Luke 20:34-35 “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die, for they are like the angels.”

The Sadducees to whom Jesus was speaking had no real desire for the resurrection. They were the ruling class. They were generally wealthy. They were satisfied with their earthly life. That’s why they feared Jesus. They feared that he would upset the status quo. They were on top now, as close to heaven as they needed to get.

We may not be so satisfied as the Sadducees were, but we are also tempted to settle for less than God provides. We become too obsessed with improving our conditions here. Sometimes that comes out as rank materialism. We pour ourselves into making heaven on earth.  We stop just short of outfitting our homes with clouds and pearly gates.

This worldly obsession may show itself another way. We become so concerned with improving our world’s morals, including our own, that we slip into thinking we can create heaven on earth. We try to find our heaven in better behavior rather than more things.

Obviously, I am not against better behavior. But no matter how nice we make ourselves or others, no matter how much stuff we collect, do we really want this world to be all there is?

Jesus reveals that the resurrection is all gift. When he says, “Those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age…” there is a special emphasis on the word “considered.” Our worthiness is not earned. I once saw an ad for the U.S. Marines featuring the sword that is part of their dress uniform. The caption above the sword read, “Earned. Never given.” That’s the way our world thinks things should be. But that’s not the way it is with the resurrection. Here the caption should read, “Given. Never earned,” at least, not earned by us. Eternal life is a gift that God gives us freely. He gives it by giving us his Son, who gives his life for us at the cross, so that he might give us forgiveness of all our sins. It’s ours though we have not lived worthy ourselves.

To those who take part in the resurrection, Jesus promises, “and they can no longer die.” Sooner or later, death begins to sound appealing. Our health declines, we live with constant pain, and death sounds like a welcome escape. Human relationships fail, we are lonely, or depressed, and death seems to offer relief. More than we fear death, we fear suffering, whether in mind or body.

Understand that suffering is itself part of death. It is evidence our bodies are dying and our world is dying. It’s part of the process. We may hope to die quickly and painlessly–fall asleep and never wake up again– but death always involves a degree of violence. It tears apart a body and a soul which were never created to be separated. It is still the wages of sin. And if one wakes up in hell after death, it provides no relief or escape.

Those Jesus raises to life with God, however, can no longer die. The life that follows will not be an endless repeat of our current experience. Death is gone and so are all its symptoms. Have you noticed that when the Bible describes heaven, it usually speaks in terms of what it is not? There is no more crying or pain, hunger or thirst. Anger, hatred, and loneliness have all disappeared. Doesn’t an existence like that sound desirable?

In place of death Jesus promises, “They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.” “Wait a minute,” we might object. “Aren’t we already God’s children? Doesn’t Paul say you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus? What does this have to do with the resurrection?”

It is true, we are all children of God now by faith. But do we look the part? I don’t always act like one. Sometimes my behavior makes me look like I belong in the “other guy’s” family. Life doesn’t always treat me like a member of God’s royal family. Problems make it look like someone is out to get me. Is that what we expect for God’s children?            

But in the resurrection, our new identity, the one we have now by faith, will be clear to see. Our status as God’s children will no longer be hidden behind sin or suffering. We will be glorious. We will be holy. Everything we do will end in fantastic success. Doesn’t that resurrection sound desirable?

Luke 20:27-33 “Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. ‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?’”

The Sadducees believed that they had come up with a scenario that made the idea of a resurrection and an afterlife nonsensical. Part of the welfare system provided by the Law of Moses required an unmarried brother to marry his brother’s widow if his brother died. This provided support for the widow, it provided an heir for that branch of the family, and it made sure that the land stayed in the family.

It also raised a problem in the afterlife in the minds of the Sadducees. Who would be married to whom? It wouldn’t be right for all these people to be married to each other. Marriage is between one man and one woman. None of the men in their story had a greater claim on the relationship. No children had been born. Polygamy wasn’t an acceptable option. It seemed better to the Sadducees not to believe in life after death at all.

Modern day Sadducees aren’t hard to find. The halls of academia are full of them, sometimes even the halls of religious academia. The objections may not be the same, but the basis for them is. They object to logical problems with the resurrection as they see it. Maybe you have even entertained some of these skeptical objections in your own mind.

There is a scene in the movie The Lion King in which the father, Mustafa, teaches his son, Simba, how “the great circle of life” works: “You must respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope,” Mustafa says. “But dad, don’t we eat the antelope?” Simba asks. “When we die, our bodies become the grass,” Mustafa explains, “and the antelope eat the grass. And so, we are all connected in the great circle of life.”

We too might think, “If I die and my body returns to the dust, those dust particles go to feed worms and plants. Then as part of the food chain part of me may later end up in other animals or plants, which in turn end up on another person’s plate. Atoms and molecules that once made up my body then become part of another person’s body. How will God raise our bodies if part of what was once me now belongs to someone else?” If we let our reason and logic get away with us, then the resurrection may not seem sensible.

Jesus, however, offers a sensible solution. “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage.” The Sadducees understood the way that things work in this world. Marriage belongs to this life. But it is a leap of logic to assume our marriages follow us into the life to come. Where is that written? Just because we have seen or experienced something doesn’t give us the right to assume things always work that way.

But that is exactly what our sinful reason tends to do. We presume to judge God’s promises right or wrong, true or false, based upon our personal experiences or observation. We draw sweeping, universal conclusions based on the tiny slice of knowledge we have. Is it fair to assume that the God who made everything and still keeps it going is somehow limited to doing things the same all the time? Doesn’t he have the right to arrange things in heaven or on earth the way that he wants? Doesn’t he have the ability to solve all the discrepancies we think we find with his word? If we believe that God is all powerful, it is sensible for us to believe he has the ability to raise the dead. And he will.

John 8:35-36 “A slave does not remain in the household forever, but a son does remain forever. So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.”

I have three sons, and when I use the word, I’m generally not trying to communicate anything more than the fact that my wife and I have three male children. We produced these three people, and they are boys. We made a girl, too, for a total of four children.

The Bible uses the word this way, too. In the Christmas story, Mary “gave birth to her firstborn, a son.” She had a baby boy, a new member of the family. Not much more is meant in that case.

But many times, God uses the word “son” to emphasize a certain relationship with him. It is more than being a biological member of the family. Even slave parents can give birth to a male child. But to be a son in God’s family is a privileged position with special rights. Sons are heirs. The family’s property, the family’s business, the family’s interests belong to them as well.

In God’s family, Jesus is the natural son, the one and only, the only-begotten. All the power and privileges that belonged to the Father belonged to him. From all eternity he has been God’s Son, a member of the divine family, and he will continue to be for all eternity to come. “A son does remain forever.”

But neither Jesus nor the Father were content to be a family with a single Son. Since the fall into sin, their only choice has been to populate the family by taking slaves to sin like us and setting them free. “So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.”

The Son sets you free. That starts with sin’s consequences, the fate of being slaves. We aren’t going to end up in the Universe’s incinerator, just so much garbage for God to get rid of in the end. By his death on the cross and resurrection from the dead Jesus has severed our responsibility for all that work we produce as sin’s slaves. We don’t have to answer for it anymore. Sometimes if I am home for lunch at noon, I will watch the news, and many of the commercials during the middle of the day are for lawyers. A number of them offer help getting out of your tax debt. One of them even offers to pay off the remaining debt themselves if they can get your bill reduced to a certain point.

I don’t know what tricks the lawyers might use to convince the court to forgive taxes owed. I do know that Jesus paid off our entire debt of sin from the beginning. In this way the Son has set us free and made us sons and daughters in his family. The Son has set us free, and we are really free.

But his freedom goes farther even than this. Do you know the hymn Rock of Ages? In the closing lines of the first stanza we pray, “Be of sin the double cure: Cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r.” In setting us free from our slavery to sin, Jesus not only frees us from guilt and all we needed to pay for it. He frees us from sin’s power over our lives as well. Maybe that seems a little hard to believe. Does this agree with our experience?

If you are like me, you may still find it easy to slip into sins you don’t want to do anymore. They didn’t completely lose their appeal when you became a Christian. They still tempt. They still promise good times or good feelings. The taste for them has not left you.

In some cases, the Lord may remove the taste for a certain sin in response to faith and prayer. But here is the thing he always does: he gives us the power to fight back. Once we were like a small oppressed people ruled by neighbors with a superior army. Now we have been armed. Our weapons are superior to the enemy’s.

And God himself has joined us in the fight. Tempting or not, sin no longer holds total control. We can resist. “Sin shall not be your master, for you are not under law but under grace”, Paul once wrote (Romans 6:14). The Son has set us free, and we are really free.

John 8:34 “Jesus responded, ‘Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.’”

This word was in response to their claim, “We have never been enslaved to anyone.” And there is a reason this slavery can be hard to detect.

So long as a slave and his master agree, they get along more like friends and partners. I don’t mean to imply that I am somehow a slave to my wife, but we have a kind of running joke, or at least I do, when she asks me to do something. “Would you like to take out the garbage?” she will say. And I reply, “I was just thinking, I would really like to take some garbage out.” I know, it’s sort of a bad dad joke. And in spite of the sarcasm, I really am willing to do what she asks. My point is, as long as we are in agreement and our wills are aligned, it doesn’t feel like someone is making you do something.

That’s how it works so often with sin. As long as you are in agreement and your wills are aligned, it doesn’t feel like someone (or something) is making you do something. You know how this goes. For the man who likes to indulge his lust and ogle the pretty girls, it is no burden to take a second look, or to find a web page that allows him to entertain his fantasies. For the woman desperate to build up her sense of self-worth, gossip may be something she embraces as a pastime, not a conversation she struggles to avoid. People intent on getting plastered at the party don’t feel like all those drinks are being forced on them. They are ordering more themselves.

Sometimes this slavery hides under the disguise of godly zeal. Take Westboro Baptist Church for example. They try to confront sin by being mean to people. They have staged loud protests outside the funerals of fallen soldiers, not because they know of any particular sins the soldier committed, but because he died supporting a government that allows abortion and various sexual sins. One former member admitted she didn’t feel guilt or regret when she used to mock and dismiss the grief of these families and insult the mourners. It made her feel proud and righteous. She was unaware of the sinful slavery behind her actions.

Jesus sets us free from this slavery first by exposing it. Once we see the sins and try to resist, the slavery becomes more evident. The sinful nature in me is like a psychotic ex- boyfriend or girlfriend. It isn’t going to accept that we are breaking up. It has a psychopathic attachment to my soul, an unwholesome need to control my life. It won’t let go. It knows every button to push, every manipulative trick to play on my mind. Sometimes it forces itself into my behavior with an act of pure power.

It’s the same with the sinful nature. When we were getting along and thinking the same way, it looked more like my friend and less like my master. It was hiding the fact that I was not free. Now I understand just how unhealthy this relationship really is, and how truly it applies also to me.

Jesus helps us further in setting us free by exposing the consequences of this slavery. “A slave does not remain in the household forever…” Jesus is no longer looking at the way the slave is controlled. Now he is looking at a slave’s status. Slaves don’t belong to the family as full-time members. In Jewish society, slaves were supposed to be set free every seven years. After that, the family had no more obligation to feed, clothe, or house them. In Greek and Roman society slaves could be bought and sold like property. The Greeks in particular looked down on slaves as inferior people and slavery as beneath the dignity of the Greek citizen. They kept slaves, but they loathed the status for themselves above all else.

We can say that the whole world and those who live in it are part of God’s household. But not everyone is a free member of the family. For now, even the slaves enjoy some blessings of being in the household. Jesus described God’s goodness to all this way in the Sermon on the Mount: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” They may not all live day to day with the peace of forgiveness or an awareness of God’s love. But their basic needs are met.

The day will come when this will end for those who remain slaves to sin. Their time in God’s household will end. It is a subtle way in which Jesus is warning us that hell, eternal banishment from God, is the consequence of sin. It’s all the more reason we need Jesus to set us free from our slavery to it.

Romans 8:35-37 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble, or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

Sometimes God’s love feels a little theological, a little theoretical, like a set of abstract principles in mathematics. It works on paper, but is it real? Oh yes it is! Look at how God’s love intersects with our lives.

In order to open our eyes and help us see God’s love more clearly, Paul gives us a list we might call “Love’s skeptics” or “Love’s deniers.” So often experience seems to contradict the idea that God loves us. Ancient life was not so different than our own. Behind words like “trouble” and “hardship” in Paul’s Greek are experiences we know all too well. “Trouble” literally has the sense of “pressure.” We feel the “squeeze.” We feel pressure to compromise our morals or our integrity from the people we work for, or from our peers at school. “Hardship” puts us in narrow place, a tight spot. The walls are closing in. The options are running out. Finally, we are cornered and trapped.

Why, if he loves us, does God let us be persecuted? How come I can’t just fit in and be accepted? Why should they others make jokes behind my back when I try to live my faith? Why should my job, my reputation, my safety be threatened because of what I believe?

If I am God’s child and he loves me, then why should I suffer famine or nakedness? Or to put it in more 21^st Century American terms, why should I be living on the edge of poverty? Why should I be struggling to make ends meet? Doesn’t God promise our daily bread? What gives?

What about danger or sword? My house has to be a little fortress–dead bolts and alarms and tornado shelters–to keep me safe. And even these offer no real guarantees. Has God stopped loving us?

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” In support, Paul brings a second list. Here are the leading candidates for getting between us and God’s love for us. Every one of them is destined to fail.

“I am convinced that neither death nor life…” Death can’t do it. Although death was at one time the penalty for sin that cut us off from God, now it is the gateway to life. It is our last step on the way home. It brings us into the direct presence of God and his love. It never moves us farther away.

Life can’t do it, either. More than death, people fear the things life throws at us. We don’t want to suffer. But the worst that life has to offer is just temporary, and God promises to love us through it all.

“Neither angels nor demons…” Spiritual powers, whether good or evil, cannot do it. We should respect them because their powers greatly exceed our own. But they are no match for God and his love. Even if the good angels were to turn against us (which they would never do) God’s love remains the same. It always protects us. It always says to them, “You may go this far and no farther.” These most powerful spiritual beings (other than God himself) cannot separate us from his love.

“Neither the present nor the future nor any powers…” Nothing in time can do it. We may not like the times we live in now. They feel like evil times. Christianity and Christians seem to be in retreat. We may fear the future with all its unknowns even more. But present or future, from now until the day Jesus returns, we will be the objects of God’s love, every minute, every moment, until the clock ticks its final second and time is over.

“Neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Build a space probe and travel to the farthest edges of the universe. Dig a hole and keep digging until you come out in China. God’s love for you is bigger and more powerful than anything else that exists. You will never find anything anywhere that can separate us from God’s love.

How do we know? In his Son, on a cross, and at an empty tomb God has loved us and loves us still.

Deuteronomy 10:14-15 “The heavens, indeed the highest heavens, belong to the Lord your God, as does the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them–he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today.”

We are easily impressed by people who have a lot. I once watched a documentary about people who owned extraordinary houseboats. Most of them had more square footage than my own house. A two thousand square foot boat (most of them were more like barges) is an interesting thing, interesting enough that someone made a show about them. But in the end, it’s just people living on a big boat. You can find similar shows about extravagant houses, impressive car collections, and other luxuries beyond the reach of ordinary people.

People who can afford such things have choices the rest of us don’t. They don’t have to settle for “just-barely-good-enough-to-get-by.” For some, almost nothing is beyond their reach. The food they eat, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive are all of the highest quality. Such people don’t hang around with just anyone. The friends they make, even the people they marry, come from an elite class of people who don’t associate with the rest of us.

The Lord God makes all these celebrities and rich folk look like beggars. Moses mentions God’s ownership of the entire universe in which we live, not to make him interesting to us, nor to suggest that he is aloof and distant and unapproachable to little people like you or me. He does it to magnify God’s grace, his undeserved love, in choosing us to be his people. “Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them–he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today.”

The Lord could have chosen any people he wanted. Israel had nothing to make them especially attractive to the Lord. From the time of their father Abraham they were nomadic shepherds, not great rulers and conquerors. The families from which they had come had been quite dysfunctional. Many times the family history read like a soap opera: adultery, playing favorites, pathological lying, unhealthy rivalries, domestic violence. As they grew into a nation, they proved to be stubborn, whiny, and ungrateful.

Still, the Lord set his heart on them and loved them. He didn’t overlook their shortcomings. He was well aware of them all. But he forgave them nonetheless. His standard for choosing them, for having them wasn’t based on their gifts, accomplishments, or goodness. It was all based on his grace. He is a seeking God who does not claim the best. He rescues the worst. He turns sinners into sons and daughters, the people he has made his very own.

Today, we are that people. In his first letter Peter writes to New Testament Christians, “You are a chosen people.” “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (2:9,10). There’s that standard again: mercy, grace. We have not impressed God with our credentials. We have been saved by the life and death of Jesus Christ, cleansed by his blood, and gathered by faith as the people who are his very own.            

That’s impressive.

Deuteronomy 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul? Keep the Lord’s commands and statutes I am giving you today, for your own good.”

Alongside fear, proper respect and awe for God, Moses reminds us “to love him and to worship him with all your heart and all your soul.” In talking about Christian love, biblical love, we often say that is more than a warm feeling. It doesn’t seek for itself but it gives, and gives unconditionally. Moses words reflect this, too, when he says we are to worship the Lord, which in the Hebrew is more generally to serve him, with all our heart and soul.

So love is more than warm feelings, sentimental gush. It goes to work. It acts to serve God or help others. But it isn’t less than a genuine, heartfelt affection, either. We can’t claim to love God if don’t really care about him. Would that work in my marriage? If I was faithful to my wedding vows; if I did my share of the work at home or even more; if I always deferred to my wife and we did the things that she wants to do, but I didn’t really have any feelings or care about her, would she be pleased? Would you? Should that kind of relationship make God happy with us? “They are behaving themselves but couldn’t care less whether I were alive or dead. Oh, goody!”

We know how we love our friends, our spouses, our children, our parents. We have experienced the emotional component and how it affects the way we treat them. Does any of that carry over to the way we relate to our God?

This is a problem that runs in two directions. I once sat in the home of a man who professed his great love for God while he defended his decision to defy God’s will for his marriage. What kind of love is that? “I love you, but your will for my life means nothing to me.” Well then, thanks for caring.

I have also known the cheerless, joyless, bitter Christians who slave away at living right as though they were whipped to it. At times, I have been both these kinds of people myself. “Love the Lord your God” is easy enough to understand as a standard for serving him. In practice we struggle.

Nor can we complain that the Lord’s standards somehow work to his advantage and against our own. “Keep the Lord’s commands and statutes I am giving you today, for your own good.” For your own good. When our parents made rules for us, they were simply looking out for us. Eat your vegetables. Be in bed by eight or nine. Don’t play in the street. Don’t talk to strangers. Life works better this way. We are healthier, stronger, and we don’t get hurt.

We don’t have time to cover the entirety of God’s law now, but it works the same away. In many ways, it is the operating manual for the world he created. Live out the implications of fearing and loving the Lord your God, and life works better. His standard for serving him is for our own good.            

Is that hard to believe? Doesn’t his grace convince us it must be so? We know better than the people of Moses’ day the sacrifice our Lord was willing to make to save us. He submitted himself to torture and death to save us from sin and death. That was all “for our own good.” We can trust that his commands are for our good just the same.

Deuteronomy 10:12 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul?”

Have you ever seen someone with special skills make something hard look easy? A friend of mine let me try his trumpet once. He could make it sing. I blew into it and no sound came out at all. My dad had a knack for carpentry. He cut out pieces of wood, and they just seemed to fit together. I tried it and the lines were not straight and the angles were not square. There is more to this than meets the eye.

Moses makes God’s standards of behavior sound kind of easy at first. “This isn’t rocket science,” he seems to say. It boils down to something quite simple. Knowing what God wants isn’t that hard to understand.

Knowing it and doing it are two different things, though. There is more to this than meets the eye. “Fearing the Lord your God” isn’t primarily a matter of being afraid of him. It is about acknowledgment. It is about recognizing God as God. He, and no one or nothing else, stands above us with power over every feature of our existence. He blesses or withholds blessing. He makes things work out for good or harm. Our survival, our livelihood, depend on him–not on our environment, not on our government, not on our employment, not on our investments, not on our friendships, not on our families, not on our own cleverness and ingenuity.

There are many things that compete to be the “big thing” running our lives. In this sense we may “fear” people, possessions, relationships. We stand in awe of them as though they have god-like power over us. We compromise our morals and principles to keep them happy and keep us safe. We lie for the boss to protect our jobs and stay on his good side. We bite our tongue around family members to keep the peace even though the situation is crying for someone who has the guts to call someone out for his nonsense.

If there were an x-ray that let us peer into our souls, they would look like one of those homes on Hoarders, cluttered and choked with things we can’t let go of because we are terrified we can’t survive without them. As these things grow in importance and influence on our hearts, God himself shrinks in our view. He seems more and more irrelevant. We imagine he doesn’t make that much difference.            

That is a spiritually fatal mistake. The Lord is the “big thing” running our lives, whether we acknowledge this or not. Any attempt to replace him or ignore him will end in us beating our heads against the wall. “Fear the Lord your God, by walking in all his ways,” Moses commands. It’s not hard to understand why he deserves such a place of respect in our hearts and minds. Look at how great and powerful he is. Look at how gracious he has been, forgiving our sins and redeeming our souls. But this standard for serving him is hard to put into practice, which is why Moses has to repeat it here.