Announcements
1. Men’s Breakfast Saturday morning. We will eat at 8:00am but come early for fellowship in the kitchen.
2. Practice for our Christmas play will begin next Sunday, November 14th, during the Sunday School hour for Middle School and High School youth. We need them all to be there if possible. Practice for the younger children will start later, they will continue to have their regular Sunday School class until play practice starts for them.
Luke 20:27-38 (ESV)
There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, [28] and they asked him a question, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. [29] Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. [30] And the second [31] and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. [32] Afterward the woman also died. [33] In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife." [34] And Jesus said to them, "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, [35] but those who are b considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, [36] for they cannot die anymore, because they are f equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. [37] 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. [38] Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him."
Questions for Reflection
1. What do you imagine happens to us after death?
2. How have your beliefs in the afterlife changed over the years?
3. Why did Jesus describe God as “the God of the living”?
4. What makes belief in the resurrection an important Christian belief?
The Sadducees, a group of conservative religious leaders, honored only the Pentateuch—Genesis through Deuteronomy—as Scripture. They also did not believe in a resurrection of the dead because they could find no mention of it in those books. The Sadducees decided to try their hand at tricking Jesus, so they brought him a question that had always stumped the Pharisees.
They wanted Jesus to say something they could refute. Even so, Jesus did not ignore or belittle their question. He answered it, and then he went beyond it to the real issue. When people ask you tough religious questions—“How can a loving God allow people to starve?” “If God knows what I’m going to do, do I have any free choice?”—follow Jesus’ example. First answer the question to the best of your ability; then look for the real issue—hurt over a personal tragedy, for example, or difficulty in making a decision. Often the spoken question is only a test, not of your ability to answer hard questions, but of your willingness to listen and care.
