Which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation.
Which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation. They took advantage of their helpless condition and confiding character, to obtain possession of their property, while by their "long prayers" they made them believe they were raised far above "filthy lucre." So much the "greater damnation" awaited them. (Compare Matthew 23:33). A life-like description this of the Romish clergy, the true successors of "the scribes."
Remarks:
(1) What an exalted illustration does our Lord's example here afford of His own direction to the Twelve and His servants in every age, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep among wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves"! And shall not we, the deeper we drink into His spirit, approach the nearer to that matchless wisdom with which, in the midst of "wolves" hungry for their prey, He not only avoided their snares but put them to silence and shame; with wise speech, even as by well-doing, putting to silence ignorance of foolish men?
(2) The things of Cesar and the things of God-or things civil and things sacred-are essentially distinct, though quite harmonious. Neither may overlap or intrude itself into the sphere of the ether. In the things of God we may not take law from men (Acts 4:19; Acts 5:29); while in honouring and obeying Cesar in his own sphere, we are rendering obedience to God Himself (Romans 13:1-2; Romans 13:5).
(3) In matters which lie entirely beyond the present sphere-as the Resurrection of the dead-the authority of the Scriptures" must decide everything; and all difficulties arising out of their teaching on this and kindred subjects must be referred, as here, to "the power of God." A seasonable directory this in our day, when physical difficulties in the way of any corporeal resurrection of the dead have almost annihilated the faith of it in the minds of many scientific Christians. While "the Scriptures" must be the sole rule of faith with Christians on this subject, let us learn to refer every difficulty in the way of believing its testimony to "the power of God" to accomplish whatever He promises. So much for the doctrine of the Resurrection generally. As to the difficulty with which the Sadducees plied our Lord-the difficulty of adjusting, in the resurrection-state, the relationships of the present life-His reply not only dissolves it, but opens to us some beautiful glimpses into the heavenly state.
The Sadducean difficulty proceeded on the supposition that the marriage-relations of the present life would require to reappear in the resurrection-state, if there was to be any. This was but one of those gross conceptions of the future life to which some minds seem prone. Since marriage is designed to supply the waste of human life here which death creates, it can have no place in a state where there is no death. The future life of the children of God, as it will be sinless, so it will be deathless. This supposes new and higher laws stamped upon their physical system, to which the purer and higher element in which they are to move will be adapted. In respect of this undecaying life they will be on a level with the angels, and a faint reflection of their Father's own immortality. Yet there is an extreme on the other side to be guarded against, of so attenuating our ideas of the resurrection-state as to amount to scarcely more than the immortality of the soul. Were this all, the resurrection of the dead would have no meaning at all. It is the body only which does or can rise from the dead; and however "spiritual" the resurrection-body is to be (1 Corinthians 15:44), it must be a body still, and therefore possessed of all the essential characteristics of a body. Never let us lose hold of this truth, one of the brightest and most distinguishing of the Christian verities.
(3) What a light is here thrown upon the historical truth and inspiration of the Pentateuch! On any lower supposition, it is incredible that our Lord should have rested the divine authority of the doctrine of the Resurrection upon such words as He has quoted from it; and when, in His subsequent question about David, He quotes Psalms 110:1-7 as what David said "in spirit" or "by the Holy Spirit," and throughout all His teaching refers to every portion of the Old Testament Scriptures as of equal divine authority, we must set our seal also to that great truth, if we would not charge our Lord either with inability to rise above the errors of His age or with unworthy accommodation to them, knowing them to be errors.
(4) Our Lord's selection of an implied evidence of the resurrection in the Pentateuch, in preference to a direct proof which He might have found in the prophets, is worthy of note, not as showing His with to confine Himself to the Pentateuch, but as encouraging us to penetrate beneath the surface of Scripture, and, in particular, to take God's own words in their most comprehensive sense. When the Lord said to Moses, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," He might seem to mean no more than that He had neither forgotten nor grown indifferent to the promises which He made, some centuries before, to those patriarchs, whose God He was when they were alive. But as our Lord read, and would have us to read, those words, they were an assurance to Moses that He and the patriarchs, dead though they were, sustained the same relation still, and that as "all (of them) lived to Him," He held Himself under pledge to them; and in now sending Moses to redeem their children from Egypt and bring them to the promised land, He was but fulfilling His engagements to the patriarchs themselves, as living and not dead men.
To superficial readers this may seem, if not far-fetched, yet not the most cogent reasoning. But the views which it opens upon the indissoluble relation that God sustains to His redeemed-which death cannot for a moment interrupt, much less destroy or impair (John 11:25-26) - as they necessarily imply a resurrection of the dead, will be deemed by all deeper thinkers to be as cogent in point of argument as they are precious in themselves. In fact, the strongest arguments for a Future State in the Old Testament are derived, not so much from explicit statements-which however are not wanting-as from the essentially indestructible character of those relations and contacts which the saints sustained to God, and the consciousness of this which the saints themselves seemed to feel; as if they took it for granted rather than reasoned it out, or even reflected upon it.
(5) The intelligent reader of the New Testament will not fail to perceive that "life" in the future world is never once ascribed to the wicked as their portion, even though a life of misery. That they exist forever is but too clear. That they will "rise" as well as the righteous, is explicitly declared; but never "from the dead" х ek (G1537) nekroon (G3498)] - as if they would rise to live: They "rise to the resurrection of damnation" (John 5:29), even as in the Old Testament they are said to "awake to shame and everlasting contempt" (Daniel 12:2). But the word "life," as expressive of the future state, is invariably reserved for the condition of the saints. Hence, when our Lord here says, "For all live unto Him," we might conclude, even although the connection did not make it clear, that He meant 'all His saints'-all the dead that die in the Lord-and they only.
(6) How unscriptural as well as gloomy is the doctrine of the sleep of the soul between death and the resurrection! The argument of our Lord here for the resurrection of the patriarchs, and consequently of the saints in general, is founded on their being even now alive. Yes; and not only are their souls in conscious life, but as God is the God of themselves-the embodied Abraham and Isaac and Jacob - "though worms have destroyed their bodies, yet in their flesh must they see God," in order to be their full selves again, and get in full the promised inheritance. Sweet consolation this "concerning them which are asleep, that we sorrow not, even as others which have no hope." They are not dead. They have but fallen asleep. Their souls are still awake; "for all live unto Him." And as to their sleeping dust, "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him" (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14).
(7) In the light of the Great Commandment, what shall we think of those who talk of the Pentateuch as but fragments of the early Jewish literature, and this as embodying none but narrow and rude ideas of religion, suited to a gross age of the world, but not worthy to give law to the religious thinking of all time? Whether we compare the religious and ethical views opened up in that Commandment with the best religious thinking to be found outside the pale of Judaism during any period whatever before Christ; or compare it with the light which the teaching of Christ has shed upon Religion, and with the most advanced ideas of the present time-the peerless perfection of this monument of the Mosaic Religion stands equally forth before the unsophisticated, reflecting mind, as evidence of its supernatural origin and revealed character. And just as the deeper view of those words of the Pentateuch, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," suggest the continued life and ultimate resurrection of those patriarchs, so does the deeper study of the Great Commandment, like a "schoolmaster, bring us unto Christ, that we may be justified by faith." For who, in the view of its requirements, must not exclaim, "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight; for by the law is the knowledge of sin;" but "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us;" and this redemption, or rather "the love of Christ" which prompted it, "constraineth us to live no longer to ourselves, but to Him who died for us and rose again." And thus is the Law reinstated in its rightful place in our hearts; and, despairing of life through the Great Commandment, the life which we fetch out of Christ's death is a life of real, loving, acceptable obedience to that Great Commandment. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, in that wonderful invention! (8) The doctrine of the two natures-the divine and the human-in the one Person of Christ, is the only key to the satisfactory solution of many enigmas in Scripture, of which that which our Lord propounded to the scribes regarding David was but one. Accordingly, none who repudiate this doctrine have been able to retain their hold of almost any of the cardinal doctrines of Scripture, nor have held firmly even by the Scriptures themselves, of which this may be called the chief corner stone-elect, precious.