Luke 20:37-40 Lessons from the Burning Bush
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 9, 2018 Luke 20:37-40
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.
But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For they no longer dared to ask him any question.
(Understanding the Text) Jesus reframed the Sadducees’ question by telling them that they were using the wrong logic to try to understand heaven. They were trying to deny the existence of the resurrection using human logic based upon conditions on earth and the present state of the human physical condition. Jesus informed them that their scenario would not work because it was based on false assumptions. Next, Jesus tells them that they have made another false assumption. They have claimed that there is no resurrection and justified it by only accepting the Pentateuch stating that Moses never taught the resurrection. Jesus points out the fallacy of their claim. He tells them that the resurrection is taught in the law and gives a specific example from Moses himself.
I have had a hard time following Jesus’ logic, but I think it is because I do not know the original Greek and/or Hebrew. I think the present tense of God’s name for Himself, “I am that I am” is being focused on here. This is why Jesus could say that God is not the Lord of the dead, but of the living, and the Sadducees accepted that statement without argument. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were forever gone, then what use would it be to claim to be their God?
(Revelation of God) We are given insight into God’s workings here. Jesus says that “all live to” God. This is why I think that the second death may be when God purges Himself of every living imprint of someone. We live because we have been given life by God. Jesus always viewed the first death as sleep, I guess, because that person’s imprint was still in God and could be brought back to life with a thought. However, if God were to somehow purge Himself of that imprint, that person would be gone totally never to return. Is that what happened to Jesus? God purged Himself of every piece of Jesus that was in Him? When Jesus died, was there no imprint of Him at all left on the Father? If so, what happened when Jesus was resurrected? Did their lives intertwine again somehow in the old configuration? Or in some new way? This does answer the question I have had about whether Jesus raised Himself or the Father did. Jesus raised Himself. The Father had torn Himself totally apart from Jesus. Jesus is God, so He had the power to lay His life down and take it back up again on His own. As a human, he only used the power of the Father to act, not His own, but in His death and resurrection, Jesus used His own divine power. (Note: This was a thought I was exploring as I studied this passage. I have no idea if it is correct or not. I am still unsure about whether the Father raised Jesus or Jesus raised Himself. The Bible states it both ways, so it is not an either/or situation.)
Does this mean that the Father no longer holds the imprint of sinful men, but Jesus does? Jesus took all the sin that had been accumulating on the Godhead into Himself and then separated from the Godhead and became forgotten, so to speak. When He raised Himself, was it without the imprint of that sin? Or maybe not. This is too deep for me right now, but I think I am getting a better idea of what it means that Jesus took our sin on Himself. We always think of it as being taken from us, but maybe it was being taken from the Father. Maybe when we sinned, it was always imprinted on the Godhead, but now it is only on Jesus and He has successfully dealt with it somehow.
(Understanding the Text) Edersheim reinforces my earlier idea that part of the problem of belief for the Sadducees was caused by the Pharisees’ ideas. He cites some of the strange ideas that the Pharisees had about resurrection. “Thus, it was a point in discussion, whether a person would rise in his clothes, which one Rabbi tried to establish by a reference to the, grain of wheat, which was buried ‘naked,’ but rose clothed. Indeed, some Rabbis held, that a man would rise in exactly the same clothes in which he had been buried, while others denied this. On the other hand, it was beautifully argued that body and soul must be finally judged together, so that, in their contention to which of them the sins of man had been due, justice might be meted out to each – or rather to the two in their combination, as in their combination they had sinned. Again, it was inferred from the apparition of Samuel that the risen would look exactly as in life – have even the same bodily defects, such as lameness, blindness, or deafness. It is argued, that they were only afterwards to be healed, lest enemies might say that God had not healed them when they were alive, but that He did so when they were dead, and that they were perhaps not the same persons. In some respects even more strange was the contention that in order to secure that all the pious of Israel should rise on the sacred soil of Palestine, there were cavities underground in which the body would roll till it reached the Holy Land, there to rise to newness of life.” I’ve always thought of the Pharisees as having more Biblical understanding than the Sadducees, but the more I learn about their superstitions and shallow ideas, the more I realize that their understanding was just as limited as the Sadducees.
(Application / Prayer) My application to myself is that Jesus is more powerful than I have ever given Him credit for. I have looked at Him mostly as a man who was divine rather than divinity who was a man. There is much more to Him than I have ever noticed, and I need to be careful not to place my human limitations and blinders on Him. He is a man, but He is also God, and that is a mystery that I will never be able to completely fathom. I should never pigeonhole Him in my mind because He is so much more than I can conceive. Help me to see You as clearly as possible. Don’t let me get bogged down in wrong ideas about You. Show me the truly important aspects of who You are and don’t let me pick up strange ideas that are based on human logic.