I’ll give you an example of this: David’s overwhelming love for Absalom which leads to his open rebellion, eventually hanging by his hair/head plucked from his running horse by a tree branch, and pierced through with many arrows, illustrates God’s complete insane love for us. The kind of love that sends His Son to killers on a “Perhaps-they-will-respect-Him-whim” (Luke 20:13) to give those killers another chance.
So it is with Jesus’ reply to the Sadducees who didn’t believe in the resurrection, “‘But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the burning bush, where he calls the Lord THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB. Now He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to Him’” (Luke 20:37 NASB77).
I never “got my head around” this, perhaps I shouldn’t have been trying, until about the 40th anniversary of my graduation from New Mexico Military Institute. I visited their website to look up alumni. There was my roommate. Dead in his 40’s. There was my company commander dead in his 50’s. Still not having learned a lesson. I randomly looked up a member whom I hadn’t seen in 35 years. I knew he was an orchestra conductor and those jobs are not many. Found him. Dead at 77 in an Idaho National Park.
This was all very depressing, but I pushed on a few years later to Jack and Shirley Andrews. A childless elderly couple who had been very generous to us when we moved to Louisiana. He’d show up unannounced at church to give me money because he knew moving expenses don’t cover moving, having children was expensive, and pastors too need to have fun. He also gave me three pistols. They were in their 80s when I left over 20 years ago, so what did I expect? I was stunned and saddened after I foolishly went looking for them to “learn” that that they had died quite some time ago.
Until I looked these people up they were all alive to me. Despite the fact that the aged would have to be well over a 100 when I did look them up, they were, nevertheless, alive to me. Now all of these are dead. Dead to the world, dead to life, dead to me. But not to God, you see?
Every last one of them is alive to God. To Him, they were as they had been to me before looking them up. Very much alive. Their deaths did not change anything for Him while changing everything for me. However, death doesn’t need to do that for me, for you, for anyone in Christ.
Aside from my classmates at New Mexico, of which I don’t know, I have every reason to believe that the others died in Christ. They are alive awaiting the Second Resurrection, the loud command, the voice of the archangel, the last trumpet, the Last Day which will be the first of the rest of our resurrected lives.
Remember Jesus proclaims “for all live to God.” No one is lost in some collective cosmic consciousness. As they were individual people to me so they are to the God of all. Not one whit less alive today to Him than they were to me in 1975, 1985, 1995.
Matthew 22 and Mark 12 tell us what Luke 20 doesn’t. That the first words out of Jesus’ mouth in response to the taunt about who will the seven-time-widowed women be married to in the resurrection (that remember they didn’t believe would ever happen) is: “You do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.”
I’ve seen animals, particularly birds, deer, and pigs, go on running, flying, or jumping till it seems all of sudden they realize they’re dead. No human is dead unless and until God says he is. That’s the Second Death and that’s forever. Don’t go there, as the saying goes. That’s hell. All the rest are very much alive to Him and we are not amiss to see them running, flying, jumping, or singing with “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.”
Absurd? Nope, divine.
