Mark 12:27: How Jesus Made the Case for the Resurrection

INTRODUCTION

Recently there have been several best-selling books of testimonies of people who claim to have died and experienced the joys of heaven.

Some people are impressed by these stories. Some people scoff at them.

You’ve heard of the recent best seller Heaven Is for Real. It is the story a little boy told his father, a pastor, about an experience the child had had in Heaven during a time when he was very ill. He saw people, including his grandfather, with halos around their heads and flying around with little wings. This story was even made into a movie.

A pastor, Don Piper, wrote a book entitled Ninety Minutes in Heaven. As Piper was driving back from a church conference a truck plowed into his car and killed him. Another minister, driving by, saw the body, and even though he knew that Piper was dead, he prayed for him, and Piper revived. The book is mostly about Piper’s painful recovery. The story is convincing to many. But skeptics are doubtful.

Then there is the book by the neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven, a book that has created quite a stir. I checked it out from the library. It is pretty technical. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t need that book to convince me of the reality of the world to come.

My favorite story about heaven is in a fascinating book, A Window to Heaven, by Dr. Diane Komp, a pediatric oncologist, a member of the faculty of Yale Medical School. Dr. Komp took care of children who were dying of leukemia back in the days when there was little that could be done to prolong the lives victims of that disease.

Dr. Komp was an agnostic but became a Christian because of the testimony of dying children she cared for. Here is one of her stories:

She was treating a little girl named Anna. Anna had gone in and out of remission many times, and at the age of seven was facing her death. Dr. Komp, along with the child’s parents, was at Anna’s bedside.

Here it is in the doctor’s words: “Before she died, Anna mustered the final energy to sit up in her hospital bed and say: ‘The angels—they’re so beautiful! Mommy, can you see them? Do you hear their singing? I’ve never heard such beautiful singing!’ Then little Anna lay back on her pillow and died.”

Dr. Komp remarks, “Anna’s parents reacted as if they had been given the most precious gift in the world. Together we contemplated a spiritual mystery that transcended our understanding and experience. For weeks to follow, the thought that stuck in my head was: Have I found a reliable witness?”

In the end Dr. Komp decided she had found a reliable witness, and became a convinced believer and has written several books about faith.

I honestly don’t know what to think of some of these stories. I remember the story in the gospels of how Jesus raised a 12-year-old girl from the dead. We don’t know what that girl had experienced while she was dead, but Jesus told her parents, “Don’t tell anyone” (Mark 5:43).

Jesus also raised his friend Lazarus who had been dead four days. But the gospels don’t record any testimony from Lazarus about his a visit to heaven (John 11).

Jesus himself was raised from the dead, nothing is recorded in the New Testament about his experience in heaven.

St. Paul tells of a time when he was caught up into the third heaven and saw things too wonderful to be told. But he tells us is that he was given a thorn in the flesh—a messenger of Satan—to keep him from boasting (2 Corinthians 12).

Stories about visits to Heaven are to be helpful for some people, but faith for most of us comes in other ways than testimonies of out-of-the-body experiences.

Our faith doesn’t rest on our belief in heaven.

Many people believe in heaven who have no saving faith in Christ.

Our faith rests in Jesus, and it is he we need to trust, and it is he to whom we must commit our lives in faith and obedience, in love and in service.

When we experience Jesus in our own lives, then we know it’s true.

This is the way it’s been all through history. We come to faith through a personal experience with Jesus Christ. And we live by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

I. Here is how Jesus made the case for the resurrection:

A. In Jesus’s day most Jews believed in the Resurrection, but some didn’t. They were the party of the Sadducees.

In Mark 12:18-27 we read of some Sadducees who came to Jesus with a question they considered a real “stumper”:

The Sadducees—who say there is no resurrection—came to him; and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the wife, and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no children; and the second took her, and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; and the seven left no children. Last of all, the woman also died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.”

This is sort of like if someone would tell a story about a missionary who was killed, cooked and eaten by a cannibal. Now suppose the cannibal later became a Christian: “How could God raise up both the missionary and the cannibal, since part of the cannibal’s body had belonged to the missionary?”

Here is how Jesus answered the Sadducees’ question:

Jesus said to them, “Is not this why you are wrong that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God said to Moses, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living: you are quite wrong.”

B. You remember the story: Moses was herding the sheep belonging to his father-in-law, and he saw a bush burning but not burning up, so, we read, “he turned aside this great sight, why the bush didn’t burn up.”

Then God began to speak to him out of the bush:

I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

C. So what is the point Jesus is making?

Jesus is saying that if God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he loved them. He was their friend. They were his people.

If God is God, he doesn’t enter into a relationship with people he loves and then just throw them away.

Jesus is telling the Sadducees that of course these people who God had loved and who belonged to him are alive somewhere, somehow, and in God’s keeping.

This interpretation may have surprised the person who wrote the story in Exodus, because in ancient Israel of the Old Testament there is little evidence of a belief in a glorious afterlife. In fact, many of the Old Testament were quite gloomy about what they might experience after their death.

Our Lord makes the case that when God takes hold of a person and draws that person to himself, he’s not going to ever let him or her go.

II. But, although Jesus’s answer to the Sadducees assures us that there is a resurrection for us who are God’s children, we still have questions. And that is why books like the ones I mentioned at the first are so popular. So what do we know for sure about heaven, except that there is such a place?

A. We can discard the silly idea that heaven is up in the sky somewhere, where people sit on clouds and play harps.

“Heaven” and “sky” are the same word in Greek and Hebrew, but “heaven” as God’s home is a metaphor. It simply means somewhere above anything we can imagine—a world beyond this one.

The Bible never tells us that our souls are immortal. That was a Greek idea.

The New Testament promises a resurrection from the dead for those who belong to Jesus.

The New Testament tells us about resurrection and eternal life in a “Better Country” in the age to come.

B. Jesus promised the believing thief who hung beside him on the cross: “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.

“Paradise” is the word for a beautiful pleasure garden. I can imagine flowers and trees laden with fruit, birds singing, sparkling streams and pools, and green grass.

C. Jesus also compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a banquet at which all believers from all times and places will sit down together.

He said, “I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11 & Luke 13:28).

D. In the last two chapters in the Bible, John, the writer of Revelation, tells about his vision of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven from God as a bride adorned for her husband.

He tells us that God will dwell there with his people and he will wipe away every tear from there eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more…for God will make all things new.

We read about “the River of the Water of Life that flows from the throne of God, bright as crystal—as it flows through the middle of the street of the city.

“And on either side the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.

“And his servants shall worship him and we will see his face, and his name shall be on our foreheads, and we will reign with him for ever and ever.”

People ask, “Will we know our loved ones in heaven?” Of course we will, because all of God’s children will share the joy of the Lord together. We will not only know our loved ones, we will have thousands and thousands of new friends.

E. Most of what we read about the world to come is in metaphor. We read of golden streets, as clear as glass. The prophet is trying to describe something indescribable.

We read of people praising the Lord with golden harps in their hands and waving palm branches. These metaphors are not intended to be taken literally but to suggest a scene of great joy and gladness and beauty.

What else we will do besides worship, we aren’t told, but surely we won’t be bored. We will be beautiful—shining like stars for brightness—dressed in our spotless robes. We will sing and dance and play games together, and share stories. I believe we will enjoy ever new experiences. No one will be bored—ever.

But the best thing about our future life will be that we will be with our Savior. Our greatest joy will be praising him with the saints and angels.

It will be better than we can imagine. That is why it’s called a “blessed hope”—“the hope of glory”—and entering into the joy of the Lord.

CONCLUSION

When you get discouraged and perplexed, think about your future.

Imagine yourself in the New Jerusalem, with the saints and angels, praising the Lord, and enjoying the company of all God’s children.

Imagine yourself forever young and vigorous, never bored, full of joy but always looking forward to the next new and exciting chapter of your life.

We will all be cleansed of our faults and become the people we are meant to be and have longed to be ever since we knew we were God’s children.

But especially imagine seeing your Savior, the Lord of Glory face to face! You will see him. You will live with him forever. And you will be satisfied.

This is what we have to look forward to.