Luke 20:27-36 Whose Wife is She?
Format for Your Devotions
Instructions: Do not read my example devotion until you have completed your own devotional time in the scriptures. Reading my thoughts first may limit your own understanding. Let the Holy Spirit speak to you alone before looking to see what anyone else has to say, whether it is me, a Bible commentary, or a friend. Let God speak to you before you let another person speak to you. I have provided a format, but modify it to fit your needs. For example, I usually combine my application and prayer together talking to God about the application to my own life. You can go through this devotion process mentally, speaking out loud, or in writing as you wish. Don’t worry if you are not following this process exactly. Sometimes, I add extra information and sometimes I emphasize one part more than others. However, you should always think about what you learn about God from this passage.
Step 1: Pray–Ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance first of all and that God may reveal the lessons that He wants you to have that day. Request that God protect you from Satan’s distractions (and the devil will try to distract you whether it is pinching the baby or putting you to sleep). Ask to see God more clearly as you read and think about the passage.
Step 2: Read the passage–Read to get an overview of the information first. Then start looking at specific parts after the first reading. You may read a larger or smaller section than I have here because you do not have to follow my organization at all.
Step 3: Understand the passage–You can summarize, ask and answer your own questions about the passage, visualize the story, analyze the characters, and relate this passage to other scriptures and personal experiences.
Step 4: What does this reveal about God?–What do you learn about the Father, Son, and/or Holy Spirit from this passage?
Step 5: Apply this to your own life.
Step 6: Prayer
My Example Devotion: November 8, 2018 Luke 20:27-36
Note: In the devotion examples, I leave my questions and thought processes in the text because I am trying to demonstrate that a devotional time is a dialogue with God about what you are reading from His word. As such, any questions or ideas that you have should be explored by talking it out with God. These example devotions are not my attempts to teach you what the meaning of a particular scripture is. They are an attempt to teach you the process of devotions, which is a combination of prayer and Bible study where you explore ideas with God as you read His word.
There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.” And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.
(Understanding the Text / Revelation of God) The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, yet they asked a question about the resurrection. It seems that humans always focus on the very thing that they make a point of denying. I think that this was probably a well-known question among them that they circulated to show the inconsistency of believing in the resurrection. Again, Jesus cuts through the question to the assumption that it was based on. It was based on the assumption that people would live in heaven in the same way that they lived on a sinful earth. Jesus said that life would be different in heaven, and one way it would be different is that there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage.
(Understanding the Text) Edersheim points out that the Sadducees were trying to show up Jesus a country bumpkin or an uneducated fool. “Their object was certainly not serious argument, but to use the much more dangerous weapon of ridicule. Persecution the populace might have resented; for open opposition all would have been prepared; but to come with icy politeness and philosophic calm, and by a well-turned question to reduce the renowned Galilean Teacher to silence, and show the absurdity of His teaching, would have been to inflict on His cause the most damaging blow.”
I saw an interview with 3ABN leaders saying that this only meant new marrying in heaven because they did not think that God would separate two people that loved each other. It’s true that God hates divorce, but the 3ABN leaders’ answers did not ring true to my ears. Another answer that I have considered is that this only applies in heaven and not when we begin to live on the new earth.
Jesus calls them two different ages. This age is our life on sinful earth. That age is our time after resurrection. Jesus specifically says that they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” which seems to mean “not be married” but could mean something else. This is hard for me to understand, not necessarily because of the specific words used but because the concept is strange to me. Jesus says that the reason we don’t marry is “they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection” To me, that would imply that the changing of our bodies when we are transformed will change our sex drives also. It may be that marriage in the sense being talked about is the physical union between a man and a woman which Jesus says will not happen, I guess.
We were created a little lower than the angels, but after our resurrection we will be equal to angels. It calls us sons of God because we are resurrected. That has new meaning to me nowadays. Adam was a son of God while every other human is a son of Adam, but after the resurrection, Jesus says that we will no longer be sons of Adam, but sons of God like Adam. Is this because Jesus is our brother and the Father is His father? Or is it because we will essentially be a new creation of God’s not formed in a natural process of procreation but in a creative process through God’s power? Whatever process it refers to, we will have been elevated in stature to equality with angels. This is something I need to study more.
Edersheim points out that none of the people of Jesus’ time had ever known about a resurrection before. There had been resuscitations in the Old Testament and by Jesus where people were brought back to life in their same old bodies (only healed), but no one had seen a body transformed before Jesus. “It was as yet a matter of hope, not of faith: something to look forward to, not to look back upon. The isolated events recorded in the Old Testament, and the miracles of Christ – granting that they were admitted – were rather instances of resuscitation than of Resurrection. The grand fact of history, than which none is better attested – the Resurrection of Christ – had not yet taken place, and was not even clearly in view of any one. Besides, the utterances of the Old Testament on the subject of the ‘hereafter’ were, as became alike that stage of revelation and the understanding of those to whom it was addressed, far from clear. In the light of the New Testament it stands out in the sharpest proportions, although as an Alpine height afar off; but then that Light had not yet risen upon it.”
(Application / Prayer) My application for myself is not to apply the worldly actions and ways of life to heaven. God’s ways are not the aggressive, overly sexed, status-seeking, violent ways of this world. Most of the ideas and ways of life that I am familiar with from the world are tainted with sin, so I need to focus on the ideas of heaven found in the Bible to understand the difference. I need to realize that God has the power to do new and creative things that will result in greatly different lives for us in heaven than we have on the earth. Open my mind to the lessons of heaven that You have provided so that I do not apply earthly things to heavenly things. I want to live as a citizen of heaven.