The Big Picture: Knowing the Scriptures and the Power of God

Mark 12:18-27
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, April 25, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Gregory Broderick

This is a difficult text to preach from, assigned, I think, with undue glee by the person who assigned it to me.  I was tempted to skip it.  I was tempted to preach from something else.  But “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).  So it may not be the easiest word to preach, but God has a word for His people from this text.

As human beings, we are limited creatures.  We are all here on this earth for a very short time, and then we are gone.  As Isaiah 40 and 1 Peter 1:24 remind us, “All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.”  In all the thousands of years of human history, very few names abide.  And most, even the great, are forgotten in a short time.  If you do not believe me, just talk to a young person.  Events that are seared into your memory, such as 9/11, or the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, are regarded as irrelevant history, or, worse, not known at all.  This is a result of our finite nature as human beings and our limited perspective.  As a species, we tend to think that history began on the day we were born and will end on the day that we die.  Of course, not overtly—most of us are too socially conscious to actually say that out loud.  But we live that way as a practical matter.  There is a subtle assumption embedded in the way that we live, which is that this life is all that there is.

This kind of small-view perspective is clearly on display in our text this morning.  The Sadducees present our Lord Jesus with a wild hypothetical involving what is called levirate marriage.  This is a practice where, if a man died and he left his wife with no children, his brother would marry the widow in order to provide for her, to take care of her, and to carry on that brother’s name.  If you are highly interested in this topic, you can read more about it in Deuteronomy 25.

But always skeptical of the resurrection, the Sadducees used this part of the Mosaic law to develop an extreme hypothetical and to expose what they think is a fatal flaw in the idea of the resurrection, which is otherwise clearly taught in Scripture.  This is an underhanded attack on veracity of the Holy Scriptures, but it did not work.  Instead, the Lord Jesus exposes their problem.  They are ignorant, they are scripturally obtuse, and they have a wrong view of God and a wrong view of eternity.  Their unstated premise is that this life is all that there is, and that any next life must be just like this one, some sort of continuation.  That is their viewpoint.  Jesus points out their problem.  This life is not all that there is, nor are the things of this life even very important in the eternal view.  Instead, the one thing that is important in this life, the one thing needful in this life, is that we confess Christ as Lord and Savior and enter into eternal life with Jesus Christ to worship God in joy and in glory forever.

Our 40 or 70 or a hundred years on this earth are insignificant compared to the ten thousands of ten thousands of years in eternity—in fact, the eternity years in eternity, the infinity years in eternity.  All those years we will spend either in eternal worship of God in heaven or in eternal torment and agony in hell, bearing the wrath that we deserve.  In fact, the things of this life only really matter to the extent that they bear on this question:  “Where will I go when this life is over?”

The key takeaway from our scripture this morning is this:  Keep your eyes on the prize.  Focus on the big picture of eternity, not the insignificant minutia of this world.  We can all say “Amen” to this for unbelievers, who may meander down the path to eternal damnation, distracted by unimportant and earthly matters.  I imagine I will get a high percentage of “Amen’s” to that.  But it can also be true for those of us who have confessed Christ as Lord and Savior.  We can easily become so consumed with the things of this life, with the things of this world, that we lose sight of eternity, and this can be dangerous.  We can, at the worst, shipwreck our own faith and prove it false.  But even short of that, we can pierce ourselves with many unnecessary griefs or retard our work in the kingdom of God.

Jesus is saying here in our text, “Don’t lose focus. “ Don’t become distracted.  Know the Scriptures, know the power of God, and know where you are headed—to glory, to eternity, to new life, to a perfect life, the life that is truly life, with God and with one another forever.  That is where believers in Jesus Christ are heading.  Everyone else is heading to agony, to torment, and to hell forever.

1. The Sadducees’ Problem

The principal problem of these Sadducees is unbelief.  They rejected the concept of the resurrection of the dead, even though it is taught in Scripture.  And it says that right here in verse 18:  “The Sadducees .  .  .  say there is no resurrection.”  Of course, their problem is that, while they say there is no resurrection, the Scriptures say that there is.  It is clearly taught in the Holy Scriptures, which are the infallible word of God.

This was especially clear by Jesus’ time.  Jesus taught about the resurrection repeatedly, and they had the New Testament revelation.  Perhaps it was not all written down by the time of the events in our text this morning, but it was clearly taught all over the place by Jesus in that time.  Jesus said in John 11:25, “I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies.”  It does not get much more explicit than that.

But this was not a new teaching that Jesus was bringing.  The resurrection is clearly taught all over the Old Testament as well.  Indeed, just before Jesus declares, “I am the resurrection and the life” in John 11, Martha makes clear that she already understands this concept.  She says, “I know my brother will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”  So she knew about it.  Jesus may have brought a new understanding, but it is not a new concept or an obscure doctrine.  In fact, if you think about it, this doctrine was so well-established in the Scriptures that Martha, an ordinary woman living in the suburbs of Jerusalem, not only knows about it but confidently declare it.  It was widely understood.

Teaching on the resurrection is all over the Old Testament.  In Job 19:25–27 we read, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end, He will stand upon the earth.  And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see Him with my own eyes—I and not another.’  Or look at Psalm 22:29:  “All who go down to the dust will kneel before Him—those who cannot keep themselves alive.”  Psalm 49:15 says, “But God will redeem my life from the grave; He will surely take me to Himself.”  So this is not talking about rescuing you from some death you might face in this life.  It is talking about taking you to Himself after this life is over.  Hosea 6:2 says, “After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will restore us, that we may live in His presence.”  This is speaking of eternal life.  Hosea 13:14: “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death.”  Isaiah 26:19: “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise.”  Or Daniel 12:2: “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake:  some to everlasting life, other to shame and everlasting contempt.”  This is taught all over the Scriptures, in the Old Testament all the way through to the New Testament.

Yet despite this clear teaching of the Old Testament and the Lord Jesus Christ, our verse says that the Sadducees said that there is no resurrection.  This can be nothing other than unbelief in the face of all that clear scriptural teaching.  It can be nothing other than wickedness to refuse to believe God’s revelation.  They outright rejected the word of God, despite claiming to be orthodox believers in Jehovah and His Book.  Recall, these are not regular, uneducated people.  These are not some outliers.  These are the Sadducees, the party of the high priests, the aristocrats, the big shots.  They are temple workers.  They are priests and chief priests.  That is who makes up this party.  Yet in their pride, while claiming to be not just God’s people, but God’s special people—in their pride they reject the word of God, substituting their own judgment for God’s clear scriptural teaching.

Despite their claims of rationality and piety, their rejection of God’s Scriptures was the result of enmity, not the result of inquiry.  This is obvious from the interchange here.  The question they are asking is not a question.  It is not the earnest answer-seeker coming to understand something he does not understand.  Such a person might ask, “Will I still be married to my wife or to my husband at the resurrection?”  Or, “What if I am remarried after being widowed?  Whose husband will I be at the resurrection?”  Those are reasonable questions to ask.

But that is not what these Sadducees are asking.  That is not their approach.  They begin with the premise that the resurrection is false.  Their question is disingenuous.  They are like the Herodians who questioned Jesus about paying taxes while intent on catching Him in His words.  So they invent a crazy hypothetical:  A woman marries seven different brothers, and each brother dies, leaving her childless.  I ask you:  Is this a real problem?  It is not a real problem.  It is not a real question.  It is unlikely that this ever occurred in the history from Moses all the way to Jesus.  But even if it did occur, even if something like this had occurred in the ancient past somewhere, even if seven men in a row married the same widow and left her with no heir—even if something like that had happened somewhere along the line, this was not their problem.  This was not an actual problem for them.

This reminds me of people who quibble about the moral responsibility of some hypothetical Amazonian tribe who has never heard the gospel and ask if it is still fair to hold them morally accountable.  And there is, of course, a scriptural answer to that question.  See Psalm 19:1 and Romans 1.  But the real answer to that question is that this is not your problem.  You have heard the gospel.  You are going to hear the gospel today, if you have not heard it before.  You have a moral responsibility before God to confess it or to bear the consequences if you reject it.  Now, this kind of abstract question is often a smokescreen to avoid engaging with the real issue.  The real issue is not whether this is fair for someone else.  The real issue is whether you believe it.  That is what Jesus asked.  He said, “I am the resurrection and the life.’  And then what does He say?  “Do you believe this?”  Is Jesus your Lord and Savior?  Will you confess the truth?

We see that these Sadducees would not believe, no matter what evidence was presented to them.  Remember, they heard Jesus preach about the resurrection.  They even come and question Him here.  They heard Jesus say that He would die and rise again to prove His claims (Matt. 27:63).  But after He did so, they lied to cover up the report of all that had happened (Matt. 28:13).  They refused to believe the eyewitness reports of His disciples, who saw the risen Lord Jesus.  They refused to believe the accounts of more than five hundred, who saw Jesus after He had clearly died and been buried in the tomb (1 Cor. 15:3–8).  In Acts 4, Peter and John testified before the Sanhedrin.  They were all there.  Do they believe it?  Do they say, “This is the truth.  We were skeptical, but now we believe it”?  No.  Indeed, when Stephen said, “I see heaven open, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” in Acts 7:56, what was their response?  They covered their ears, they yelled at the top of their voices to drown out his voice, and they stoned him to death.  They have no interest in truth.

Their focus is not truth here in their interchange with the Lord Jesus.  Their focus is in proving their point.  There cannot be a resurrection, they claim.  Look at the absurd results that would follow:  one woman married to seven men.  It doesn’t make any sense.  “Aha!  We have it!” they think.  They failed to regard the Scriptures as the word of God and as absolutely true.  And what a fatal conceit that is.

Instead of looking for a way to understand the consequences that flow from the truth of God’s word, they lean on their own understanding and come to the conclusion that the Scriptures must be in error.  Indeed, as Sadducees, it is likely that they rejected these texts as being scriptural at all.  Many in the party of the Sadducees regarded only the Torah, the first five books, as inspired.  So they rejected the psalms, Job, and all those proofs that I gave you before.  You can see the undertone in verse 19: “‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘Moses wrote,’” thus and so.  They had to subtly give weight to the words of the Torah.  Moses wrote.  It is not just something in the Scripture.  Moses said.  That gives it extra authority.  No, no, no.  It is not that Moses wrote; it is God said.  That is what gives the Scripture its authority.  Second Peter 1:20–21 says, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation.  .  .  .  but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

So it is not Moses’ authority we are trading on.  It is God’s authority, God’s spoken word.  We must submit our conscience, our understanding, and our thinking to the word of God.  We cannot sit over the word of God and judge it.  Second Timothy 3:16 teaches, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”  All of it.  When we encounter something in Scripture that we do not understand or that does not conform to our own experience, we must conclude that it is we who are in error, not the Scriptures.  The Scriptures are inerrant and infallible.  That means they contain no mistakes, and they could not contain a mistake.  They are always right, and they are always proved right because they are the word of God.  God spoke them, and God does not err.  He does not make mistakes (Ps. 18:30), nor does he lie (Num. 23:19).

We must always be careful to conform our thinking and our consciences to the Scriptures as God’s holy word, not the other way around.  As a counterexample to these Sadducees, look at Nicodemus.  He did not understand.  He asked, “How can you say that we must be born again?  It doesn’t make sense.  You cannot enter your mother’s womb and be born a second time.  I don’t understand.”  He is coming as a person with an earnest question.  And to such people, Jesus gives an explanation.  Jesus gives an explanation logically, but He also gives the understanding by the Holy Spirit so that you can understand.  That is the right approach when we run across something in the Scriptures that we do not understand.

2. Jesus’ Response

We may be turned around by the crafty arguments of the Sadducees and the like.  We may be mixed up by those, but God is not.  Just as with the Pharisees and the Herodians who posed the tax collector hypothetical, Jesus sees through the duplicity of the Sadducees as well.  Jesus is omniscient.  He knows their thoughts.  He knows reality comprehensively.  He was not tripped up by their claims of logical inconsistency in the Scripture because he knows the full-orbed truth.  He knows how it all fits together.  He has the comprehensive and perfectly global perspective.  He knows that the error is not in God’s word but in these fallible men who came to question him.

So He tells them in plain terms, “You are in error”—not, “The Scriptures are in error,” but, “You are in error.“  Now, the NIV translation of our text records it as a question: “Are you not in error?”  The parallel passage in Matthew records it as a statement.  Either way, Jesus is saying, “Wrong.”   And not just wrong, but “You are wrong because you are ignorant.  You, Sadducees, do not know the Scripture or the power of God.”

Here Jesus exposes the foolishness of the Sadducees and their limited perspective.  They have supposed that the life to come, eternity, is more or less just like this life, only perhaps with some upgrades.  But eternal life will not be a continuation of this life; not merely a better version of this life.  It will be categorically different from this life, not merely in degree but in kind.  And, frankly, it is well beyond our capacity to understand at this time because we are limited, limited creatures.  If you want to prove it, just try to imagine eternity and infinity.  It is beyond our capacity to understand even the simple concepts of eternity and infinity, because we are such limited people.  Try to imagine a heaven with no more sin.  It doesn’t make sense to us.  Or with no more sorrow.  Sorrow is such a part of our daily lives.  That doesn’t make sense to us.  Or with no more pain.  We cannot gather this concept.  We can’t understand these concepts.  They are difficult.

In 2 Corinthians 12:4, Paul, who received a vision of heaven, attempts to describe it but words fail.  He says he heard inexpressible things.  Now, he doesn’t mean they couldn’t be expressed, because he heard them.  He means he cannot express what he heard because they are beyond his capacity.  It is simply outside of our experience.  We lack any framework for comprehending it.  We lack any framework for describing it due to our limited nature and our finite existence.  (GTB)  We do not know what those who have gone ahead of us to glory are experiencing right now.  But we know that it is good, and we know that it is great, and we know that it is perfect.  “Now we see only through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12).  So now we see through a glass darkly, but one day we will know.  We will see God face to face.  We will have only joy—no fear and no trouble—only ecstasy all the time.  Perfect fellowship with God and one another forever in total unity and total joy.  That is beyond our capacity to imagine or understand.

It is beyond our capacity to understand or imagine, but we know it, and we know it because we know the Scriptures.  These Sadducees knew the Scriptures in a sense.  They knew what it said.  But they did not know the Scriptures believingly.  That is where they erred.  They sat in judgment over the Scriptures.  They tried to make the infinite God fit their limited experience from this short and trial-filled life.

But I want to warn you: I have been speaking about the greatness of heaven, how great it is, how it is so great that we cannot understand—I want to warn you that, as unimaginably good and perfect as eternal glory with God is, as much as it cannot be described to the good, the converse is true of eternal hell.  Scripture tells us so.  So we know that too.  Eternal hell is equally awful.  Eternal conscious torment with no way out.  It is equally eternal.  It is equally infinite; it has no end.  It is equally indescribably bad.  And Jesus speaks of it in Mark 9:48 as the place where “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched,” quoting Isaiah 66:24.

In Luke 16, Jesus speaks of hell.  He says that the rich man went to hell, was in torment, and longed to lick the cool water from the finger of Lazarus, the former detestable and leprous beggar.  That is how bad hell is, that you will lick the beggar’s finger just to get some cool water.  Hell is beyond description, and so we speak of it in analogical terms.  We speak of flames.  We speak of dungeons and lakes of fire.  That is all from Revelation 20:14.  Now, that may be literal, or it just may be the closest analogy we have.  I don’t know yet.  But we know this: Hell is as indescribably bad as heaven is indescribably good, because God says so.

Apart from confronting their unbelief, Jesus rebukes these Sadducees for their pathetic ignorance and small perspective.  This world, He tells them, is not all that there is.  The things of this world are not even the critical things, the lasting things.  Even important things, like marriage, are not eternal.  Now, it surely matters whom you marry.  I can testify.  But it only matters because it means we are doing God’s will when we marry the one He wants, that He has chosen for us, and because that person helps us along the way as we are conformed more and more to the likeness of Christ.

We must keep in view the big picture—not what job you have or what house you live in, how much money you make or what you achieve.  No, we must keep in mind where am I am going for eternity.  Am I going to be with infinite God in infinite joy in infinite glory?  Or am I going to suffer His infinite wrath in hell?

3. The Right Question

They asked the wrong question.  But the right question to ask here is not some self-justifying nonsense about an unrealistic hypothetical.  The right question is, “What must I do to be saved?”

We have already established from the Scriptures that there is a resurrection, not just of Christ our Lord, but of everyone good or bad.  Second Corinthians 5:10 says, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.”  That is real.  At that time, there will be no escape, there will be no argument, there will be no opposition.  Moreover, as I have already alluded to, everyone will live eternally, either in heaven with God in glory, or in hell forever.  There is not a third way.  There is not some blinking out of existence, and you just cease to exist.  It is either eternal heaven or eternal hell.  That is it.  In Matthew 25, Jesus taught those who were on His right, “Come, you who are blessed by My Father.  Come and take your inheritance, the kingdom of prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Matt. 25:36).  So that is those who are on His right.  And He says to those on His left, “Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41).  This is Jesus speaking.  There is only a right or a left.  There is no in-between.

But what is the dividing line between the right and the left?  Who goes right and who goes left?  Certainly, the good works spoken of in Matthew 25 are part of it.  But they do not ultimately decide.  After all, Jesus says, “Those who are blessed by My Father” and “those who are cursed,” not “those who did good” and “those who did wrong.”  No, good works show the difference, but they do not make the difference.  You cannot earn your way into heaven.  We know that from Romans 3:23 and 6:23.  It tells us that all have sinned, and it tells us that the wages of sin is death.  So we know that all deserve hell.  If it were a question of merit, everyone would be on the left, everyone would go to hell.  What is the difference, then, between those on the right and those on the left?  It is nothing more or less than faith in Jesus Christ alone.  All who call on the name of the Lord in faith will be saved (Rom. 10:13)—saved by grace, saved through faith in Christ alone.

The Sadducees were very foolish.  Here is the one person who can save you, standing right in front of you, willing to talk to you, the God-man Jesus Christ, the only totally unique being in the history of mankind.  You are meeting with Him face to face.  Not very many people got that opportunity.  You are meeting with Him face to face, and you blow it on a fake question.  You could have asked, as the Philippian jailer did, “What must I do to be saved?”  And He would have told you.  Instead, they went for trivia, for debate, to make a point, to justify themselves.  What a waste!  What a tragedy!

It is too late for them, but it is not too late for you.  Jesus Himself is present here today, perhaps not in physical form as a man anymore, but He is just as present here today in spirit.  He is speaking to you today through me.  Don’t waste this opportunity like they wasted their opportunity.  Hear the word, put your faith in Christ, cry out to Him, and be saved today.  Don’t be distracted or misdirected by the comparatively trivial matters about your job or your house or your lunch or whatever else.  Eternity hangs in the balance as you sit here today.

See that big picture.  Where will you be in a hundred years?  Where will you be in a thousand years?  Where will you be in ten thousand years?  What will you care about then?  Will you be in heaven, or will you be in hell?  Will you be in glory, or will you be in agony?  Those are your only two options.

See that big picture.  Know the Scriptures, which tell it to you.  Believe them.  Believe the power of God.  Jesus speaks about the power of God, and we know the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe (Rom. 1:16).  Confess Christ today and be eternally saved.  In the final analysis, this is all that matters.

4. Beware, Christians!

I am sure that I am getting a lot of agreement.  I can even hear some of it from up here.  And most of you have confessed Christ as Lord and heartily say “Amen” as I exhort others to do so.  That is good.  But, Christians, be warned.  You too can lose sight of the big picture.  You too can become ignorant of the Scriptures, ignorant of the power of God.

This is most dangerous for those who are second- or third-soil people.  They have embraced the word, just like these Sadducees think that they have embraced the word.  Not only do they think they are God’s people, but they also think they are a class above God’s people.  They think they are saved, but their confession is false.  In time, they will abandon the faith.  And so I say: make sure that this is not you.  The Sadducees and Pharisees all thought that they were secure and that they were saved, but most of them fell away.  Most of them did not put their faith in Christ.

Ask yourself earnestly:  Are you in Christ truly?  Are you still producing the fruit of good works, obedience to God?  Why are you in God’s holy church this morning?  Is it to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?  Or is it to receive material blessings?  Or because it is the easy thing for you to do?  If you have all those material blessings, if you are here for these material blessings, what will you do if those material blessings go away?  Will you stand firm and let nothing move you?  Or will you leave because the thing that you are here for is gone?  Are you continuing to call others to Christ and to call others up in their faith?  Examine yourself and be examined.  Repent of your sins and recommit your life to Christ today, and demonstrate this life of God in the soul of man by your obedience of faith (Rom. 1:5; Heb. 5:9).

Even after you have made your calling and election sure, be very careful not to be distracted by the minor things of this life.  It can happen to anyone.  It happened to the disciples.  In Mark 9:33 they asked, “Who is the greatest?”  Who cares?  The question is, “Are you going to heaven or not?”  It is not, “Who is the greatest for the short period of time you are on earth here?”  In Mark 10, we see the power-hungry James and John, looking for position, not the important thing of this life.  In Mark 8, we see the incorrect focus on having no bread in the boat.  Jesus is speaking about eternal matters, and the disciples are running around looking for a piece of bread.  Even the great Peter lost focus in Mark 8 and rebuked Jesus Christ Himself and told Him not to go to the cross.  So, yes, anyone can lose sight of the big picture.  If it happened to them who are greater than us, it can certainly happen to us, and it can happen to you.

We are especially at risk here in this church because we are especially blessed in this life.  We have a true church with true shepherds.  We think it is common because we are used to it; it is not common.  We have a pious and learned pastor who has been with us to lead us for almost fifty years.  We are a prosperous people.  We are basically rich compared to the rest of the world, compared to most Americans—even compared to most people who live in our surrounding area.  We don’t worry about where our next meal is going to come from.  We don’t worry about our housing situation.  We worry about getting a bigger house maybe, but we don’t worry about “Where am I going to live?”  or “Am I going to have a place to live?”  We mostly have two or more cars, and big houses—not everybody, but most people.  We are rich, free, safe, and alive all at the same time, and that puts us in the top 0.001 percent of all humanity that has ever lived anywhere at any time.

So we can quickly mistake the order of priorities, can’t we?  God does not exist to bless me and to give me the stuff that I want.  That is the wrong focus.  Indeed, I exist to glorify Him and to enjoy Him forever.  That is the chief end of man.  The purpose of all these material blessings that He has given us is not so that we can enjoy the material blessings.  That is not the point.  It is to draw me closer to God so that I can testify to His greatness.  We recently read Psalm 105:44–45.  Speaking of the people He brought out of Egypt, it says, “He gave them the lands of the nations, and they fell heir to what others had toiled for.”  And then it gives the reason why: “that they might keep His precepts and observe His laws.  Praise the Lord.”  So the purpose of those blessings is not so that they could live the “good life.”  It is so that they could obey God, that they had what they needed to obey God and live the life God wanted them to live, and so that they could praise the Lord.

As it was with them, so it is with us.  Let us always remember that earthly matters, however good or bad they become, are secondary to eternal matters.  And let us drill down.  The purpose of your godly husband is not to make you feel nice or to bring you flowers.  It is to wash you with water through the word and to lead you in righteousness.  You will not need to be washed with water in eternity.  You will not need a husband to lead you in righteousness in eternity.  God will be there to do that.  The purpose of my godly wife is not merely to take care of me or make me dinner or whatever else.  It is to be a helpmeet in this life, to help me to do God’s will, and to help me to make sure that I know what God’s will is.  The purpose of my job or my house or whatever things I may have is not to provide me with luxury so that I could sit around and have that “good life.”  There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not the purpose.  The purpose is to provide us with the tools we need to do the work that God has for us to do:  spreading the gospel and building one another up in the kingdom of God.

So let us not get lost in the pursuit of these secondary things; these mere means.  Instead, let us focus and re-focus on the primary objective:  to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.  We are to have the mind of Christ.  We are not to engage in this worldly thinking.  That is what happened to the Sadducees here.  They were stuck in worldly thinking.  A friend of mine preached last year:

There are many ways to think like the world.  But one especially common way is to think that this world is all there is.  .  .  .  That is not what you say you think, but that is how you operate.  You operate with only the things of this world in mind.  We all get caught up in the here and now, and we have no eye to eternity.  .  .  .  This is why God calls us in the New Testament to fix our eyes on Jesus, and to set our minds on things above, not on earthly things.  That is what Paul says in Colossians 3:2.  He not only says, “Set your minds on things above,” but he especially says, “not on earthly things.”.  .  .  We need to take the reality of the true and living God into account in all our thinking and in all our reasoning.[1]

I couldn’t have said it better, so I didn’t.

Conclusion

What is the conclusion of the matter?  Let us strive to do what I just read.  Let us strive to fix our eyes on eternity.  Let us strive to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.  Let us know the Scriptures that tell us that, yes, we are all sinners; that tell us that, yes, all of us deserve God’s eternal wrath; but that also tell us that there is a way out, that there is a way to God.  Salvation is available by faith in Christ.  Let us know the Scriptures believingly, trustingly.  Let us know the power of God, the gospel.  The gospel is the power of God for us who believe.  Let us trust in Christ and be saved today, and make our calling and election sure today.  And having done so, let us live for Christ who died for us—live for Him obediently, joyfully, and in thanksgiving to God our Savior.

That is the good life—not the big house and the pool and the nice car and whatever.  It is living for Christ.  Living in Christ is the good life.  That is the happy life.  And we can all have it—all of us.  God promised it to all who believe in Him.  Do it today and be eternally secure.  And then, having done so, let us walk together to eternal glory, to life with God and one another.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Rev.  Gregory Perry, “Beware of Yeast,” https://gracevalley.org/sermon/beware-of-yeast/