In the twenty-second chapter of Matthew and also in Luke’s gospel, there is a story about the Sadducees’ coming to test the Lord Jesus Christ on the subject of the resurrection. It was one of a number of tests because people were trying to attack Him on different subjects. They had asked Him about the law and what was the first and greatest commandment. There was also a question about taxes, hoping to catch Him on His views concerning the relationship between one’s obedience to God and to the Roman government.
Then the Sadducees came with their question about the resurrection. The background for it is that they did not believe in the resurrection and wanted to show how foolish Jesus was if He believed in it. They approached Jesus on this subject with a made-up story that was meant to reveal the difficulties. There was a certain man who married a wife and then died. In accordance with the laws of levirate marriage, it was proper for the man’s brother next in line to marry her and try to raise up children in order that the line of inheritance might not fade away. But this man died without having any children either. So the third brother married her, but he died also. The same thing happened, all the way down to the seventh and last brother. Eventually, the woman died.
The Sadducees asked Jesus whose wife she would be in the resurrection, since all seven were married to her. They thought they had trapped Jesus because it just did not make sense to talk about a resurrection, and they thought this story proved it. You may recall that our Lord responded to them on two levels. He told them that they were making a great error for two reasons. First of all, He told them that they did not know the Scriptures. This was because in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Secondly, He said that they were ignorant of the power of God because their chief problem was not this matter of marriage in the next world, but the matter of the resurrection itself. Jesus used the examples of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, pointing out that in Scripture God says that He is their God, long after the three patriarchs had died. Jesus then said, “He is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Matt. 22:32). Jesus’ point was that God, for whom all things are possible, is certainly able to bring about a physical resurrection of human bodies.
That sort of reply comes to mind as we come to this latter portion of 1 Corinthians 15. In the verse that begins this section, verse 35, you have two questions which are more or less parallel to the idea to which our Lord responded in Matthew 22. Paul says that someone may ask the question, “How are the dead raised?” That has to do with the power to raise as well as with the question of the kind of body that will exist. It is not an absolute parallel, but it is a close one. What our Lord said in reference to the Sadducees in a certain way applies to this matter here.
People who are questioning the resurrection do so for one of those two reasons. Either they are ignorant of the Scriptures, which is to say, they are confused about things. They are asking questions about things they do not fully understand. If they would read the Scriptures, there would be a perfectly adequate explanation. The other reason is the more serious one, which is that they simply doubt the power of God. What Paul is doing in this chapter for the benefit of the Christians at Corinth and, of course, for ourselves as well, is dealing with the problems on each of those levels. It is interesting that we still have that with us today because this kind of disbelief is nothing new. Just as it was present in Christ’s day in the form of the Sadducees, so we have it today, even in some who identify with the Christian Church.
Paul deals primarily with this matter of the resurrection body, that is, the nature of the kind of body that we are going to have in the resurrection. Presumably that was the chief question in the minds of the Corinthians, who we see from this letter were influenced by Greek culture and philosophy. And where that influence came into conflict with the Word of God, Paul needed to correct their thinking.
