Have You Not Read

On four separate occasions Jesus answered the questions and accusations of His opponents with an intriguing counter-question: “Have you not read?” (Matthew 12.3, 5; 19.4; 22.31; Mark 12.10). The question implies Jesus’ disappointment and surprise at the immature Biblical understanding displayed by the reputed experts of the law. Not only did Jesus assume his fellow Jews would have a thorough knowledge of what Scripture said, He also expected they could connect dots together to make thoughtful inferences. Let’s briefly explore an occasion in which Jesus asks this question and be challenged to understand our Bibles more deeply.

In Matthew 22.23-33, Jesus faced a verbal attack from the Sadducees, an upper-class Jewish religious sect which did not believe in the resurrection. They asked Jesus to untangle a ridiculous thought-experiment, in which a woman marries seven brothers in succession after each one dies without offspring. “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?” they impudently inquired. In Jesus’ masterly response, He directed their minds back to Exodus 3.6 (the Sadducees only accepted the first five books of Moses as God’s inspired Scripture) to prove that there will be a resurrection. “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22.31-32). Jesus quoted from a passage in which God appeared to Moses in a burning bush and commissioned the reluctant shepherd as the Exodus leader. Since God identified Himself as the God of three patriarchs from Genesis, He implied that although their bodies died, they’re still alive with Him and awaiting their resurrection.

It is easy to scoff at the Scriptural blindness of the Sadducees, but put yourself in their place. Without the benefit of Jesus’ explanation, would you have understood that resurrection is a valid inference from Exodus 3? Yet He expected them to have already grasped this point without His commentary! How many of us feel that we’ve mined all there is to know about a particular Scripture after a cursory glance? How many of us immediately read over the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament, not bothering to go back and understand the whole context of the brief snippet the writer is bringing into his inspired message? How many of us breeze through our Bible readings but fail to meditate for any length of time on the significance and meaning of what we’ve just read? How many of us forget that the Bible wasn’t written to us, but to different kinds of audiences over the span of thousands of years? I am personally guilty of every problem I’ve just identified. Let’s resolve to be better Bible students. No doubt the Sadducees had read Exodus 3 many times before their conversation with Jesus, yet He incredulously asked, “Have you not read…?”

Nathan