GOD OF THE LIVING

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 06 2007
Reading: Mark 12:18-27

The purpose of the example given by the Sadducees was to make belief in a life hereafter seem foolish. As far as they were concerned there was no resurrection of the dead, no immortality, and no angels. As we all are well aware there are many people today who seem to agree with the Sadducees.

Many of our movies and sit-coms often put across the same idea. The stories are built around life on a natural plane with little or no consideration given to the supernatural. Even in moments of crisis and death many of them ignore God and prayer. Credit must be given, though, to the few shows that do direct our attention to God and Christ-like principles - like “Touched by an Angel” and “Seventh Heaven.” But overall, except during Christmas time and Easter, the celluloid entertainment world produces shows with characters who seem to have never heard about the existence of God. The Sadducees claimed to believe in God, but they didn’t believe in life with him in the hereafter. Jesus tried to correct their way of thinking.

"You are badly mistaken,” he told them, “because you fail to understand the Scriptures or the power of God … Have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’? He is the God of the living, not of the dead. You are very much mistaken.”

Let us not let ourselves, or our children, be influenced by the Sadducees of today who, like their fore-bearers, are very much mistaken about the reality of God in both this life and in the one we all most surely will someday be entering.