When Close Isn't Close Enough

All right, we're back in Mark 12 this morning. You can go ahead and turn there. We're actually going to get right into it, starting in verse 18 of Mark chapter 12. So, we're in the life of Christ, in what we would refer to as Passion Week. In Mark's Gospel, Jesus has already ridden into Jerusalem during His triumphal entry and is now in the beginning stages of that week, interacting with people on the Temple Mount. The emphasis in Mark has to do primarily with His interactions with some of the religious leaders: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, members of the Sanhedrin, the chief priests, and people like that. So, we have continuing examples of that here in Mark 12. Let's look at verse 18, and we're going to read the first half of the passage that we're going to be addressing this morning:

"And Sadducees came to Him, who say that there is no resurrection, 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 widow and raise up offspring for his brother. There were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and when he died, left no offspring. The second took her, and he died, leaving no offspring. The third likewise, and the seven left no offspring. Last of all, the woman also died. In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.' Jesus said to them, 'Is this not the reason you are wrong, because 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 spoke to him, saying, "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.'"

What I see in this passage, and in the section after that we're going to look at in just a minute, is that as these individuals are interacting with Jesus, this first example is another instance of trying to stump Him, put Him on the spot, and make Him look silly in front of the group of people. But what really comes to the surface is this idea that being close to the truth is never close enough; you have to believe the truth as well. You can't just be close to it. These members of the Sadducees, as they present to Him this hypothetical scenario, remind me of the riddle about the man going to St. Ives: "You know, he met a man with seven wives, and seven sacks, and seven cats, and all that sort of stuff." This is not what's going on, but this is what popped into my head. We've got this guy with seven wives and all these cats and all this stuff. This story feels a little bit like that to me.

Now, there are two details at the very beginning that I want you to take note of because they are very significant and really help us to understand what is going on. They also help us to see why Jesus' response to the Sadducees once again demonstrates that He is not disrupted by their attempts to trap Him. The first detail, in verse 18, says, "The Sadducees say there is no resurrection." Do you see that there? This is very important. The second detail is in verse 19, where the Sadducees say, "Teacher, Moses wrote." This is very significant. Really, the whole thing turns on these two realities that are presented right at the beginning: trying to use the Pentateuch—the books of the Bible written by Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible)—specifically, the book of Deuteronomy, to make the idea of bodily resurrection seem ridiculous, presenting this scenario based on Mosaic law that God gave to Moses and through Moses to His people. What they're implying is that if somebody obeys this law to the letter, then all sorts of problems surface in a resurrection. This is going to backfire on them, as we've already shown because we've read the passage, but trying to use a law written by God to suggest that a reality designed by God is somehow ridiculous is not going to work.

When you go to museums or historical sites, do you read the signs, or do you just look at the thing and move on? I'm 50-50. Sometimes I look at the sign, sometimes I read the sign and try to skim it just to get the idea of what it's saying. Other times, I really get invested in it. But right now, we need to read the sign a little bit in that we need to figure out what this marriage scenario is that these Sadducees are describing. It seems quite strange to us in our culture; we don't have anything like this. We don't do this, and so imagining a situation like this might seem kind of silly. What the Sadducees are describing is what we know in Scripture as levirate marriage, which essentially uses the term "brother." It was given by God to Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 25, verses 5–10, where it's outlined. It's a provision under the Old Covenant that was meant to ensure that widows were provided for and that their deceased husbands' names and estates could be preserved. This was designed to foresee occasions when a husband would die before they had any children, and the wife would have been essentially destitute. As a way to provide for her, there are a couple of very well-known examples of this in Scripture, one good and one bad.

The bad one is the situation between Judah and Tamar, which is wedged right in the story of Joseph. In that situation, Judah, who was the father-in-law of this woman Tamar, essentially denied his youngest son to her, fulfilling this levirate law, because he was afraid that if his youngest son married her and carried out this duty, he was going to die as his previous sons had done. In that story, all sorts of sordid details come out, and it exposes his wickedness for not caring for her in this way. The other one is not identical to this levirate system but is very close: the story of Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz. Ruth and Naomi have both lost their husbands, and as they come back to Israel, Boaz redeems them as their kinsman-redeemer to provide for them and to carry on their family legacy in a way that would not have happened if they did not have somebody taking care of them. He was a direct relative of Naomi's husband and undertook to redeem them and provide for them in that way.

So, the Sadducees propose this almost ridiculous hypothetical situation where there are now seven brothers carrying out this responsibility, and each one of them dies, and there are no children in the end. Finally, the woman dies. So, we've got seven dead husbands and no offspring. Their question, their big concern, is: in the resurrection, whose wife is she? You can see how ridiculous this is, but we have to understand that, just as the Pharisees who asked Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar didn't really care about paying taxes, these Sadducees really don't care about marriage and the resurrection either. It's just a way to try to get Jesus to answer a trick question. They assume that, no matter how He answers it, somebody's going to be offended by what He says, and that will be their opportunity to turn on Him and get the crowds to turn on Him. But once again, Jesus navigates this masterfully. He doesn't fall for their trap and, in fact, shows them that they, who are so knowledgeable in Scripture, can have Jesus say, "Hey, we're talking about Moses and the bush, right?" and they know exactly what He's talking about. They could have quoted it word for word. There were no chapters and verses back then, but they knew the Scriptures, specifically the writings of Moses, like the back of their hand. They were so close to the truth, and yet they didn't even understand what the contents really meant, what was being communicated in it.

The question reveals that they make some false assumptions about resurrection life and, maybe even more importantly to them, they don't understand what the Scriptures written by Moses teach them about God. The misunderstanding about resurrection is that Scripture is very clear that eternal life for God's people is not just an upgraded version of this life; it's an entirely different and better kind of life. We hear this idea of the upgraded version of this life all the time at funerals and memorial services when family members share and testify about, "Well, Grandma's up in heaven playing bingo with Jesus now." This idea that Grandma really loved bingo, so she must be in heaven still playing bingo—it wouldn't be much fun because you would win every time, right? You would always get the bingo. Or people talk about, "Oh, my mansion in heaven is going to have a baseball diamond in the back, and my front yard's going to be a full 18-hole golf course." You envision these things I like doing in this life; therefore, I'm just going to have a better version of it in the afterlife. The same thing here with marriage: well, there's marriage in this life, and marriage is good, and we enjoy it, so therefore there must be some kind of better version of marriage in the resurrection. What Jesus is saying is, "No, it's not like that. The resurrection life is going to be real life. It's going to be eternal life. It's going to be the most amazing, joy-filled life that we Christians can comprehend or even imagine, but it's going to be a life beyond our ability to comprehend."

Let me describe it this way: we've got two beautiful mothers in our church waiting to give birth to babies. Their babies are alive in their wombs, but those babies have no comprehension of what life outside the womb is going to be like. It's completely different, and it's not just an upgraded womb version of life, right? That would be really weird, wouldn't it? It's a completely different kind of life. Once that baby is born, there are all kinds of experiences that are not even possible in the womb. That's kind of what Jesus is saying: "Listen, it's real life, it's wonderful life, it's unimaginable life, but it's not the identical life that you live here, just an upgraded version." So, He says one of the things that's very different is there's no marriage in heaven. People are not married up there; they don't give themselves in marriage. It's a concept that does not exist in the resurrection. That doesn't mean there's no relationships, that we don't know each other and won't interact with one another in a relating sort of way, but it just simply means the relational categories that we have here on this earth are not a part of that. So, He says it's more like the relationship shared by the angels. What is that like? We don't know. There's not a whole lot of details about the interaction of angels with one another in heaven or in any scenario, really. So, He's simply stating that, somehow, in some way, our relationships in the resurrection resemble theirs, which is apparently very different from our human relationships on earth right now. I also want to clarify: He's not saying that we become angels, okay? That's not what He's saying either. He's talking about that relationship aspect. Somehow, this resurrection life is different in a way that we don't comprehend right now, and one of the things that's different about it is relationships.

Even more significant, I think, is the point He makes about God as He references God's interaction with Moses at the burning bush: God is the God of the living. In this passage, in verse 26, He says that God spoke to Moses, saying, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." He is not God of the dead, but of the living. The point Jesus is making to these Sadducees, as He outlines this, is a form of logic that's maybe a little bit different from the way we think in our culture and society today but would have been very resonant with these Sadducees. When God addressed Moses at the burning bush, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been long dead. They're in the ground; their bodies are decomposed; they're dead. Yet, in that moment, God speaks in the present tense: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Even though they have died and been buried, what He's saying is that God, in the same way that He is in the perpetual present—there is no past, present, and future to God; He exists at all points in time and space as if it were present—the relationship that He has with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a present-tense relationship. They are alive. They are not in a dream state; they're not in some sort of cryogenic freeze, like in the '90s when people were freezing their bodies in the hopes that a thousand years from now we'd have the technology to revive dead bodies. It's not like that. They are living beings; they are alive, and they will, because they are alive, one day be resurrected. The evidence of this, as Jesus is saying to the Sadducees, is because even after they were dead, God was still their God and is still their God, present tense, actively.

This is not a concept that we necessarily hold on to, but it is definitely a logical argument that would have resonated with these Sadducees. We see this in Scripture, and maybe we don't even really think about it. For example, in Hebrews chapter 12, we read all the time that we're surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and so because of that, let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. That great cloud of witnesses are the faithful men and women of the past talked about in Hebrews 11. They're presented in a way that is very much active and alive, that they can apparently see and observe what is going on in history. They are not just these sort of consciences or abstract thought ideas or spirit beings that are just nebulized out there in the ether. Another example would be when Jesus talks about the rich man and Lazarus, and the two of them are very much alive. This is one of the struggles of the rich man as he is there in agony, and he realizes that what he is experiencing, present tense—the pain and the agony as he's even craving just a single drop of water to be put on his tongue—is something that awaits his brothers and his family members. He wants to reach out from the dead and send Lazarus or himself to go back and warn them—very much alive. So, in the resurrection, the alive spirits of believers are reunited with a glorified physical body. 1 Corinthians 15:51 and following: "Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed."

By the way, this is a complete side note, but when we were at Grace Community Church, this was the verse that was put on the diaper bag tags of all the kids in the nurseries: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." That's very clever; you've got to admit that's very clever for nurseries. Anyway, "Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed." So, what all this is pointing us to, as Jesus is interacting with the Sadducees, is the exposure of this deficiency that they had. They had great learning and a grasp of Scripture, a command of it; they were very familiar with it, and yet they didn't understand it. So, we need to not settle just for learning facts, rote information, but there needs to be a sense when we study God's Word that we are endeavoring to understand it, to grasp it.

I wonder how many of us here have found ourselves just filling our heads with biblical facts, maybe even a learned theology and doctrine at a level that's above the common Christian, and yet maybe we don't really understand it. We have just been compiling in our head a grouping of information, and we can regurgitate it, but we don't really understand it. We don't really grasp what God's Word is telling us about Him, about the world, about sin, about salvation, and about His plans and purposes for eternity. So, I guess the question I have is, if you are a professing Christian, do you understand what you claim to believe? Do you understand what you have learned? Can you not only regurgitate the facts, spit back out the information, but could you explain it? Could you apply it? Do you actually live out what God's Word is teaching us?

What I think is interesting in this is we find out that Jesus' answer impressed at least one person. If you look at verse 28, we pick up the next section of this narrative: "And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that He answered them well, asked Him, 'Which commandment is the most important of all?' Jesus answered, 'The most important is, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." The second is this: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is no other commandment greater than these.' And the scribe said to Him, 'You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that He is one, and there is no other besides Him. And to love Him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.' And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, He said to him, 'You are not far from the kingdom of God.' And after that, no one dared to ask Him any more questions."

It doesn't appear that this question is meant to be a trick or a trap with Jesus. It's different from some of the questions that have preceded it. I suppose it's a question that describes somebody that we might say is a sincere seeker. They really want to know the truth; they really want to know what God has revealed to us, what He wants us to do, how He wants us to live, what the priorities of my life should be if I want them to align with the priorities of God. I love how the ESV phrases the question: "Which commandment is the most important of all?" That word "most important"—I'm messing this up again; here we go, there it is. I'm learning; I've got to look back every now and then. In other places, we've got this phrased as "the greatest," but I love this expression "most important" because I think it gives an extra dimension to what we often hear as the Great Commandment. This is not just a matter of scale or even a matter of personal interest—which one is the greatest to you?—but this word "importance" stresses a prioritization. When we think about it, if God has commanded us things, they're all important, but what one is the most important? Think about our Bill of Rights and the amendments to the Constitution. Of all of them, the one we talk about the most, and the one I think we would all agree is the most significant, the most important, is the First Amendment. The significance of all the others sort of flows out of that one. It's foundational; it's necessary for all the other amendments to make any sense or for us to do anything with them. Similarly, here we have this most important commandment, and Jesus, in other places, has said that really these two sum up all the Law and the Prophets.

This scribe who's come to Jesus is in complete agreement. We don't see any pushback whatsoever. There is not even a hint of, for example, when Jesus poses this and the question is, "Well, who is my neighbor?" if I'm supposed to love my neighbor, who is it? There's not even anything like that. His agreement even conforms. You can go all the way back to the life of King Saul and Samuel confronting King Saul after Saul had been victorious in battle and wanted to offer sacrifices to the Lord, but Samuel wasn't anywhere to be found. Saul got impatient and took it upon himself to make these sacrificial offerings. Saul is confronted by Samuel when he finally shows up, and Samuel says, "Isn't it more important to obey God than to offer these big sacrifices to Him? That's really what God cares most about: your obedience, not an impressive spectacle of this huge offering that you're going to offer up to the Lord. What He really loves is simple obedience." This scribe here really states that even what could be more simple than to obey these two commands, and he says that's more significant to God than offering your biggest, best bull you've got in your herd or whatever grand gesture you want to make. God doesn't care about that nearly as much as just being obedient to these two simple commands: love God with all of your being and love your neighbor as yourself.

Let's stop for a quick minute, though, and do just a tiny bit of soul-searching here. How often do you find yourself—you don't have to raise your hands or shout out a number or a frequency—but how often do you find yourself trying to justify a lack of obedience with a grand outward gesture towards God or trying to excuse it or ease your guilty conscience by doing some grand gesture? You've got a guilty conscience, maybe about a hidden sin that you have kept to yourself, but it's festering in you. So, to justify that lack of obedience or lack of dealing with that sin, you're like, "Well, I'm going to give extra money to the church this week, or I'm going to volunteer to work in children's ministry because that'll show I really love God. That'll show Him that I'm really devoted to His kingdom and His ministry." Once again, you don't have to raise a hand, but I think a lot of times we do that. We recognize some deficiency in our lives, and maybe some guilt creeps in, or maybe it's just that we're very possessive of that thing, and we don't want to give it up. So, instead of dealing with it, we're like, "Well, I'm going to pay God extra money. I'm going to give God extra time." Rather than just simply obeying and living out a life devoted to Him, you're not doing it to earn God's favor or try to keep God's favor. Obedience is meant to flow out of our relationship with our Savior.

If you do feel the weight of some guilt pressing down on you, you've done something, and your conscience is pricked by that, you're convicted by it, the thing to do is to go to God with transparent confession, not good works trying to get on His good side. Here are a couple of verses I want you to maybe write these references down: Micah 7:18–19: "Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of His inheritance? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." These are verses expressing a God who is eager, willing, and able to forgive. Romans 8:1, we quote this all the time, and it's so encouraging: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." That's so liberating to realize that if you are in Christ, if you have repented of your sins and you are trusting in the work of Christ Jesus for your salvation, you are a new creation in Christ, and there's now no condemnation. You're not having to maintain this. Hebrews 4:16: "Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." What an encouragement that you can run to the throne of God, and what you're going to find there is grace and mercy. 1 John 1:9, a classic—learn it in Sunday school and just keep remembering it your whole life: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Yes, obedience is better than sacrifice, but when sin takes over, as it has done in the lives of so many biblical figures, don't try to bribe God with your good works. It's so unnecessary. Just run back to Jesus, run back to the God of grace and mercy.

I love how the Apostle Paul, who wrote, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," in the same book, in the book of Romans, expresses his own struggle with sin and the frustration of oftentimes not doing the things that he knew he should do as a follower of Christ and instead doing the things he knew he shouldn't. We can all relate to that struggle, and yet we're reminded there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. You can still wrestle with those sins, you can still do battle with those sins, and you should, but you also need to remember that you don't have to continue to work to strive to earn God's favor. That's freely given in Christ, and it can't be earned.

All right, let's go back to Jesus and the scribe. At the very end of this whole scenario, Jesus makes this statement that maybe is confounding, where He tells him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." Why would Jesus say that? What does He mean? This guy understands what is prioritized in Scripture. He is in complete agreement with Jesus about what are the most important commands that God has given His people. He knows them; he's agreed with them. So, why would Jesus say, "You're not far from the kingdom of God"? Why wouldn't He say, "Great, high five, let's move on"? There are two possibilities. One is that Jesus, being who He is, knows that maybe this guy is a hearer of the Word but not a doer of the Word. He knows it, and he agrees with it, but maybe he's not living it out. Perhaps Jesus knew that this man knew the law but, like everyone else, needs encouragement to follow it. Maybe—not likely—that Jesus would reinforce a works-based righteousness: "Just keep being better, young man, and you'll get yourself into the kingdom of heaven." That doesn't sound like Jesus; it doesn't sound like the Bible.

More likely, this man is an individual just like Nicodemus, just like the rich young ruler, just like so many others before who come to Jesus and want to know about the commands of God and what is different about Jesus and what He's teaching compared to what they have understood. Just like Jesus tells Nicodemus, the thing that you need is you need to be born again. You need new life. You can't do this on your own; you can't just work your way into heaven. He needs to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. He needs to trust Him as his Messiah and his Savior. He needs to come to terms with the reality that it is not by works of righteousness that we are saved, but according to His mercy that He saved us. He needs to understand, much like Paul talks about in Galatians chapter 2, where he says, "We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ, not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified." Yes, these are the most important commandments. Yes, God wants us to live in obedience to these commandments, but that is not how you are justified before God. You're not going to be declared righteous based on your good works.

So, maybe what He's saying is, don't settle for love; you have to believe. Just as with the Sadducees, you couldn't just settle for learning; you had to understand. You can't just settle for this outward act of demonstrating love towards God and love towards neighbor. You actually have to believe in what God has provided for us to save us. You have to entrust yourselves. How many of you are like that man? You're not far from the kingdom of heaven, but you're trying to work your way there. Let me assure you, you cannot "good" yourself into God's kingdom. You cannot be good enough to get into God's kingdom because the Bible is very clear: "There is none righteous, no, not one." God does desire righteousness; He wants us to live in obedience. He's even given us His Holy Spirit to aid in that pursuit, but what we need to do is trust in the work of Christ on our behalf, recognizing our own deficiencies and inabilities and bringing ourselves to the point of crying out to God for grace and mercy. That is what He has provided for us in Christ Jesus.

God wants to save sinners. Paul writes to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 2: "This is good and pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." Yes, God wants to save sinners, but in order for that to happen, one of the things that we have to come to realize is He's the one who saves us. He's the only one who can save, and we cannot be good enough. We cannot, through our own works, just finally check off enough boxes, get enough stars on our sheet. We have to cry out for grace and mercy, confess our sin, acknowledge that we are unable to bring ourselves back into a right relationship with God, and embrace the offering that He has given to us through Christ Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. That's why this man could understand what the most important commands are but also still be just very near the kingdom. All you need to do is the same thing that people who are very far need to do, and that is to confess your sins and trust, believe, put your faith in the work of Jesus Christ to save you. As the Bible says again and again and again, if you do that, you will be saved.

Let's pray: Lord, I thank You so much for the interaction that Jesus has once again on the Temple Mount, as Mark records for us these two scenarios. Thank You for the humility with which He addresses both this group of people and this individual, continuing to press them on the truth, continuing to point them back to what is revealed in Your Word—revealed to us about God and who You are, revealed to us about salvation, even revealed to us about things like the resurrection. Maybe all the details aren't revealed; maybe so much of it is still fuzzy. But there are certain things that we can know, and what we can know is that, even though it's beyond our comprehension, we can be certain that it is going to be an experience that is filled with more joy than we could possibly imagine. I ask that You would help each one of us here to not only come to terms with the reality of our own inability to save ourselves, our own inability to be good enough to be accepted in Your sight, but also to embrace the offering that You have given to us in Your Son, Jesus Christ, as our substitute who paid the penalty for our sins, who died the death that we deserve but He did not, who rose victorious over sin and death and has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where He is there interceding for us. May we put our faith in Him and Him alone, and may we find great comfort in the fact that for all who do that, there is no more condemnation. May that be so comforting to us. Amen.