Matthew 22:23-33

The Sadducees were prominent religious leaders of Jesus’ day who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.  They did not come to learn from Jesus, but to question him so that they might find fault with his teaching and discredit him before the people. Their question of whose wife the seven-times-married woman would be in the resurrection stemmed from a law that God gave his Old Testament people through Moses (Deuteronomy 25:5-6).  God set down that law to protect widows and to guarantee continuance of a deceased man's family line.  

Jesus confronted their unbelief about the resurrection from the dead with the truth of the Scriptures.  He took them back to the account of the burning bush, the scene at which God called Moses to be the leader of his people to lead them out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land.  God revealed himself to Moses by saying: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."  At the time of Moses, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob has been dead already for hundreds of years.  Yet when God spoke to Moses, he didn’t say that he was their God, but "I am" their God.  Therefore Jesus declares that the Lord "is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."

The God of the living declares that he will raise the dead to life.  Jesus said, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out” (John 5:28-29).  God is all-powerful and faithful to his word.  He can and will keep his promise of raising the dead to life.  Not only does Jesus make that clear in his word, it is proved by his own resurrection from the dead.  The Bible declares, “By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also” (1 Corinthians 6:14).

Trusting in Jesus as our Savior from sin and death, we can declare confidently: “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.  How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25-27)