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Our blessed Saviour having put the Pharisees and Herodians to silence in the foregoing verses, here the Sadducees encounter him. This sect denied the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body, and as an objection against both, they propound a case to our Saviour, of a woman that had seven husbands; they demanded whose wife of the seven this woman should be at the resurrection? As if they had said, "If there be a resurrection of bodies at the great day, surely there will be a resurrection of relations too, and the other world will be like this, in which men will marry as they do here; and if so, whose wife of the the seven shall this woman be? They all having an equal claim to her."
Now our Saviour, for resolving of this question, first shows the different state of men in this and in the other world: The children of this world, says Christ, marry and are given in marriage; but in the resurrection they do neither. As if our Lord had said, "After men have lived a while in this world, they die, and therefore marriage is necessary to maintain a succession of mankind; but in the other world, men shall become immortal, and live forever; and then the reason of marriage will wholly cease; for when men can die no more, there will be no need of any new supplies of mankind."
Secondly, our Saviour having got clear of the Sadducees' objection, by taking away the ground and foundation of it, he produces an argument for the proof of the soul's immortality, and the body's resurrection, thus: those to whom Almighty God pronounces himself a God, are alive; but God pronounces himself, a God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, many hundred years after their bodies were dead; therefore their souls are yet alive, otherwise God could not be their God." For he is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
From the whole note, 1. That there is no opinion so absurd, no error so monstrous, that having had a mother will die for lack of a nurse: the beastly opinion of the mortality of the soul, and of the annihilation of the body, finds Sadducees to profess and propagate it.
Learn, 2. The certainty of another life after this, in which men shall be eternally happy, or intolerably miserable, according as they behave themselves here: though some men live like beasts, they shall not die like them, neither shall their last end be like theirs.
Note, 3. The glorified saints, in the morning of the resurrection, shall be like unto the gloruous angels; not like them in essence and nature, but like them in their properties and qualities, namely, in holiness and purity, in immortality and incorruptibility; and also like them in their way and manner of living. They shall no more stand in need of meat or drink than the angels do; but shall live the same heavenly and immortal lives that the angels live.
Note, 4. That all those that are in covenant with God, whose God the Lord is, their souls do immediately pass into glory, and their bodies at the resurrection shall be sharers in the same happiness with their souls. If God be just, the soul must live, and the body must rise; for good men must be rewarded, and wicked men punished. God will most certainly, one time or other, plentifully reward the righteous, and punish the evil doers; but this being not always done in this life, the justice of God requires it to be done in the next.