Matt.22:29-33 – Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God.
This quote of Jesus has the smell of the vision of dry bones given to the Prophet Ezekiel. “Can these bones live?” This was the question posed by the Lord to Ezekiel. In the light of the Spirit of prophecy that was moving mightily upon Ezekiel the obvious answer would have to be a resounding ”YES !!!” Of course the Lord can cause dead men to come alive by the power of the Spirit in the new birth and also by His Spirit He will raise the dead at the last day. The religious leaders had no spiritual understanding and Jesus went right to the heart of the problem. They did not know the scriptures or the power of God. Of course these teachers had a head knowledge of scripture but they were blind because they did not know the power of God which enlivens scripture and will raise us up from the grave at the end of time. Here is how Albert Barnes describes this.
“They had taken a wrong view of the doctrine of the resurrection. It was not taught that men would marry there. The Scriptures, here, mean the books of the Old Testament. By appealing to them, he showed that the doctrine of the future state was there, and that the Sadducees should have believed it as it was, and not have added the absurd doctrine to it that men must live there as they do here.,,,
Nor the power of God. They probably denied, as many have done since, that God could gather the scattered dust of the dead, and remold it into a body. On this ground they affirmed that the doctrine could not be true—opposing reason to revelation, and supporting that Infinite Power could not reorganize body that it had at first organized, and raise a body for its own dust which it had at first raised from nothing.”
The scary thing about all of this, it sounds way to familiar. Churches and individual Christians have there own deep seated belief about the meaning of scripture but like the Pharisees and Sadducees of old they don’t know the scriptures or the power of God. The church world in a large degree is just like these leaders of old were, they don’t know the scriptures or the power of God. Our world desperately needs divine intervention.
