Doctrine of the Last Things (Part 18): State of the Soul after Death: Jesus’ Argument with the Sadducees

State of the Soul after Death: Jesus’ Argument with the Sadducees

Last time we surveyed briefly views on the state of the soul after death in the Old Testament and saw that the belief in the resurrection of the dead was a gradually developing doctrine within Judaism.

Although the belief in resurrection was widespread in Judaism during Jesus’ time, it wasn’t universally held. Jews were divided about this doctrine. We see this division explicitly in Acts 23:6-10 where we have this marvelous story about how Paul exploits this division between the Pharisees and the Sadducees to his own advantage. Paul had been arrested and was brought in front of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, to be tried. Let’s read in Acts 23:6-10 what happened:

But when Paul perceived that one part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, “Brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees; with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead I am on trial.”

What a clever move! He is being tried for what he preached about Jesus – the resurrection of Jesus. But he says I am on trial because I believe in the resurrection of the dead which immediately parts the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

And when he had said this, a dissension arose between the Pharisees and the Sadducees; and the assembly was divided. For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge them all. Then a great clamor arose; and some of the scribes of the Pharisees’ party stood up and contended, “We find nothing wrong in this man. What if a spirit or an angel spoke to him?” And when the dissension became violent, the tribune [that is, the Roman tribune], afraid that Paul would be torn in pieces by them, commanded the soldiers to go down and take him by force from among them and bring him into the barracks.

Here Paul adroitly exploits just the difference that we are talking about in order to escape judgment by the Sanhedrin, and the Romans have to rescue him, so violent is the dissension that ensues.

It is very interesting to notice that Jesus sided with the Pharisees on this issue. Jesus himself sided with the Pharisees against the Sadducees when he was questioned about this doctrine. Look at Matthew 22:23-33. Matthew writes,

The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.”

And you can just imagine these guys chortling to themselves at how clever they were, trying to trap Jesus with this silly thought experiment.

But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

Here Jesus teaches that the resurrection will occur but that there will be a different quality of life in the resurrection. There will not be marriage such as we have here on Earth. Therefore, the riddle was simply beside the point. He appeals to the Pentateuch which was accepted by the Sadducees as authoritative Scripture from God to say that God is the God of the living, including the past patriarchs, which suggests that they are in some sense still alive.

So in Jesus’ argument with the Sadducees, we see him affirming his belief in the resurrection of the dead. The Christian movement that followed Jesus, of course, believed not only in Jesus’ resurrection, but they considered that Jesus’ resurrection was the foretaste and harbinger of our own eventual resurrection from the dead. As Paul wrote, Christ is risen from the dead, “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). That is, Christ is a representative sample of the harvest that will come.

So the early Christian view was essentially the same as the Jewish view of the resurrection of the dead with this important difference – one person’s resurrection has already occurred in advance as the guarantor and harbinger of our own resurrection; that is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. His resurrection is the basis on which our hope in immortality and resurrection rests.

The last several lessons we’ve been talking about what we might call cosmic eschatology – how the end of human history and the world will come about. But as I said last time, for most of us, or at least all Christians up until this point in history, have not and won’t experience that cosmic end of the world when Christ returns but rather Christians have experienced what we might call personal eschatology. They have been ushered into the presence of Christ through their own personal deaths.

This raises the question: What happens to a person when he dies? If he doesn’t live until the return of Christ, what happens to that person when his body finally gives out? Does that person go straight to heaven, or to hell, or does his soul somehow sleep until the resurrection day when he rises from the dead and Christ returns? Many people on our contemporary scene have claimed that they have had near-death experiences in which they have gone to heaven and had a glimpse of heaven – what it is like when we die. For example, a best-selling book and film was Heaven Is For Real in which a young boy – Colton Burpo – describes his experience of what he calls “going to heaven.” He says that he saw there people whom he recognized. He saw his deceased grandfather. He even saw his little sister whom he did not know he had because she died before he was born. He even claims to have seen Jesus in this state.

What are we to make of these kinds of claims? If a person does go straight to heaven when he dies then how do we understand the final resurrection of the dead and of the Judgment Day? How can there be people who are already in an embodied and recognizable condition if they haven’t yet been raised from the dead, since that won’t happen until Christ returns.

If you say, well, people have to wait until the resurrection from the dead, then what happens to the souls of the departed? Where are the souls of the saved or the unsaved during that interim period before Christ returns and the dead are raised?

These are the sorts of questions that we want to address next time.^[1]