Mk 11:26-27

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“As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, [the] God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living.”

I was hoping someone could explain this: Why does Jesus quote here from Exodus?
 
“As Jesus was teaching in the temple area he said, 'How do the scribes claim that the Messiah is the son of David? David himself, inspired by the holy Spirit, said: ‘The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.”’ David Himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?” [The] great crowd heard this with delight."

How is it that the Messiah can be both David’s son and lord? Why does Jesus mention this? And why is the crowd delighted?
 
Actually it’s Mark 12. 😉 Anyway, Jesus quotes from Exodus to show that Moses believed in the resurrection of the dead, giving the teaching the authority of God himself. Jesus was refuting the Sadducees who denied that the dead will be resurrected to new life.
 
Cpb88 said:
“As Jesus was teaching in the temple area he said, 'How do the scribes claim that the Messiah is the son of David? David himself, inspired by the holy Spirit, said: ‘The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.”’ David Himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?” [The] great crowd heard this with delight."

How is it that the Messiah can be both David’s son and lord? Why does Jesus mention this? And why is the crowd delighted?
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  1. The answers lie in the genealogies of Christ, in both the Gospels of Luke, and Matthew.
    Matthew charts the Humanity of Christ from the David; Luke the Divinity of Christ back to God. So, considering Jesus has both a human nature and a divine nature, biologically he is the Son of David, and by divinity he is the Son of the Father, and therefore God, himself.
  2. To show he is fulfilling the prophecies that the Messiah would come from the house of David, and to show he is also the living God.
  3. After centuries of oppression; first by the Egyptians, then the Babylonians, and now the Romans, the 1st Century Jews were delighted because they recognized the Messiah had arrived, and suspected he would deliver them and restore the great Kingdom they once so enjoyed.
Hope this helps.

Peace and all good!
 
Cpb88 said:
“As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, [the] God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living.”

I was hoping someone could explain this: Why does Jesus quote here from Exodus?
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Jesus is talking to Sadducees, a group of Jews who believed that only the Five Books of Moses (otherwise known as the Torah or the Pentateuch) were inspired of God. While the prophets like Ezekiel and some of the wisdom writers and psalmists spoke about the physical resurrection of the body, the Sadducees rejected all such concepts since these works were not part of and written after the Books of Moses (Genesis though Deuteronomy).

So when some “Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him,” Jesus, with what the Sadducees believed was a question that proved the concept of resurrection impossible, Jesus used the words of Moses in Exodus to show how wrong they were.–Mark 12:18-23.

Jesus’ words at Mark 12:26-27 are thus: “Have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living.”

Quoting Moses, the only written authority the Sadducees accepted, Jesus pointed out that God did not say he “was” the God of the patriarchs. No, instead Jesus pointed out that God told Moses: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” using the present tense.–Emphasis added.

Jesus limited himself to the only written authority the Sadducees accepted and was still able to prove how wrong they were. The Book of Moses has God speaking of the patriarchs as living before Him.
 
Yet how does God’s relationship with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prove the resurrection of the body?
 
Cpb88 said:
Yet how does God’s relationship with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prove the resurrection of the body?
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If they are alive, their souls will be reunited with their bodies. The Sadducces believed that the dead were simply dead–no spirits in Abraham’s bosom. But since God created us with souls and bodies, if our souls are alive in God, then it follows that God will raise our bodies to new life, as well.
 
I may have to do some more research on the Resurrection of the Dead, however, it occurs to me that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were dead at the time of Jesus’s saying this.
 
Cpb88 said:
I may have to do some more research on the Resurrection of the Dead, however, it occurs to me that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were dead at the time of Jesus’s saying this.
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Their physical bodies were dead, certainly, but their souls were alive with God in Abraham’s bosom. The resurrection is the reunification of soul and body which will happen when Jesus comes again. Jesus was merely establishing the fact that the dead are not gone, as in no longer having existence. Their souls are with God or in hell, but all will be resurrected when Christ comes again, some to eternal life and others to eternal damnation.
 
Cpb88 said:
I may have to do some more research on the Resurrection of the Dead, however, it occurs to me that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were dead at the time of Jesus’s saying this.
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But you see He wasn’t their God until they were born living… Abraham in his time, Isaac in his time, Jacob in his time. Now, he’s our God, God of Petra 22 and God of Cpb88!!! and all the dead gone before us who still live in Jesus Christ… 🙂
 
Cpb88 said:
I may have to do some more research on the Resurrection of the Dead, however, it occurs to me that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were dead at the time of Jesus’s saying this.
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The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other faithful ones were indeed alive during the time of Jesus, albeit not on earth.

Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, “hell” - Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek - because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into “Abraham’s bosom”: “It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Savior in Abraham’s bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell.” Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.–CCC 633, emphasis added.
 
Cpb88 said:
Yet how does God’s relationship with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prove the resurrection of the body?
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Recall that Scripture says that the Sadducees “say there is no* resurrection*,” meaning a reanimation **of the body **by reuniting it with one’s soul. (Mark 12:18) The confusion with many, it seems, is that people often come to the conclusion that the Sadducees did not believe in the afterlife, and this is not correct.

The word “resurrection” does not occur in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a word of Greek origin, “anastasis,” and it means “to bodily stand up.” It is NOT in reference to life after death as an immortal soul.

So limited is the word to corporeal reanimation that some of the Greeks who heard St. Paul speak at the Areopagus came to laugh at him when he mentioned “resurrection.” In Roman-Greek society the belief was that a resurrection was unnecessary due to the soul being immortal. This spiritual afterlife was considered a “release” from the physical body, and thus a physical reanimation of the body seemed unnecessary and illogical:

Even some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers* engaged him in discussion. Some asked, “What is this scavenger trying to say?” Others said, “He sounds like a promoter of foreign deities,” because he was preaching about ‘Jesus’ and ‘Resurrection.’…

When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff…–Acts 17:22-32.

Belief in the afterlife does not include “resurrection” or the raising of the physical body to life for all religions that embrace the concept of “life after death.” The Sadducees did believe in life after death in Sheol, though the concept was of a shadowy existence. They were not annihilationists by any means. Due to their strict belief in “Torah-only” interpretation they did not embrace the concept of “resurrection” since it is not mentioned until the prophets (whose writings came after the Torah was composed)–and then again not by the name “resurrection.”

The New Testament speaks of the Sadducees denying the physical raising of the body, “resurrection,” and therefore since Jesus said they were wrong for denying the “resurrection,” this proves that resurrection of the physical body is a teaching of Christ. In Mark 12:26, Jesus said that the dead are definitely “raised.”
 
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