You are mistaken because you do not know

The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, and they came to Jesus with a riddle designed to make the doctrine look ridiculous.

Seven brothers, one wife, each dying childless in turn as the law required, and then the question: at the resurrection, whose wife will she be?

It is a trap built out of the law of Moses, which is the only part of Scripture the Sadducees fully accepted. And the answer opens with a diagnosis rather than a rebuttal.

You are mistaken because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.

Two things, and both are needed. A man can know the text and not believe God can act; a man can believe God can do anything and have no idea what He has said.

Then the argument itself, and it is startling.

Have you not read what God said to you? — and then a quotation from the burning bush.

The whole weight of the argument rests on the tense of the verb. God did not say I was the God of Abraham. He said I am, speaking to Moses centuries after all three men were buried.

Notice what has just happened. Jesus has proved the resurrection — a doctrine the Sadducees rejected as unbiblical — from a verb tense in the Torah, the only part of Scripture they would grant.

He met them on their own ground, at the level of a single word, and Matthew says the crowds were astonished at His teaching and that from that day on no one dared to ask Him any more questions.

And He also does something that should be read slowly. He says what God said to you — to men standing in Jerusalem in the first century, about words spoken to one man at a bush a millennium and a half earlier.

Which is exactly the assumption this volume met in Week Five, where Paul says the Scripture said to Pharaoh. The written text is treated as God addressing the present reader in the present tense.

And the first half of the diagnosis is worth carrying home. They were not mistaken because they were unintelligent. These were the educated, wealthy, priestly party, who handled the Scriptures professionally.

There is a lesson in the method for anyone who has to answer a hard question. Jesus does not widen the discussion, appeal to His own authority, or accuse them of bad faith. He narrows it — to one book they accepted, one sentence in it, and one verb inside the sentence. The narrower the ground, the harder it was to leave.

They were mistaken because they did not know them.

The Sadducees accepted the written Torah and rejected the oral tradition, the resurrection, angels and spirits — which Luke states plainly in Acts 23:8. Jesus’ choice of Exodus rather than Daniel 12 or Isaiah 26, which teach resurrection more directly, is deliberate: He argues from the books His opponents granted.

Mark’s version at 12:24–27 adds a further sentence at the end — you are badly mistaken — and Luke’s at 20:38 adds that all live to Him. The three accounts differ slightly and agree on the argument from the tense.

The levirate marriage law the Sadducees cite is real, given in Deuteronomy 25:5–10 and enacted in the book of Ruth. Their riddle was a standard debating exercise; Jesus does not dismiss it as frivolous, but answers both its premise and its assumption.

Note the order of the two failures. Jesus names the Scriptures first and the power of God second, and the rest of the answer addresses both: they had misread the text, and they had underestimated what God could do with a body.

The scribes in Luke’s version respond with something almost comic: some of the teachers of the law said, Teacher, You have spoken well. The Pharisees, who did believe in the resurrection, had just watched their opponents dismantled with their own Scriptures.

Look it upG4105 πλανάω planao, to lead astray, be mistaken · G1492 οἶδα oida, to know, perceive · G1411 δύναμις dunamis, power · G1583 ἐκπλήσσω ekplesso, to be astonished, struck out

Then read Acts 23:6–10, where Paul, on trial before the same council, names the resurrection as the point at issue and splits the room. The argument Jesus settled from a verb tense was still dividing Jerusalem thirty years later.

Where this touchesMatthew 22:23–33 · Mark 12:18–27 · Luke 20:27–40 · Exodus 3:6 · Deuteronomy 25:5–10 · Acts 23:6–10 · Romans 9:17 (Week Five, Day Three). Josiah, Ezra, the wilderness, the chariot, Emmaus, Pentecost, Apollos, Daniel, Stephen, Timothy’s household, Jehoshaphat, Nazareth, the dry bones and Agrippa were the earlier scenes.