Luke 20:27-40
We see in these verses what an old thing unbelief is. We are told that “there came to our Lord certain of the Sadducees, who deny that there is any resurrection.” Even in the Jewish Church, the Church of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob,–the Church of Moses, and Samuel, and David, and the prophets,–we find that there were bold, avowed, unblushing sceptics. If infidelity like this existed among God’s peculiar people, the Jews, what must the state of heathenism have been? If these things existed in a green tree, what must have been the condition of the dry?
We must never be surprised when we hear of infidels, deists, heretics and free-thinkers rising up in the Church, and drawing away disciples after them. We must not count it a rare and a strange thing. It is only one among many proofs that man is a fallen and corrupt being. Since the day when the devil said to Eve “ye shall not surely die,” and Eve believed him, there never has been wanting a constant succession of forms of unbelief.–There is nothing new about any of the modern theories of infidelity. There is not one of them that is not an old disease under a new name. They are all mushrooms which spring up spontaneously in the hot-bed of human nature. It is not in reality an astonishing thing that there should rise up so many who call in question the truth of the Bible. The marvel is rather, that in a fallen world the sect of the Sadducees should be so small.