Biblion Bible Commentary
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The God of the Living
Matthew 22:23-33
23 On that day Sadducees (those who say that there is no resurrection) came to him. They asked him, · WEB
A riddle about seven husbands is answered from a verb tense at the burning bush.
On that day Sadducees (those who say that there is no resurrection) came to him Matthew 22:23.
The second delegation of the day holds the opposite position to the first. The Sadducees were the temple party, and they denied the resurrection, the angels and the spirit world, accepting the authority of the books of Moses above all else — which is why the answer is taken from Exodus rather than from the prophets, where the resurrection is stated plainly Daniel 12:2 Isaiah 26:19.
Their case is a constructed one, and its purpose is ridicule. The law required a man to raise up offspring for a brother who died childless Deuteronomy 25:5–6, and they run the rule through seven brothers and one woman. "In the resurrection therefore, whose wife will she be of the seven?" Matthew 22:28. The argument is that the doctrine produces absurdities, so the doctrine is false.
The exchange is in the earlier account Mark 12:1–27. "You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God" Matthew 22:29 — two failures, and men who prided themselves on the text are told they do not know it.
"For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God's angels in heaven" Matthew 22:30. The riddle dissolves because it assumed the age to come is this one continued. Nothing here disparages marriage, which he had defended from the creation three chapters earlier Matthew 19:4–6; what is said is that the institution belongs to this age. The comparison to angels is limited by its own context to that one point, and no more is claimed.
Then the argument for the resurrection, and it turns on a tense. "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" Matthew 22:32 Exodus 3:6. Spoken to Moses at the bush, centuries after all three were buried, and spoken in the present. "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."
What that proves is what it was brought to prove — the resurrection, which is the subject of the whole exchange and is named as such twice in the two preceding verses. He calls it the resurrection of the dead Matthew 22:31, and the patriarchs are on the dead side of that phrase; they are lying in a cave at Hebron and the argument says so by needing a resurrection at all. The claim is about the covenant: God binds himself by name to three men and does not lose them, so their case is not closed while he holds it open. He speaks of them as living because he intends to raise them, calling the things that are not as though they were Romans 4:17.
When the multitudes heard it, they were astonished at his teaching Matthew 22:33. The party that controlled the temple has been answered out of the one book they could not dispute.
held with reason What this mark means