“Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”
When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. — Matthew 22:23-33
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In recent centuries the reliability of Scripture has been on trial as never before, and as followers of Christ, it is important we know how Jesus views Scripture. In this passage we get a very direct and candid look into the way Jesus views Scripture, the written word of God that in His day consisted of what we call the Old Testament.
Jesus is responding to a question from the Sadducees, and in verse 32 He quotes Exodus 3:6 where God speaks to Moses in the burning bush. God identifies Himself to Moses by saying, “I am the God…of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
In Matthew Jesus hangs his response to the Sadducees on the tense of the phrase “I AM.” Since God tells Moses that He is the God of these men who are already dead, then there must be life after their bodily death. Otherwise these men would no longer have a God and the phrase would have been “I was the God…”
The key thing here is that Jesus is confident that Scripture is authoritative and that things truly occurred just as Scripture records them….even down to the very tense of a specific word. If Exodus records God as saying “I am,” then that is truly what He said.
Beau Bristow: http://www.beaubristow.com beau (AT) beaubristow.com
