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Our blessed Saviour having put the Pharisees and Herodians to silence, next 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 question to our Saviour, of a woman that had seven brethren successively to her husbands; they demand, Whose wife of the seven this woman shall be at the resurrection? As if they had said, "If there be a resurrection of bodies, surely their 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 seven shall this woman be, they all having and equal claim to her?
Now our Saviour for resolving of this question, 1. Shews the different state of men in this world, 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 time 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."
2. Our Saviour having got clear of the Sadducees objection, by taking away the ground and foundation of it, he produceth an argument for a proof of the soul's immortality, and body's resurrection. Thus, "Those to whom Almighty God pronounced himself a God are alive; but God pronounced himself a God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, many hundred years after their bodies were dead; therefore their souls are yet alive, federally alive unto God; their covenant relation lives still, otherwise God could not be their God; for he is not God of the dead but of the living. If one relation fails, the other necessarily fails with it; if God be their God, then certainly they are in being, for God is not the God of the dead; that is, of those that are utterly perished.
Therefore it must needs be, that although their bodies be naturally dead, yet do their souls still live, and their bodies shall also live again at the resurrection of the just.
From the whole, Note, 1. That there is no opinion so absurd, no error so monstrous, that having had a mother, will die for the lack of a nurse. The beastly opinion of the mortality of the soul, and the annihilation of the body, finds Sadducees to profess and propagate it.
Note, 2. The certainty of another life after this, in which men shall be eternally happy or intolerable miserable, according as they behave themselves here; though some men live like beasts, they shall not die like them, nor shall their last end be like theirs.
Note, 3. That glorified saints in the morning of the resurrection, shall be like unto the glorious angels; not like them in essence and nature, but like them in their properties and qualities, in holiness and purity, in immortality and incorruptibility, and in their manner of living; they shall no more stand in need of meat or drink, than the angels do; but shall live the same heavenly, immortal, and incorruptible life, 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, some 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.