“But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” Luke 20:37-38)
In their zeal to eliminate Jesus as a threat, the Pharisees sent several groups of their followers to try and trap Him into saying something to incriminate Himself. None of their efforts succeeded. Jesus had true wisdom and always spoke the truth so that His authority was above reproach. Here we see one such attempt by the Sadducees, a group of Jewish leaders who did not believe in resurrection from the dead. These men wanted to trick Jesus into saying something that would make Him look foolish and so lose the respect and admiration of the people.
Jesus used this blatant attempt at trickery to teach us a great lesson about the afterlife as well as responding to people who deny the truth of Scripture. He used the authority of that very Scripture to correct their beliefs. Jesus pointed out that when the Lord told Moses He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob He used the present tense. This means that those men, though physically dead, were spiritually alive in God. This is proof that the dead are indeed raised. This then is a confirmation of our own eternal life: we who have faith in Christ will live forever.
Increasingly more and more people are denying this truth as well as the gospel of faith in Jesus Christ. Millions deny His existence as well as the reality of an afterlife. Millions more, however, continue to believe in a heaven of their own making, one which reflects their own philosophical or spiritual ideology without reference to Jesus, faith or sin. The afterlife they seek will turn out to be quite worse then they imagine unless they come to faith while there is time. We believers must rely on Jesus and His word to speak the truth to such people even though they deny the authority of that very Word. It is our authority and has the power to change the hearts of all who hear it.