When We Try to Shrink God: Lessons from the Sadducees
There's something deeply human about wanting to understand everything, to have all the answers neatly packaged and controlled. We crave certainty. We want to be right. And sometimes, without even realizing it, we try to shrink the infinite God of the universe down to something we can fit in our pocket.
The Sadducees understood this temptation all too well—though they'd never have admitted it.
The Trap of Certainty
In Luke's Gospel, we encounter a fascinating confrontation. The Sadducees, a religious sect known for their strict adherence to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, approached Jesus with what they believed was an unanswerable riddle. Unlike the Pharisees we hear so much about, the Sadducees held some unusual beliefs. They insisted that if something wasn't explicitly written in those foundational texts, it simply wasn't true. This led them to deny the resurrection entirely, claiming that the soul dies with the body. They believed in absolute free will, suggesting that God wasn't really in control of anything—evil existed simply because humans chose it.
Armed with their limited theological framework, they presented Jesus with a scenario: a woman had been married to seven brothers, each dying in succession without producing children. According to the law of levirate marriage (designed to protect vulnerable widows), each brother had married her in turn. Their question dripped with confidence: "At the resurrection, whose wife will she be?"
They thought they had him cornered. They'd turned the miraculous into a math problem, the eternal into a logic puzzle.
The Danger of Small Gods
What the Sadducees failed to grasp—and what we often miss ourselves—is that they were treating the resurrection of the Son of God as though it were a riddle to be solved rather than a reality to be embraced. They had taken something miraculous, incredible, and amazing, and said, "Unless we can understand it completely, it can't be true."
This is the danger we all face: creating God in our own image, limiting Him to what our finite minds can comprehend.
Jesus responded not by getting tangled in their hypothetical scenario, but by meeting them on their own ground. He quoted from the very texts they claimed to revere: "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." His point was devastatingly simple. When God spoke these words to Moses at the burning bush, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had already died. Yet God didn't say, "I was their God." He said, "I am their God."
Is God the God of people who no longer exist? Of course not. God is the God of the living, not the dead.
The View from Eternity
The Sadducees' fundamental error was viewing eternal matters from a temporal perspective. They looked at resurrection through the lens of earthly marriage, earthly relationships, earthly limitations. They forgot that God is eternal, that His promises stretch beyond the grave, that His love transcends death itself.
When we approach Scripture—or life—with the assumption that we can master it, control it, or fully comprehend it, we've already lost the plot. We've forgotten that God is the God of the cosmos, the one who spoke the universe into existence, the one who knew your name before time began.
The Sadducees came to Scripture expecting to tell it who God was. Incredibly, they stood before God Himself and tried to tell Him what He could and couldn't do.
The Promise That Cannot Die
Here's the beautiful truth that underpins everything: a relationship with God is not fleeting or temporary. It's not bound by the limitations of our physical existence. Our connection to the Divine is, by its very nature, eternal.
Death may seem like an ending in the physical world. But it cannot end something that is eternal by definition. The God who promised to be with us always forever is not constrained by what we call death. He is the God who sent Himself to earth, who took upon Himself all our sin, mess, mistakes, and mortality. He died and rose again to prove that His promises are trustworthy, that death is not the final word.
This is what we're invited to remember: not to hold God tightly in our clenched fists, trying to control or comprehend Him fully, but instead to open our hands and allow God to hold us.
Held by God
God is always more than we imagine:
More faithful than our questioning
More alive than our fears
More tender than our sorrow
More forgiving than our anger
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is still the God of the living today. He is the one who gathers every story, every life into His compassionate heart. He knows the names of the forgotten. He remembers what we've lost to memory. He holds those we've loved and lost—not in our grasp anymore, but in His.
Living in Hope
This changes how we face loss, how we remember, how we grieve. When we remember loved ones, when we think of those who have gone before us, we don't remember in despair but in hope. They are not gone into nothingness. They are held by the God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God who holds His people still.
And here's the promise that sustains us: He has promised to hold us too, until all things are made new.
We don't need to have all the answers. We don't need to solve the riddles or make God small enough to understand. We simply need to trust that the God who was faithful to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God who proved His faithfulness in the resurrection of Jesus—will be faithful to us as well.
The Sadducees failed because they took one sentence out of context and forgot the bigger story. They forgot that God is the God of love, that He is eternal, that His promises endure forever. They treated Scripture as a dead text to be controlled rather than the living word of a living God.
Let's not make the same mistake. Let's allow God to be bigger than our boxes, more mysterious than our certainties, more loving than our limited imaginations. Let's trust that the God who holds the universe also holds us—and that His grip is far more secure than ours could ever be.