“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (Mt 22:32 AV)
This statement is a treatise on the
resurrection. The Sadducees, who did not
believe in the resurrection, posed a hypothetical situation and challenged
Jesus to defend the doctrine of the resurrection. They questioned if a man died and his wife
married his brother, and his cycle repeated down to the seventh brother with no
offspring left behind, then whose wife would she be in the resurrection? The implication is the resurrection would
pose all sorts of confusing situations.
Their error was not in the resurrection.
Rather, their error was in the nature of that resurrection. That nature being one of spiritual reality
and glorification and not so physically.
The marriage relationships we enjoy in the temporal world have no force in
the spiritual world. Then, Christ asks revealed
just how contradictory their own belief system appears to be. The Sadducees refer to the LORD as the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How can that
be? If there is no resurrection of the
dead, then God cannot be the God of someone who has died. He can only be the God of someone who is
living. By using that phrase, the Sadducees
are admitting what they refuse to profess and the truth. That is the resurrection of the dead unto
eternal life. But we want to consider this
passage in a slightly different way.
There is another way of looking at the
understanding of ‘the living’. Not merely
resurrected. But spiritually alive. Having life.
Vibrant. We can look at this as
it applies to the believer. Namely, if God
is our God, then we should be alive! We
should exhibit signs of life. My son,
Joshua, was a pitcher from the time he played ball in little league to his freshman
year of college. All through his early
years and into High School, the pitcher is often seen as the de facto team leader. The starting pitcher was the cheerleader of
the team. He was the one who bore the
outcome on his shoulders more so than any other single player. He played for an inner-city High School team that
didn’t show nearly as much enthusiasm or effort when it came to practice or
games. Contrast that against his years
playing for a team located on a Navy base and there is quite a difference being
the team leader for a team that didn’t really care and a team that was pumped
up for every game. There was one game that
went sixteen innings. We ran out of pitchers. As an assistant coach at the time, my job was
to keep these kids focused and enthusiastic until an outcome was determined. I learned it is much easier to coach a team
that can be motivated. Flip the
page. When coaching the High School
team, enthusiasm was not even in the script.
Players were sitting in the outfield picking dandelions. It was pathetic. In one such game, the coach up and walked out. He looked at me with a look that said, “you
need to walk out, too.” If the team
would not respond to any kind of motivation, why bother. If they have no life, then they are not going
anywhere.
The church of Laodicea was accused of
being lukewarm. They were neither hot
nor cold. It made God sick. God is the God of those who have life. He is the God of those who show life. God cannot lead where people are not willing to
go. I sense a deep feeling of apathy settling
in the people of God. A general spirit
of ambivalence towards just about anything.
The world is not as we wish it would be.
Our nation is falling into a hole of secularism, socialism, and
immorality which will be impossible to escape.
Our churches are not as alive as they once were. There seems to be little life. What life there is, is manufactured by
worldly music and manipulative stage presentations. God is not the God of the living. He is quickly becoming the God of the dying. The fault is not His. The fault lies with the people of God. We have refused to live. We are content in waiting out the clock. This is not the kind of people whom God wishes
to be a part of. It is time for us to
live again!
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