The Resurrection and David’s Son

Whatever is there and isn't there, one thing we know will not be there in heaven is sin, and everything that profanes human relationships will be gone. No sin, no deceit, no death, no sickness, no sorrow. Although we know some things about heaven, we don't know everything, so we must be careful when we speculate about eternity. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thank you for joining us for this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. The Sadducees approached Jesus, and although they didn't believe in a future resurrection, they asked him a question about heaven in an attempt to trap him in something that he might say. As R.C. Sproul continues his sermon series through Luke's Gospel, he unpacks Jesus' conversation with the Sadducees and what we can learn about eternity and the exaltation of Christ.

Here's Dr. Sproul. Well, this morning we're going to continue our study of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, and I'll be reading from Luke chapter 20, verses 27 through 44. I'm going to ask the congregation police to stand for the reading of the Word of God. There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection. And they asked them a question saying, Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife and died without children, and the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward, the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?

For the seven had her as a wife. And Jesus said to them, The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now He's not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him.

And then some of the scribes answered, Teacher, you have spoken well, for they no longer dared to ask Him any question. But He said to them, How can they say that Christ is David's son? For David himself says in the book of Psalms, The Lord said to My Lord, Said to My Lord, Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool.

David thus calls Him Lord, so how is He His son? Again, this is the inspired text of sacred Scripture coming to us with all of the authority of God Himself. I ask you to receive it as such.

Be seated. Let us pray. Again, our Father and our God, we thank You for this teaching that comes to us from our Savior, and we would pray that He would send His Spirit to illumine the meaning of this text for our understanding, and we ask this in His name.

Amen. One of the downsides of expository preaching, of going through the text seriatim where we don't get to choose whatever we want to preach about, but the text demands that we speak to it is that we come to texts like this one. I'm not all that excited about preaching on this text.

In fact, if it were left for me, I wouldn't even touch it. I have to deal with domestic problems at home about it because my wife has a problem with the traditional wedding service where we make a vow in our marriage that we will be faithful till death do us part. She will have none of that clause. She says, she says to me that death will not part us, but we will certainly be husband and wife in the resurrection. So I have to approach this text with the greatest fear and trembling.

I have tried to find many ways to comfort her about this matter, but so far to no avail. So we read that this time those who come to Jesus with a question are not the group of the Sanhedrin. It's not that larger group that is made up of priests and scribes and Pharisees, but specifically it is the group who are known as the Sadducees who come to present to Jesus a question with the same motive that they've all had to try and trap Him and to catch Him in some kind of heresy that will make Him unpopular either with the government or with the populace. And the Sadducees, you know, was that group who traced their tradition to Zadok, the priest during the time of David, and they were of the priestly class, and they differed significantly theologically from the Pharisees because in the first place they held up the Torah at a higher level than the rest of the Scriptures, and secondly they rejected the traditions of the Talmud and other portions of rabbinic studies and tried to restrict their doctrine principally to the Torah.

And so they did not believe that there was grounds for believing in a future life, and therefore they denied the resurrection of the dead. And it was at this particular point that they tried to press Jesus for an answer going back to a citation from Moses with respect to the Levirite law that wrote that in the case of marriage where a man dies leaving the wife childless, that it is the responsibility of his brother to take that woman as a wife that she might have the opportunity to bear children. And the storyline that they approached Jesus with was one that took it even further, not only one husband but seven, and still no progeny, and then till finally the woman died. And so now they ask this question to Jesus, okay, if there is a resurrection, and there is a resurrection, and this woman has been married to seven men, whose husband will she be? My wife has an easy answer to that question today. Of course, it's the first one.

That's the only one that really matters. But Jesus doesn't approach the problem in that manner. What He does say by way of response is helpful to a certain degree, but on the other hand perhaps raises even more questions for us than we would have if He hadn't answered this. Now anytime we talk about heaven, I have people inevitably come to me with all kinds of questions as if I'd already been there and knew all the details of what to expect. And they'll come with questions like this, will we know each other in the afterlife?

Or if we do know each other, how is recognition possible? In the resurrection, how old will I be? Will I be as old as I am now or even older? Or will I maintain an appearance in the resurrection of something like when I was twenty-five years old, which I would prefer to imagine?

Or what about infants? When we know them in the resurrection, will they have been grown to adulthood? And again, if so, how will we recognize them?

Now these are difficult questions, and when people ask me, I have to tell them, I don't know. Where God ceases His divine revelation, I will cease from inquiry. And as Calvin said, when you've got a question like this, you just be quiet, shut up, think about it. But we don't have all the answers to what life in the resurrected state will be.

John himself says, beloved, what manner of love is this that we should be called the sons of God? And yet we are, but we do not know yet what will we be like. Only that we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. And then Paul's teaching about the resurrection of 1 Corinthians 15, he talks about that which is sown perishable, will be raised unperishable, that which is sown in corruption will be raised in corruption, sown in mortality, will be raised in immortality. But we don't get a comprehensive picture of what that will all look like. Another question is, will people in heaven be able to look down on those who are still on earth and know what's going on in their lives? And if so, will they be subjected to pain and anguish by what they watch taking place before their heavenly gaze? I remember hearing a sermon that was particularly wicked in a seminary chapel when I was a student, and I walked out to the parking lot with my mentor, Dr. John Gerstner, and I said to Dr. Gerstner, I said, John Calvin would have rolled over in his grave if he would have listened to that sermon.

And Gerstner looked at me, and he actually stopped in mid-stride, turned around and looked at me. He said, what? Don't you know that nothing could possibly disturb the felicity that John Calvin enjoys at this very moment?

I said, yes, sir. I stand corrected. But again, you look at the parable of Diocese and Lazarus, and at least parabolically speaking, the suggestion is in that text that people can look down and see what's happening and so on. But these are just little glimpses that we get about our heavenly state. But for the most part, we have to wait and see. We're now in that state where we look into the glass darkly. We know in part that once we make the transition, then our knowledge will be so much greater when we arrive in that place.

But I'll tell you this. If I know anything about the resurrected state, it's going to be not infinitely but almost infinitely better than what we enjoy in this state. Paul wrote to the Philippians where he said, for me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. And so, in one sense, I have to leave it at that point simply saying this, we know for sure. When we enter into heaven, we will lose nothing of substance or of value. What we will experience is only gain. And Sylvester says, well, then that means we're not going to lose each other as a marriage partner and so on.

She goes with her discourse. And I said, or maybe what it means is that when we get into heaven, the joy that we experience together as a married couple will be exceeded by our relationship with every other believer in the kingdom of God, if you can imagine that. Because think of this. Whatever is there and isn't there, one thing we know will not be there in heaven is sin, and everything that profanes human relationships will be gone. No sin, no deceit, no death, no sickness, no sorrow. So, how that falls out in the resurrection, I don't know. But I trust God at His Word that whatever we experience in heaven will be wonderful and will be nothing but gain. And so, in answer to this question, Jesus said, the sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain that age in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. In first glance, that would suggest that we are not in a state of marriage in heaven.

But whatever state we'll be in, as I said again, will be better than anything we can imagine now. For they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. And He goes on to say there that we will be there, that we will be like the angels. We will not be angels. Don't get that idea that when we die, we spring wings and suddenly live an angelic existence. Others mean by this that, well, angels are sexless. We don't know that, and we don't know whether they're genderless. I would assume that we've been created male and female, and in our redemption we will remain male and female.

But maleness and femaleness will move to a completely different level, a level that is greater, a level that is more wonderful. But what Jesus is saying, there'll be no need anymore to fill the earth and multiply by propagation, because death will be no more, and we won't have to have children in heaven in order to populate the place. All of the population of heaven will be there by God's grace for eternity. What Jesus promises is glory. Just this Christmas season, we got a beautiful Waterford crystal glass lamp for our house.

And we were talking about it yesterday, and I was admiring, and I said, honey, that's really beautiful. And then immediately thought, but we won't need it in the new heaven and the new earth. There won't be any lamps there because the light will be given by the glory of the Lamb and the transcendent majesty of the brilliance and refugence of God Himself.

So when we say you can't take it with you, we mean we don't need to take it with us, because what is good and perfect and beautiful in heaven will exceed everything that we could possibly imagine now. But notice that in this text, Jesus silenced the Sadducees, and even the scribes who had failed already to try to trap Him, complimented Him by saying at the end of the text, teacher, you have spoken well, for they no longer dared to ask another question. And then Jesus said, okay, you've been asking me all these questions.

You have been trying to trap me in every conceivable way, and let me ask you a question. And now He turns His attention to His question. He said to them, how can they say that the Christ, the Messiah, is David's Son? For David himself says in the book of Psalms, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. David thus calls Him Lord. So how is He His Son? What a provocative question that Jesus puts to these opponents at this time. The Bible says that the Messiah who is to come will be the Son of David, and yet David speaks of the Messiah as David's Lord. How can David have a son who is also his Lord?

How do you put those two propositions together in any meaningful way? That's the question He asked of His interrogators at that point, and then He supplies the answer Himself for us. He cites Psalm 110, and let's pause for a moment to look at that Psalm, because that Psalm is the most quoted or alluded to Old Testament text in the New Testament in the New Testament. That is to say, there's no Old Testament text that is referenced as often as Psalm 110 is in the New Testament. And so Jesus speaks of Psalm 110, which has a jarring, apparent contradiction within it, where we have a conversation that goes on between God and somebody else, where it says, the Lord said to my Lord. Now what you have here in the Hebrew is the name of God combined with the chief title of God. You read earlier in the Psalms where David writes, Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent or majestic is Thy name in all the earth. And what he does in that Psalm is he combines the name of God, Yahweh, with the chief title of God, Adonai. And though we have in the English text the repetition of the word Lord, there are two different words in the Hebrew text, where in the Hebrew text it says, Oh Yahweh, our Adonai. That is, Oh Yahweh, our sovereign one, our supreme governor, our Adonai.

How majestic is Your name in all the earth. And throughout the Old Testament, that supreme title Adonai, or sovereign one, is reserved for God. That's why it's so startling that in this text, Psalm 110, you have a conversation between Yahweh and somebody else who's given the title Adonai. Psalm 110 reads, The Lord Yahweh said to my Lord Adonai, Sit thou at my right hand. So somebody else is given the title of Adonai besides God the Father. Yahweh says to my, David is referring to himself, to my Adonai, my sovereign, my, the Greek translation is kyrios, my Lord, sit at my right hand. In the Canotic passage in Philippians 2, Paul says, Have this mind among you which was in Christ Jesus, being in the equality with God, took His equality not as a thing to be tenaciously grasped or held onto, but He emptied Himself and so on, became a servant, obedient even unto death. And so, and then he goes on to say, Therefore has God highly exalted Him and given Him the name that is above every name.

What's that name? It's not Jesus. He already had the name Jesus, but He's given to Jesus the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee would bow and every tongue confess that He is what? Adonai, He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Because in His exaltation, Jesus ascends to heaven, and He sits at the right hand of God where He is appointed by the Father to rule over all of the earth, to be the King of kings, and to be the Lord of lords, to be Adonai, David's Lord, Caesar's Lord, your Lord, my Lord, having given Him the name that transcends all titles, Adonai, Kyrios, so that every time we even hear the name of Jesus, the appropriate response is to be on our knees in obeisance before the One whom God has placed at His right hand and has exalted Him with such majesty. And that that does not detract from the glory of God the Father, but it is to the glory of God the Father that we confess that Christ is Lord.

That was R.C. Sproul preaching from Luke chapter 20. You're listening to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Sproul's decades of study in the Word of God led to the development of his expositional commentary series. Because you heard a message from Luke's Gospel, today we're making the digital edition of his commentary on Luke available to you for your gift of any amount. So when you give your donation at renewingyourmind.org, the digital edition of his commentary on Luke will go into your learning library so that you can read it on your smartphone or your tablet.

So give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org. Next week we'll continue R.C. Sproul's series in Luke's Gospel considering Jesus' prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem.

That's next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind. R.C. Sproul, a.k.a. R.C. Sproul.