatism like the Pharisees or of liberalism like the Sadducees. The gospel is something else; it's not in the middle; it's something totally different than either one of those things. What's the gospel? There's lots of ways to summarize it, but here's just one: God is a God of justice. Sin has overtaken the world, and God just can't overlook that. He is a God of justice, but God is also a God of mercy, and Jesus Christ satisfied the justice of God so completely by the mercy of God that when I receive that gift of grace, I am justified before God by grace alone because of what God did for me on the cross.

The conservative Pharisees and the liberal Sadducees cannot stand this gospel, neither one, because the Pharisees agreed with the first part and said, "That's right, God's a God of pure justice. God is demanding, and God is holy, and the way to satisfy him is all these religious rules." And when the Pharisees listened to Jesus, they thought they smelled a liberal. But the Sadducees agreed with the second part, and they said, "You know what? There is no judgment. You do not stand before the judgment throne of God because you don't live after death. When you die, that's it; there's no wrath." And so the way to live is to be ethical. And when the Sadducees listened to Jesus, they thought they smelled a conservative. But the gospel is actually neither; it's totally different than either one.

I love the way Keller puts it: the God of Jesus is more conservative than the conservative God and more liberal than the liberal God at the same time. He is a God of total justice and a God of total mercy at the same time. You say, okay, so what's the application to me? Here it is: if you're a Christian, get used to all kinds of groups disliking you. Now why is that important? Because listen, a lot of us—tell me if this wasn't true for you—a lot of us, when we first come to Christ, we like the gospel because it seems like it confirms what we already believe. But the more you become like Jesus and the more you begin to grasp the gospel, the more you realize it's actually not like anything else. Grace is totally different from anything that we get from anybody else in our society.

And so some people won't like the fact that you believe in evangelism and you believe conversion is a good thing, and they'll roll their eyes when you say the Bible is God's word, and they'll call you a fundamentalist. And other people will roll their eyes when you talk about feeding the hungry and reaching the poor, and they'll call you a bleeding-heart liberal. If you're a Christian, get used to people from all sides of the spectrum misunderstanding you. And here's another application: if you're not a Christian or if you're just kind of checking out, and one of the things I love about TLC is there's always people at any service just checking it out, make sure you take time to understand the gospel and don't leap to snap judgments because the gospel is unlike anything else. It takes time to get grace.

And since Jesus said to them, "You are in error because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God," I think the obvious application is for you and me to ask, well, am I open to the scripture and to the power of God? You know, let alone knowing them. Ask yourself, have I come to the point where I've said, "God, I am totally open to whatever you show me in the word of God, and I'm totally open to whatever you want to do by your power in my life?" Because see, I think a lot of people are actually not open to that. Not only are we ignorant of the scripture and the power of God, we're actually not really open to either one. We've got our minds made up; we're set in our ways. Closed? Or are you open? What if the Bible told you you were wrong? And what if the power of God was powerful enough to change you? Would you even be open?

What if the scripture said God loves you unconditionally? And everybody says they believe that, but nobody really does because everybody goes, "Well, actually, I think he wants me first to quit smoking," or "I think he wants me to repent harder for that thing I did in my past," or "I think he really doesn't like me because of this." What if the scripture says God loves you unconditionally, and you really were open to that? And then the power of God said, but as Paul and Mark said a couple of weeks ago, but I love you too much to leave you that way, and the power of God could change your personality and heal all your wounds and start you on a new path in life. Would you even be open to that, really? Because that's a huge question. If you are truly open to the scripture and to the power of God, there is no limit to what God can do in your life, but you have to be open to both.

And then Jesus shows them first how they don't know the scriptures, and this is that redirection. See, every time in these three debates in Mark 12, Jesus is asked a wedge question—last week about politics, this week about the afterlife, the next week about morality. Each time, Jesus deftly redirects the question back to his core message. He will not let them pull him off message; he always pulls it back to a focus on a relationship with God, and we really need to learn how to do this too. Here, you see Jesus makes an amazing case for the reality of the afterlife. Check this out: he says, "Now about the dead rising, have you not read in the—what? The book of Moses—in the account of the burning bush?" Do you see how brilliant this is? Jesus does not go to the Psalms or the prophets; he does not go to Job or Daniel or Isaiah or David or some other person that they wouldn't have respected as holy scripture. He's brilliant because most of us would have gotten sidetracked on that immediately.

We would have said, "Well, here's 12 arguments for proving that the Psalms and the prophets actually are the word of God, so let's establish that first." Jesus doesn't even go there first; he goes to one of the first five books of the Bible, the only books the Sadducees respected. He's referring to Exodus 3:6, the place where God appears to Moses in the burning bush. They brought up Moses, so Jesus goes, "Let's talk about Moses." Jesus says, "Did you notice something?" And this is a great example because Jesus is arguing from the tense of a verb here, and to me this speaks to the complete inspiration of holy scripture. He says, "God does not say, 'I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.' He says, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.'" God speaks to them in the present tense even though by the time of Moses they'd been dead for centuries. Jesus says he's not the God of the dead but of the living. You are badly mistaken.

Jesus is saying God didn't tell Moses he was the God of Abraham; he says, "I am the God of Abraham." He says that shows God is still in a relationship with Abraham 400 years after Abraham had died. You know, the most tragic thing for us is when our relationships move into the past tense. When you say, "I had a son, I had a spouse, I had a friend." But what if it's possible for the most important relationship in the universe to never move into the past tense? And that's exactly what Jesus is saying here. God never moves into the past tense; he always is. And Jesus is saying this means he always is your God; he always is your friend. Jesus is pointing out when God puts his love on you, when God starts a covenant relationship with you, your relationship with God can never move into the past tense. He always loves you, and he always loves those loved ones—present tense.

Again quoting Keller, what you long for in all your other relationships—never-endingness—is true in your relationship with God. And when you get that relationship, you know it's true. See, Jesus is giving a—listen, he's giving a completely different argument than the old hellfire and brimstone preaching. How many of you grew up with any hellfire ever? Any heard hellfire and brimstone? You know how it goes, right? It goes like this: there is an afterlife, and without a relationship with God, it's not going to be very nice for you, so get a relationship with God. But Jesus is saying not, "There is an afterlife, so get a relationship with God." Jesus is going the actually the opposite way. He's saying, "Get a relationship with God, and then you'll know there's an afterlife. Get that never-ending relationship with God, and then you'll know the power of God, and then you'll understand scripture, and then you'll know that the best is yet to come because you will know God never lets you go."

But he does not say that's it. By Sadducees, gotcha with one of your favorite books, the Bible. He's not done because he gives us an amazing tantalizing preview of the afterlife. Really, it's a reimagining of heaven. Jesus says, "You don't know the power of God, for when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage." Now stop there for just a second. What Jesus is saying to the Sadducees is, "You guys, your imagination isn't big enough to comprehend how far beyond us our existence in heaven is going to be." Like, you know, I was thinking yesterday, I jotted down some songs about heaven, and it struck me that all of our songs about heaven in our society that I could think of, they're really all about things on earth because we can't imagine what heaven is like. Like, here's some examples: John Denver, "Almost Heaven, West Virginia." Seriously? The immortal poetry of Belinda Carlyle: "Ooh baby, do you know what that's worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth." Brian Adams: "Lying here in your arms, I'm in heaven." There's even a song by Hank Williams: "If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I don't want to go." That's my idea of heaven—mosquitoes and humidity. What about that Bruno Mars song, right? "Locked Out of Heaven," where he says basically heaven is like great sex. You know, the point is this: we can't—we just can't seem to imagine heaven without comparing it to something we like here on earth.

And what Jesus is saying here is, guys, it's not that heaven is boring; it's that your imaginations aren't big enough because heaven's like the best of earth times infinity. He says there's not marriage in heaven because in this respect, there'll be like the angels in heaven. There's no marriage in heaven. Now let me just pause there and say, let's be honest. Does that sound exciting to you? This does not sound exciting to most human beings because we're sexual beings; that's the way God created us. And what this sounds like is in heaven we will all just be friends. We're gonna have this eternal platonic relationship, you know, and that sounds so boring and so bland. But of course, that can't be the point of what he's saying, right? Because he's elaborating on a sentence: "You don't know the power of God." What he's—he can't mean the afterlife will have less intense love. The afterlife will have less passion. The afterlife will be less interesting than we have now. What he's saying is in the resurrection, the love we experience is going to make the greatest marriage and the greatest married passion, you know, the greatest erotic sense of oneness, the greatest love bond any couple could ever have look like a pop gun compared to an atomic bomb.

He's saying we're gonna live in a world of love. We're gonna be so soaked in love that it's going to surpass in passion and ecstasy anything we know here on earth. What a great promise! The love I will know surpasses any love I now know. Jesus is saying the afterlife is a world of love so incredibly powerful that it goes vastly beyond marriage. You know, I was thinking about this this morning. Shout out the answer to little kids: what is the greatest imaginable joy? It's really one word. If you know little kids, they'll do anything to get this. It's to eat—what? Candy! That's exactly right. Now what if you told a little, like, five-year-old, you know, there are greater joys waiting for you in life than eating candy—holding a newborn baby, or getting married, or holding your grandchild, or learning to drive, or graduating from school—but that little kid would hear you talking and would think to himself, "No way! Nothing is better than candy!" They can't conceive of it.

Well, when it comes to marriage, the feeling we have, I think we're a little bit like that kid. Jesus is saying there are greater joys than you can imagine because you're not developed enough yet. But when you're like the angels, you'll get it. Now here's a question I get a lot: does this mean I won't know my spouse? Jesus is not saying you won't know your spouse. Abraham is still Abraham; Isaac is still Isaac; Jacob is still Jacob. But there'll be a depth of delight and oneness and love that will make the best marriage in history look like nothing in comparison. Jesus is saying all of heaven will be a place of relationship, of pure love. He's not saying no more marriage; actually, what he's saying is that in the resurrection, every believer has a spouse. No more single people, no more widows, no more divorce. Why? He is our bridegroom, and we will all be made complete in him.

Let me tell you this: well, first of all, there's a lot of questions about marriage, about heaven that I didn't answer. There's a lot of questions about marriage that I don't know the answer to, but there's a lot of questions about heaven that I didn't answer in this. But we did a whole series called Heaven a few years ago; you can access that for free on our website, tlc.org, or pick up a copy of the CDs or DVDs at the desk. But I just want to say this: this is real personal resonance for me right in this moment because Friday my mother went on hospice care, which is kind of the next step before people go to see Jesus. And I know she loves the Lord; I know where she's going to go. My sister loves the Lord; she's taking care of her right now up in Oregon. In fact, I'm leaving right after church to fly up there to be with her, knowing that the next couple of days I spend with her might be the last time I see her in this life.

And talking on Friday with my sister on the phone, going through the list, you know, that hospice gives you: well, do we want her body cremated or buried? Where are we going to bury her—with Dad in Las Gatas or somewhere? Where are we going to have the funeral? We knew this was coming, but suddenly it just seems so real, so close. And I have to tell you, I do not know how people get through this without faith. I don't understand how somebody who has Woody Allen's view can get through this without just going crazy because what we believe and what my sister and I have reminded us of, what Christians really are preparing for their whole lives when they think about the death and resurrection of Jesus, is that both a cross and an empty tomb await for us for all who put their trust in the grace of God through Jesus Christ.

Saint Teresa of Avila had a great closing comment. She said, "The first moment in the arms of Jesus is going to make a thousand years of misery here on earth look like one night in a bad hotel." I love the way she put it: in the arms of Jesus, not just the first moment in heaven because it's all about that relationship. Lord, help us to understand just how wonderful this promise is. I want to thank you that the gospel is unique and it has a promise in it about the afterlife that melts in our mouths, that melts in our hearts, and in our souls, and may the sweetness and the comfort and the promise of this flow into the souls of anybody here in this room who is going through loss right now or is still grieving now. And may all of us remember it because all of us will go through this. And God, I ask again that you would remake us in the image of your Son through these great promises as the Spirit makes them real in our hearts. In Jesus' name, I pray, amen.