Is this not the reason...

Scripture Reading: Mark 12:18-27

The discussion in the passage of the Gospel of Mark centers around the resurrection. The Sadducees didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection and using human wisdom and rational reasoning they thought they had come up with the perfect argument against any resurrection. Their argument was based on the Law of Moses. So that a family lineage would continue, Moses wrote that if a man died leaving a widow and no children a brother should marry the widow and have children to extend the family name of his brother.

They reasoned that if a woman was widowed multiple times and married multiple brothers (they came up with seven as their hypothetical total) it would pose a problem in the resurrection. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection? They never considered the possibility that in the future state, the saints would not enter into marriage and procreate.

Jesus drives the stake into the heart of the real problem with his insightful analysis of the root of their error: Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? That is how Jesus said it. He goes on to make His case for their true ignorance of the Scriptures by pointing out that God, in speaking to Moses, said, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead but of the living. You are quite wrong.

The truth of the resurrection was staring them right in the face the whole time. When Jesus said that they didn’t know the Scriptures He didn’t mean that hadn’t read them, or that they couldn’t quote them. He meant they missed the true meaning of them because they were blinded by their preconceived ideas about what the Scriptures did and didn’t say. They were wrong, quite wrong, and their error stemmed from ignorance of the Scriptures.

It is hard for us to read the Scriptures without reading into them what we have already concluded they say and mean. None of us come to the Bible as empty vessels. We each come with our history, beliefs, and ideas. The key is to come under the Scriptures, in submission to them and not as one over the Scriptures, imposing on them what we want them to say.

When beginning a time of reading or studying the Bible, it is always a good idea to begin with prayer. We should pray for God to open our eyes and hearts to His word, to hear it as He meant it, and to be guarded against imposing our ideas onto the text. We need to seek to avoid the error of the Sadducees, lest we be wrong, quite wrong.