The Sure Word for Today's quotation for the week:
God Will Never Disown me.
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The Logician — Part 5.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
John 8: 7 (KJV).
The Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who challenge Jesus, are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs 27 of Luke 20:27-40). Accordingly, they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother.
In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and died without children from her, the next eldest did the same, and the rest of the seven brothers as well. Then the wife dies. The presumed absurdity in the case was that she would be the wife of all of them in the resurrection, which was assumed to be an impossibility in marriage.
Jesus's reply points out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage, and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus, he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life. So, the supposed impossibility of the woman being in marital relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.
The basic laws of logic are neither arbitrary inventions of God nor principles that exist entirely outside God's being. Obviously, the laws of logic are not like the laws of nature. God may violate the latter (say, suspend gravity), but He cannot contradict the former. Those laws are rooted in God's own nature and govern His own mind. Often, God does not act in ways that people understand or judge what they would do in the circumstances. But God never behaves illogically in the proper sense.
While Jesus did not teach a theory of logic or explicitly call attention to logical forms, his skill as a logician resides in his accurate, robust, and precise use of logic in his teaching and debates.
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All Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the HOLY BIBLE unless otherwise indicated.
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