Mark 12:18 - Meaning and Application

The Sadducees, who were like the deists of that time, came to attack Jesus. It seems they were not trying to hurt his body, as the scribes, Pharisees, and chief priests later did. They were not mainly bigots or persecutors, but doubters and unbelievers, and their aim was to weaken his teaching and stop it from spreading.

They denied the resurrection, the world of spirits, and any future reward or punishment after death. Jesus had made it his work to prove and defend these great truths, and he had carried the teaching much farther than it had been carried before. So they tried to trap him with a question.

They used the ancient law that if a man died without children, his brother had to marry the widow (Mark 12:19). Then they imagined a case where seven brothers, one after another, married the same woman (Mark 12:20). They likely meant to mock that law and make the whole law of Moses look foolish and inconvenient.

People who deny God’s truth often try to make God’s laws and ordinances look bad too. But their main goal here was to make the resurrection look absurd. They imagined that if there is a future life, it must be just like this life, and then they thought they had a problem. Either the woman would have seven husbands in the next world, which they called ridiculous, or no one could tell whose wife she would be.

Notice how carefully they worked against the truth. They did not openly say, “There is no resurrection.” They did not even seem to question it directly. Instead, they acted as if they believed it and merely wanted help understanding it. They pretended to be learners, when in fact they were trying to strike a deadly blow at the doctrine. This is a common trick of heretics and Sadducees, they confuse and tangle the truth they do not dare to deny.

Christ answered them clearly and firmly. This was an important matter, so he did not brush it aside. He spoke at length, so that even if they were not corrected, others might be strengthened.

First, he told the Sadducees that they were wrong, and he traced their error to ignorance. People who mock the resurrection often try to seem like the only intelligent ones, because they call themselves free thinkers. In truth, they are the ones in bondage, and they are the most biased thinkers of all.

He asked, “Do you not therefore err?” Their mistake came from two things. First, they did not know the Scriptures. Not that the Sadducees had never read them, or were not familiar with them. But they did not understand them rightly. They twisted their meaning, or else they refused to accept them as God’s word and set their own reasoning above Scripture.

A right knowledge of Scripture, the source and foundation of revealed religion, is the best protection against error. Keep Scripture truth, and it will keep you.

Second, they did not know the power of God. They could not deny that God is all-powerful, but they would not apply that truth here. They gave in to objections that only seem strong if you forget God’s power. If they had held fast to God’s almighty power, those objections would have fallen away. Power belongs to God (Psalm 62:11; Romans 4:19-21).

The same power that made soul and body, and kept them together in life, can keep the body safe and the soul active when they are apart. It can also bring them together again. The Lord’s arm is not too short. We see God’s power in the return of spring (Psalm 104:30), in grain rising again from death-like seed (John 12:24), in restoring a broken people to peace and prosperity (Ezekiel 37:12-14), and in the many people raised to life in both Testaments. We see it most clearly in Christ’s own resurrection (Ephesians 1:19-20). All of these are signs of our own resurrection by the same power (Philippians 3:21).

Second, Jesus removed the force of their objection by showing the true nature of the life to come (Mark 12:25). “When they rise from the dead,” he said, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage.” So it is pointless to ask, “Whose wife will she be?” The marriage bond, though given in earthly life, will not exist in heaven.

Turks and unbelievers may imagine sensual pleasures in their false paradise, but Christians know better. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50). We look for something far greater, full satisfaction in God’s love and likeness (Psalm 17:15). In heaven, God’s people are like the angels in heaven, and angels do not marry or have children.

It is no wonder we end up with endless confusion when we measure the world of spirits by the things of this world. Christ therefore lifts our minds above earthly ideas and shows that the future life is of another kind.

Third, he proves the future life, and the blessedness of the righteous in it, from God’s covenant with Abraham. God honored that covenant after Abraham had died (Mark 12:26-27). Jesus appealed to Scripture: “Have you not read in the book of Moses?” We have an advantage when speaking with people who have read the Bible, though many who read it twist it, just as these Sadducees did, to their own destruction.

Jesus pointed them to what God said to Moses at the bush: “I am the God of Abraham.” He did not say, “I was his God,” but “I am his God.” God was still Abraham’s portion and happiness, his all-sufficient God.

It would make no sense for God to keep that relation to Abraham, and to declare it so solemnly, if Abraham had been wiped out of existence. Nor could the living God be the portion and happiness of someone who was dead forever. So we must conclude that Abraham’s soul still lives and acts in a separate state after death.

That means the body must rise again at some time, because the human soul has such a deep and natural bond with the body that a complete and forever separation would not fit the peace and rest, much less the blessed joy, of those souls who have the Lord as their God. In the end, he concludes, “You therefore are badly mistaken.” Those who deny the resurrection are deeply wrong, and they ought to be told so.