Speaking of Life 4050 | False Assumptions
Greg Williams

A friend of mine was taking a web design class and one of the assignments was to find a poorly designed website to improve by redesigning it. One day one of her classmates asked her to look at the website she had chosen. After looking at it she told her classmate, “Oh wow! That is really a terrible-looking website. That definitely needs to be redesigned.” Unfortunately, my friend had made an assumption. She assumed the website she was looking at was the one to be redesigned, but in fact, it was the one her classmate had already redesigned. Ouch!

Have you ever found yourself embarrassed by holding a false assumption? It happens often and can lead to some pretty funny stories. But some false assumptions can be a matter of life and death. The Sadducees for example held the assumption that there was no resurrection after death. For them, death got the final word. This created quite an embarrassing scene for them after they carried this assumption into an argument with Jesus. You can read that story in Luke 20.

You probably don’t consider yourself a Sadducee, but is it possible we sometimes work from the same assumption – that death has the last word? Even if we believe in a resurrection after death, we can still let false assumptions about death work itself out in our lives. For example, we may fear death in such a way that robs us of the life we have. Are we more focused on death than on the resurrection?

While it’s fine to take death seriously, we should take Jesus’ words of resurrected life far more seriously. Death is not the final word, Jesus – who is God’s word to us – is. We can trust that his words of life to us are the final word to cling to and to live from. And this is something we can be thankful for as we see death all around us in our world today. Jesus’ word is truth.

Paul was thankful the church in Thessalonica was not living by the false assumptions about death but was living by the truth of God’s word about Jesus and his return. Here is how he expressed it:

We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.
Thessalonians 2:13 (NRSV)

God’s word to us in Jesus Christ shatters the Sadducees’ assumption that death has the final word. As we wrestle with our assumptions and doubts, may Jesus, the living present word continue to guide you in his way, in truth, and in life. Let’s celebrate the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and ours.

I’m Greg Williams, Speaking of Life.