But that the dead rise, even Moses shewed in [the section of] the bush, when he called [the] Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob;
The Sadducees denied any resurrection, and had just mocked the idea with a story of one woman married to seven brothers. Jesus answers them from Moses, not the prophets — from the passage where God speaks out of the bush.
The Lord could have quoted many clearer statements about the dead rising. Instead He chose a text His opponents could not wave away, since they honoured the books of Moses above all.
The Lord does not quote the clearest Scripture about the resurrection. In the circumstances He does something much better: He appeals to what they themselves claimed to respect most of all. For the Sadducee no part of Scripture carried the authority of the five books of Moses. So from Moses He proved the resurrection, and in the simplest possible way.
The phrase sounds odd today. It is how people pointed to a place in Scripture before chapters and verses existed.
In those days the books were not divided into chapters and verses as they are now, and this explains several expressions. In Mark 2:26 a quotation comes from "the section of Abiathar the high priest" (1 Samuel 21:1-6). In Luke 20:37, "Moses showed in the section on the bush" (Exodus 3).
The verse names Moses as the one who showed this. Matthew's record of the same reply names God as the speaker.
So in Luke we read, in the same connection, "But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham" (Luke 20:37). This shows beyond doubt that the human author was Moses. The parallel passage in Matthew 22:31 adds a word about the divine inspiration of the same words: "Have you not read what was said to you by God, 'I am the God of Abraham'".
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been dead for centuries when God spoke at the bush. Yet He did not say He was their God; He named Himself by them in the present.
If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had ceased to exist, could God still have taken their names — the name of nothing — to describe Himself to Israel? He might have said, "I am He who was with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when they existed." Even that would have been a completely unworthy relationship — the God of men who had no more than an animal existence. God describes Himself by them, and is not ashamed to be called their God. Could He describe Himself by a mere dying animal — by men who, at the moment He calls Himself their God, did not exist at all?
Someone might agree that these three men still live, and stop there. But the argument goes further, because a person is more than a spirit.
Further, though they were dead, their body was an essential part of who they were, for man is made of three parts: spirit, soul, and body. So the body must rise again. Abraham could not be complete without his body. The spirit of Abraham is one thing; the body of Abraham is another. But if we speak of Abraham, we speak of one to whom spirit, soul, and body all belong.
There is a second reason the grave cannot be the end for these three men. God had bound Himself to them by promises still unpaid.
Though dead to this scene, they still live and will rise again to enjoy the promises of God, which, sin having come in, can only be fulfilled on resurrection ground.
Exodus 3 never uses the word resurrection. That is part of the lesson.
In this way Exodus 3:6 taught by implication the very truth the Sadducees denied. From the Lord's use of it we learn this: where a truth is not stated outright, something may still teach it by implication. So we need to weigh the statements of God's Word carefully.
- Text — Jesus answers unbelief from the books His challengers honoured most. He proves the resurrection from Moses, not the prophets.
- Tense — the whole argument hangs on "I am": God names Himself by men long buried, and He is not the God of nothing.
- Person — a man is spirit, soul and body. Abraham without his body is Abraham incomplete, so his body must rise.
- Promise — God made promises to these three men that were never kept in their lifetimes. Only resurrection ground can pay them, so denying the resurrection denies God's faithfulness.
- Method — a truth can be taught by implication as clearly as by direct statement. So weigh every word of Scripture.
but he is not God of [the] dead but of [the] living; for all live for him.
The Sadducees denied any resurrection, and they mocked the idea with a story about one woman and seven husbands. Jesus answered them from the burning bush, where God calls Himself the God of three men long dead.
Everything turns on the tense of one verb, spoken long after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had died.
When did God say that? Centuries after those men were buried. And He said it through Moses. He did not say, "I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." That destroys the false idea that the dead have no consciousness, or that they stop existing until the body is raised. God is not the God of the dead but the living. If they had stopped existing for a time, He would have said, "I was their God." If He were looking ahead to the resurrection, He would have said, "I shall be." He said neither.
The force of "not God of the dead" depends on what His opponents meant by the word. For them, to be dead was to be gone.
"God is not the God of the dead [utterly and eternally perished, which was the sense in which the Sadducees used it, with whom He was disputing] but of the living."
If they had truly vanished, God could not still speak of Himself as standing in a relationship with them.
God says at the bush, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." But if He stood in that relationship to them then, they must exist for Him to be so. He could not be the God of the dead — dead in the Sadducee sense, meaning non-existent. They must be alive in some sense, alive to Him, and so they are.
God spoke those words while sending Moses to rescue a nation.
God sent Moses out from "the bush" to be their deliverer. He sent him under that title, "the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob," as the "I am" who had looked on His people and cared for them. The teaching of the Sadducees could never have been the good news of that deliverance, nor its inspiration. A living God in covenant with men meant life, not death; and if death was there, then a life supreme over it. So resurrection was the necessary filling out of such a declaration. The hand God held out to man was not to clasp the limp fingers of a corpse.
Up to this point the Lord had spoken only of the resurrection of the saints. The last clause suddenly widens.
Then He says that even Moses showed this at the bush: God is not "a God of the dead but of the living." Then He lays the foundation of an absolute fact He had not spoken of before at all: "For all live to Him." They have died as far as men are concerned. But as to God, wicked or saints, all live. Before this He had been speaking of the resurrection of the saints, and only of that. Now He declares that for God all live. He denies that death is the end of existence, and He does it in an absolute and positive way.
Two truths stand together here, and they answered a question that troubled Gentiles — the nations outside Israel.
Not only is God not the God of the dead, but of the living; "all live to Him" (verse 38). Two great truths are present here — living to God after death, and future resurrection, when Jesus comes and brings in the new age. This was especially valuable for Gentiles. One of the great problems for them was whether the soul existed after death, let alone the resurrection of the body.
So the argument does not stop with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Luke now adds a few words of universal importance, which deeply concern all men: "For all live to Him." Dead to us here, they live to God. So death does not end any man's existence. This refers of course to all the dead, and therefore concerns all the living.
- Tense — God said "I am" the God of Abraham, not "I was" and not "I shall be." Those men were long buried, so the present tense settles the question.
- Relationship — God cannot hold a living relationship with people who no longer exist. If He is still their God, they still are.
- Covenant — a living God who binds Himself to men means life, and resurrection completes that promise. He did not hold out His hand to clasp a corpse.
- Reach — the last clause moves past the saints He had been describing. For God all live, righteous and wicked alike, and death ends no one's existence.
- Result — Luke's added words give two certainties: life with God after death, and resurrection when Jesus brings in the coming age. What is true of the dead concerns every living reader.