MARK 12:18-23

MARK 12:18-23

It was a group of Sadducees this time who sought to entangle Jesus. They represented a materialistic sect which denied the resurrection and the existence of angels and spirits. Whether the story they put before Him was true or not we cannot say. It seems most unlikely, and may only have been an imaginary tale designed to cast ridicule upon the doctrine of the resurrection.

According to them there was a certain woman who had been wife in succession to seven brothers, and had outlived them all. According to the levirate order, if a man died leaving no heir his brother was to take the widow to be his own wife; and the first child born of the new union would inherit the estates of the former husband. In the story they told, this law was carried to an extreme, seven brothers dying one after the other and all leaving the childless widow behind them.

Now came what these cunning casuists evidently considered an unanswerable refutation of the reasonableness of the idea of the resurrection of the dead. They asked, as recorded in verse 23, “In the resurrection therefore, when they shall rise, whose wife shall she be of them? for the seven had her to wife.”

Jesus was unperturbed, for He saw through their sophistry at once. He declared they were all in error, and that for two reasons—their ignorance of the very Scripture which they professed to hold sacred, and also of the power, or might, of God. It was the Torah alone, that is, the books of Moses, that these Sadducees recognized as authoritative. So Jesus quoted from the book of Exodus in order to show the folly of their position.