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Questions, Questions, Questions

Wednesday Evening

October 12, 2005

Mark 12:13-27

“Questions, Questions, Questions!”

Dr. Derek W.H. Thomas

Now turn with me, if you would, to the Gospel of Mark, and
again to chapter twelve. We pick up the reading this evening at verse thirteen
of Mark, chapter twelve. We have been following…before I say that, let me echo
Billy’s words and say how wonderful it is to see Skip Copeland back with us
tonight. We’ve missed you, and it’s wonderful to see you back with us.

And if you have your Bible (let me encourage you to
bring your Bibles with you on Wednesday night. Now that we’re meeting in here,
we don’t have a facility to provide you with Bibles, so bring your “sword” with
you on Wednesday nights!), turn with me to Mark 12:13.

We’ve been following our Lord as He’s been making
these forays into Jerusalem with His disciples in this, His last week of His
earthly life. Each evening, it appears, He goes back with the disciples to
Bethany (probably to the house, the family home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus)
and each day coming into Jerusalem. We have seen already that there is evil
afoot in the city. There is a satanic plot systematically being encountered day
by day as the onslaught of various groups of people now come in waves upon waves
upon our Lord.

We are still in the Tuesday of the final week.
Jesus has just cleansed the temple. We aren’t given specific time references now
in Mark. It may well be the afternoon of that Tuesday…we can’t at all be
specific. And three groups now come to Jesus, two of which we will see this
evening, and then, God willing, a third one next Wednesday evening. Before we
read the passage together, let’s come before God in prayer.

Once again, O Lord, we bow in Your presence. We
acknowledge that we are unworthy servants, and we thank You for the provision of
the Scriptures, for the word of God, for the sword that You have given to us,
for the light that lightens our path, for that which is sweeter than honey. And
we pray that we might read, mark, learn and inwardly digest and profit. For
Jesus’ sake, Amen.

This is God’s word.

“Then they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Him, in order
to trap Him in a statement. And they came and said to Him, ‘Teacher, we know
that You are truthful, and defer to no one; for You are not partial to any, but
teach the way of God in truth. Is it lawful to pay a poll-tax to Caesar, or
not? Shall we pay, or shall we not pay?’ But He, knowing their hypocrisy, said
to them, ‘Why are you testing Me? Bring Me a denarius to look at.’ And they
brought one. And He said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ And
they said to Him, ‘Caesar’s.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they were
amazed at Him.

“Some Sadducees (who say that there is no resurrection) came to
Jesus and began questioning Him, saying, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a
man’s brother dies and leaves behind a wife, and leaves no child, his brother
should marry the wife and raise up children to his brother. There were seven
brothers; and the first took a wife and died, leaving no children. The second
one married her, and died, leaving behind no children; and the third likewise;
and so all seven left no children. Last of all, the woman died, also. In the
resurrection, when they rise again, which one’s wife will she be? For all seven
had married her.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Is this not the reason you are mistaken,
that you do not understand the Scriptures or 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. But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not
read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning 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 the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly
mistaken.’”

Amen. And may God bless to us the reading of His holy and
inerrant word.

Well, as I was saying, we’re in a battle scene. The
prince of darkness grim is prowling the streets of Jerusalem. It would appear
that Satan probably realizes now what’s afoot, and he is endeavoring to “bruise
the heel” of the Son of promise. The principal groupings within Israel are
coming together in what appears to be a systematic attack to embarrass, to
compromise the Lord’s teaching. It is still Tuesday, the “day of questions”, as
this day has been called; and there are in fact three episodes that now follow,
and we’re going to consider two of them. The first concerns our relationship
to this world; the second concerns our relationship to the world to come.

The first attack comes from the Pharisees and the
Herodians, and concerns our relationship to this world.
Already (in verse
27 of chapter 11) we’ve seen three groups of people: the chief priests, the
scribes, and the elders — three divisions or branches of the Sanhedrin council.
Now in all likelihood we have three more groups, probably representing more or
less the same groupings, and they are the Pharisees and Herodians in this
section, the Sadducees in the next section, and then in verse 28 the scribes,
or, as they are sometimes called, the rabbis, the teachers of the law.

The first group, then: the Pharisees and the
Herodians. They represent two quite different factions within the Judaism of
Jesus’ time, and you could, I suppose, represent them as the conservatives and
the liberals. The Pharisees — they arose in the second century B.C. They were
part of the so-called Maccabean revolt, rebellion against the Seleucid
occupation. They were eager to prevent Judaism from slipping into Hellenism.
They were trying to prevent the cultural slide of Israel because of this
Greco-Roman occupation of the land. It was a lay movement. Josephus tells us
that in Jesus’ time there were perhaps something in the region of 6,000
Pharisees, a great concentration of them of course being in Jerusalem. They
were, if you like, a conservative force, a force for traditional ways. They
weren’t as conservative as the Sadducees, as you’ll see in a minute, but they
had a strict interpretation of the Law, and by Jesus’ time had added to their
interpretations of the Law certain oral traditions, which in some cases was
regarded as more important than the written Law itself. Jesus has many clashes
in His ministry with the Pharisees.

And then there are the Herodians (if you like, the
liberals). They are on the other side, and they were accommodating to the Roman
occupation, as their name suggests. They were supporters of Herod the Great.
This is the man who died probably within a year or two of Jesus’ birth. And
they were supportive, then, of Herod, who of course was a puppet figure of Rome
itself. Herod was of course Jewish, or half Jewish, but Rome trusted him to do
their bidding. They never were particularly keen on getting involved in the
nitty-gritty of Jewish affairs. It’s a classic case of two people who otherwise
are on opposite sides of the fence, but come together in unity against what they
see as a common enemy. They are sent…verse 13 suggests that they are sent to
Jesus, probably by the Sanhedrin.

And in these chapters that are before us, we see,
then, this systematic attempt by otherwise enemies coming together now to bring
Jesus down. They begin with words of flattery (“Beware when your enemies speak
well of you.”): “Teacher, we know that You are truthful and defer to no one. You
are not partial, but teach the way of God in truth.” They speak with forked
tongue, you understand.

Mark employs a verb in verse 19 to suggest that they
have come to trap Jesus. Their entire (verse 13) mission is to trap Him, and
Mark uses a verb that he has employed in the account of Satan’s attempt in the
wilderness to tempt our Lord. Satan is coming here in the guise of these
Herodians and Pharisees. Satan is prowling about, seeking to devour the Christ.

Here’s the question that they bring: “Is it lawful
to pay taxes to Caesar?”

Now, both the Pharisees and the Herodians of course
believed that it was right to pay taxes, but common people did not. The common
people resented paying taxes. Nobody likes paying taxes — not now, and not
then. And Jesus will now appear, depending on how He answers this question, to
be either an insurrectionist or a supporter of Rome. Taxes were a constant
reminder to the people that they were a subjugated nation; that they were under
the domination, the jackboot of Rome. They had relative freedoms in Israel, but
they were not free. They had been taken over, and large sums of money were being
taken from them — at least in the mindset of the common people — to support the
ever-expanding Roman Empire.

The Romans, of course, were clever enough. They
didn’t collect taxes themselves in Israel; they gave it to people like Matthew,
one of the disciples; and so long as they received what they were entitled to
received, folk like Matthew could ask whatever they wanted and cream off from
the top, so tax collectors were deeply resented. It’s a euphemism in the
Scriptures: “tax collectors and sinners”, and they go together. And worse than
that, the coinage bore the image of the emperor, who sometimes claimed divine
qualities. You have the case in Acts 5 of a man who is called Judas the
Galilean, who led an insurrection in not paying taxes to Caesar.

So you’ve got a “have you stopped beating your
wife?” kind of question. You’re damned if you say yes, and you’re damned if you
say no! Is it lawful to pay taxes? If Jesus says yes, He’s seen as a puppet of
Rome and will lose the respect of the common people who heard Jesus gladly; and
if He says no, He’ll be seen as an insurrectionist by the Roman authorities.

And so He asks for a coin, a denarius. The denarius
was just a coin that every adult male and female would have to pay, like a poll
tax, in order to survive within the Roman Empire. And on one side of the coin
there was the inscription Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Son of the Divine
Augustus
(in Latin, of course); and on the reverse side was the image of
Tiberius’s mother, Olivia, and the words Pontifex Maximus — the chief
priest, if you like, of the Roman state cult, or the religion of Rome. (The
pope, of course, to this day calls himself Pontifex Maximus.) It was, in the
eyes of some, and particularly the Jews, idolatry. Here was the image of one
who claimed to be God. It was a violation of the commandment about representing
God in an image. It was inherently idolatrous, so there was a point to the
question. Jesus’ answer is masterful: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and
unto God what is God’s.”

In less that two months from now, Jesus’ disciples
will draw the implication of what Jesus is saying here: that there are times
when it is appropriate to obey the state, and when the state is demanding of you
something which God prohibits, then you must obey God and not men. And we’ll see
in a couple of month’s time from now, when we turn to The Acts of the Apostles
after Pentecost, how Peter and John…they’re imprisoned, and the Sanhedrin
council are forbidding them to preach in the name of Jesus, and they will say,
“It is time for us to obey God, and not men.”

Now, don’t make the mistake of concluding that Jesus
is putting these two on the same level – the obedience to the state and the
obedience to God, as though Jesus is suggesting that these are two equally
ultimate powers. He’s actually asking the question, what’s really important to
you? Because if you’re a Christian, if you’re a believer, the demands of God are
far more weighty and far more significant than the demands of the secular.
Jesus isn’t just dividing ‘this is my religions life and this is my secular
life, and never the twain shall meet.’ That’s not what Jesus is suggesting
here.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, just about a year before he
died in 1979, preached what was to be one of his very final sermons, and it was
on this text. And he drew three conclusions from it, the first of which was
this: The image that is in you is God’s image, not the state’s image. You owe
God your fundamental allegiance. You must give yourself to the Lord — “In full
and glad surrender I give myself to Thee, Thine totally and only, and evermore
to be”, to quote Francis Riddley Havergal in that marvelous hymn. The image that
is in you is God’s image.

The second conclusion that he drew was this: What is
the worst thing that Caesar can do? He can take away your life, but God is
almighty, and He can cast your soul into hell, where the worm does not die and
the fire is not quenched. And dear friends, do you and I as Christians, do we
contemplate as we ought the power of the everlasting and eternal God? “Render
unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but render unto God what is God’s.”

And the third conclusion he drew was this: That
paying taxes will bring you good things. It will bring you good roads (though
perhaps not in Mississippi!); it will bring you a fire service; it will bring
you a police force…but God can give you eternal life. God can give you eternal
life. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”

So that’s the first encounter.

Then comes the second, and this time is comes
from the Sadducees, and you see it there in verses 18-27.
The Sadducees and
Pharisees were the two prominent factions in Israel in Jesus’ day. They, too,
had arisen about the same time as the Pharisees in the second century B.C. But
they were different from the Pharisees: these Sadducees only accepted the
authority of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. They did not
believe in angels or demons; and they adamantly did not believe in a
resurrection, so they brought a question about marriage. It comes from the
Torah; it comes from Deuteronomy 25. It’s the so-called Levirate law of
marriage.

You and I know it well from the Book of Ruth. It’s
one of the issues, it’s one of the principal themes in the Book of Ruth. A widow
dies childless, and the husband’s brother is then under obligation to marry that
widow and raise up a seed in his name. The first-born of that marriage will be
regarded as the offspring of the deceased brother. Well, here’s the conundrum.
There are seven brothers — and you know what happens. Each one successively
dies, and leaving after seven of them are dead, finally the woman was still
childless. After seven husbands, she herself dies, and here’s the great
conundrum: Which husband will she have in heaven? It’s sort of one of those
reductio ad absurdum
arguments. It’s a ridiculous question. It’s the kind
of question that unbelievers love to ask. “Who did Cain marry?” That’s the
question that’s going to bring Christianity crashing down at its heels! “Who did
Cain marry?”

Well, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?
This question is of course coming from people who don’t believe in the
resurrection. It’s a loaded question. It’s the kind of question that’s meant to
bring disrepute to Jesus and to Christianity, and Jesus’ reply is fascinating.

The first thing He tells them is that they are
wrong.
They’re wrong. Is this not the reason you are wrong? There is gentle
Jesus, meek and mild, and He’s telling these Sadducees that they are plain
wrong! That they are in error! They do not know, nor do they understand, nor do
they rightly interpret the word of God, the Scriptures. He quotes from the
incident — and isn’t it interesting how Mark alludes to it in a sort of
off-hand, not a particular text verse kind of fashion, but in that passage about
the bush — the kind of thing that you and I do when we don’t have a Bible in our
hands. “You remember that passage,” we say, “in the bush.” And God refers —
He’s speaking to Moses — but He refers to this. And He says “I am the God of
Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And it’s in the present
tense; it’s not “I was the God of Abraham, and I was the God of
Isaac, I was the God of Jacob”, but “I am the God of Abraham, and I am
the God of Isaac, and I am the God of Jacob.” And Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
are dead! They’ve been buried! Their physical bodies are rotting in the ground,
but He is still their God. He still has a fellowship with Abraham, and with
Isaac, and with Jacob. Here’s a marvelous way in which Jesus, as it were, pulls
the rug from underneath their feet, because these are people who claim to
believe the Torah, and yet they don’t understand the Torah. And Jesus is saying
in this unprepossessing statement is the doctrine of the resurrection of the
believer, that there is a sense in which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are still
alive, and still in fellowship with God in heaven. Well, that’s the first thing:
that they’re wrong.

The second thing He tells them, in verse 25, is
that there is no marriage in heaven.
“When they rise from the dead, they
neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.” He
doesn’t say that they will be angels in heaven — that’s a very popular
belief now in post-modern spirituality, but that’s not what the Bible is saying.
We’re not going to be angels; we’re not going to sprout wings in heaven.
That’s not what Jesus is saying. But we will be like the angels in
heaven, in the sense that, just like the angels, there will be no need to
propagate the species in heaven.

When John Penrie, 400 years ago, sat in his dungeon
in the Tower of London the day before his execution, he wrote a letter to his
wife and his four little children. He left the four girls a Bible each, and he
then gave his love to his wife, and he signed the letter, “From her husband for
a season, and her eternal brother.” From your husband for a season, and your
eternal brother…I won’t be a grandson, and a great-grandfather, and an uncle,
and a cousin, and a nephew and a great-grandson forever, a woman won’t be
someone’s third wife forever and ever, but brothers and sisters in communion
with Jesus Christ. That’s what Jesus is saying.

He doesn’t answer all of our questions. He’s not
saying, as Augustine made so very clear in The City of God, that there is
here any sense at all that there’ll be no gender in heaven. There’ll be maleness
in heaven, and femaleness in heaven. C.S. Lewis argued the same, I think, in
Miracles
. That’s not what Jesus is suggesting here at all. There’s no
answer in this, too: “What happens to little infants when they die and go to
heaven? Are they going to be infants forever?” There’s no answer here to that
question. What happens to people who die in their nineties or a hundred? Will
they look ninety or a hundred in the age to come?

Fascinating questions — I think about them often. I
have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. My own personal thoughts, but it’s
not for the pulpit. This isn’t the place to give those opinions, and I can’t
tell you with any authority. I can tell you what I think — probably what I’d
like to think! — but one thing is absolutely clear here. Jesus is affirming
resurrection. There will be a resurrection. Brothers and sisters who love the
Lord Jesus Christ, who have been regenerated by the Spirit, who’ve been brought
into union with Christ, who’ve received the spirit of adoption — when they die,
their souls will go immediately into the presence of Christ, and at the Day of
Resurrection their bodies will rise to be reunited with their souls. Yes!
Bodies from the grave and bodies from the sea, and bodies that have been burned
in fire! And in some way, I can’t tell you how, but in some way there’ll be a
physical resurrection body with elements of continuity, so that personality will
be distinguishable and recognition will be possible; and, elements of
discontinuity, because there’ll be no need to propagate the species in
heaven.

Do you see what’s common about both of these
stories?
This systematic attempt on the part of Satan, who thinks he’s so
clever. The world thinks it’s so clever, with all of its arguments against
Christianity, and Jesus dismisses them in a moment for the triviality that they
are, because the Christian gospel is built upon solid foundations of iron and
steel, like the structure of this sanctuary that we’re all agog waiting to go
up, and we want to see those solid iron girders going into the ground. And
Jesus is giving to us here as we read this gospel the sense of confidence that
no matter what arguments are thrown against Christianity and the gospel, there
are perfectly reasonable answers to them.

These men, Pharisees and Herodians and Sadducees,
before the end of this week will hand Jesus over to the authorities, and He will
be killed. And they will lock Him up in a tomb, but you can’t keep a good man
down, and He will rise again on that third day in resurrection victory and
triumph, giving the seal of approval to the very words that He’s spoken here on
this Tuesday before His death.

As He rises, my friends, He is the first fruits of
those that sleep, and it’s our great hope and assurance tonight. You know,
we’re not going to be here forever. We’re not going to be here forever, and our
hope and assurance is not being here forever, but being in the presence of God
in the new Jerusalem, in the new heavens and the new earth in which
righteousness will grow.

Well, may God bless His word to us. Let’s pray
together.

Father, we thank You once again for Your word and
for the triumph of Christ over His enemies, as we see it again in this week of
betrayal. We ask that You would bless this word to us; hide it within our
hearts. Give us confidence, and grace, and assurance to live our lives as unto
You. To render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but to render unto You what is
Yours. Have our very all, we pray, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Please stand and receive the Lord’s
benediction.

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.