When it comes to Death and Life, the Bible has a lot to say. Jesus said to one of His disciples "Let the dead bury the dead but you go and preach the kingdom of God". 

This He said after the disciple had requested to first go and bury his father.

The understanding of this verse comes when we acknowledge the fact that Jesus had a habit of taking what people would say and turn it into a spiritual conversation, and by doing so reveal mysteries of the kingdom of God. 

Hebrews 1 says that in the past God spoke to the 'fathers' through the 'prophets'. Jesus told Pharisees that they, just like the fathers kill the prophets.

Pharisees were the religious people of the day, under the Law, with no understanding of the prophecies. 

They were the dead, lifeless, and they were keeping the prophecies buried for centuries.

When Christ came, it was no longer about the prophecies, but the fulfillment, which is the Kingdom of God.

Those who don't leave the Law and the Prophets, can not enter this kingdom, just as revealed by Jesus.

He encouraged his disciple to see it was the time for him to experience resurrection of that which was dead.

[The following is the full transcript of this teaching from our new YouTube series ‘What Jesus Meant‘.  Please note that this video, features Rose and Masoud speaking unrehearsed – they are unscripted and unedited, filmed in one take.]

Masoud: Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us with another session from What Jesus Meant series. Today we are going to look at Luke chapter nine and one of the sayings of Jesus in this chapter. I'm going to read the verse and then Rose is going to help us to understand this portion of the scripture. In verse 59:

He said to another follow me, but he said, Lord, let me first go and bury my father. Jesus said to him, let the dead bury the dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.

So now the question here is, what is this conversation between Jesus and one of His disciples? And what is this saying that let the dead bury the dead?

Rose: So yeah, that's great. Every time that someone came and talked to Jesus, Jesus always took that conversation to another level. People came to Him and they talk about ordinary matters, but Jesus used that to bring a spiritual message with a deeper insight and we can see that throughout the gospels.

For example, when He was talking about destroying the temple and people were thinking that He's talking about the natural temple, but Jesus was talking about His own body.

And what we see here in this scripture is exactly the same. There is this man, as we can see him in the same story in Matthew chapter eight, who is one of Jesus’ disciples came to Him and told Him, okay Lord, I'm going to follow you but let me first go and bury my father. And Jesus answered something totally different!

He said: Let the dead bury the dead!

How can a dead bury another dead?

For me when I remember reading the Bible long time ago for the first time, so many things that He answered, didn't make sense at first, but later on when I started gradually learning the scripture and understanding the scripture, I realized that, He sees things totally in a complete different level.

Masoud: And I think sometimes even this verse has been interpreted as if your father has passed away and you don't go after preaching of the gospel, but you go to bury your own father, You're doing something against what Jesus!

Rose: That's right. And that's why today we want to look at this from another point of view, to understand better why Jesus said such a thing.

transition from the 'dead bury the dead' to the 'kingdom'. 

So the poor guy, his father passed away and you know, of course he wants to bury the father. But what Jesus says to this person, "let the dead bury the dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God".

This 'but' brings the connection between the two things that Jesus said here. First He's talking about dead burying their own dead. And right after that He talks about the kingdom of God. What He is trying to emphasize in this verse is the kingdom of God. The message is not about the father being dead, nor is about the guy who needs to go and bury his father. The message is about the kingdom of God.

Masoud: So it's a transition from the fathers to the kingdom. 

Rose: That's right. It's a transition of "the dead bury the dead" to the kingdom. So 'dead bury the dead' must be related to the kingdom of God.

So now we are trying to see this from a different point of view to understand it better. And I think sometimes the disciples were amazed and confused at the same time, because Jesus always looked at everything through the eyes of the Spirit and through the eyes of the kingdom of God.

Today we want to understand whom Jesus was referring to as the 'dead' when He said "let the dead bury the dead".

And also we want to see who the 'father' is and how is it related to the kingdom of God.

The Kingdom raises the dead, not buries the dead

But before we move on, I really like to bring this up very briefly because we had uploaded videos about the kingdom of God, even in this series Masoud talked about it, and I don't want to really put so much time about the kingdom of God, but understanding the kingdom of God will open up the first part of the scripture which talks about the "dead bury the dead".

 If you remember, in the book of Mark, when Jesus began preaching, He went around and preached the kingdom of God in this manner (Mark 1:15):

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.

And then in John 3 He sees Nicodemus and He says, Hey Nicodemus, you need to be born again to see the kingdom of God. And when we go a little further, Jesus went around healing people, raising the dead, casting out demons, saying the kingdom of God has come upon you. That's how He preached the kingdom of God. 

So every time we see the kingdom of God comes into scene, we see the healing of the sick, we see the resurrection of the dead. We see life flowing.

And then we go a little even further, we see Him at the last supper, where He is about to be crucified. He takes the bread and the wine and He says (Luke 22:18):

For I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

This is to say that the kingdom of God came after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Why?

Because the Holy spirit was given after resurrection.

And Romans chapter 14 tells us that the kingdom of God is in the Holy spirit.

So the kingdom of God really came upon us when the Holy Spirit came upon us.

I'm bringing up these kingdom related verses so we can later dig down with more details.

Why did Jesus say "let the dead bury the dead, but you go preach the kingdom of God".

Because when you preach the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God will come upon someone. And the kingdom of God is about the resurrection of the dead. 

The kingdom of God is not about burying the dead.

So that's why He tells His disciple, you go preach the kingdom. He doesn't just talk to anyone who's not a follower of Jesus. He talks to a disciple. As a disciples of Jesus, we preach the kingdom.

And by preaching the kingdom, we heal the sick, we raise the dead. We don't bury the dead, we raise the dead. 

The Fathers that bury the fathers

But I just want to go a little deeper. We can look at the dead as someone who's physically dead. But also we can look at the dead as a spiritually dead.

We also need to know who the dead 'father' is and how it's related to the kingdom of God.

Let's go to Hebrews chapter one, verse one. It says:

God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in the time past to the fathers by the prophets.

God in the past spoke to the 'fathers' by the 'prophets'.

So in past prophets were prophesying something from God to the fathers.

Masoud: So the fathers were the ones that had a message from God, and that the message was given to them through prophets.

Rose: Exactly. And as we said before, it's not the messenger who is important, it is the message of the messenger that is important.

The message that the prophet has is more important than the prophet himself. So when we talk about the prophets, we don't necessarily talk about one particular person. We talk about the Word of God that this prophet carries.

Now let's go to Acts chapter seven where Steven is preaching to the Jews (verse 51):

You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. You always resist the Holy spirit as your fathers did. So do you. 

So God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, but they resisted. Which means they didn't believe. They didn't believe the message that the prophets brought.

And of course, when you don't believe the message, what do you do? You kill. You murder that message. So that's why the next verse says that your fathers killed the prophets or persecuted them. Look at verse 52:

Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute and they killed those who foretold the coming of The Just One of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers. 

So it says, the fathers resisted the Holy spirit. That's why they couldn't understand and receive the Word and the message that came to them through another father, which was a prophet.

So can we see two fathers here?

We see a father who is receiving a message and we see another who is giving a message. And if you go back to the book of Hebrews and continue reading, it says, God doesn't talk to us through the fathers or prophets anymore, but He talks to us through His Son.

Because they resisted the Holy spirit, they didn't understand the message of the prophets and that's why they persecuted them. So after they persecuted the prophets, what did they do? They killed the prophets.

So we see that in Luke. If you go back to Luke chapter 11  verse 47, it says:

Woe to you for you build the tombs of the prophets and your fathers killed them. 

Jesus is talking to scribes and Pharisees and then lawyers, people that are under the law. They were the leaders of the law. So He's talking to the leaders of the law. What does He say?

He says your fathers killed the prophets. This is more or less like what Steven said in Acts 7. Why? Because they resisted the Holy spirit.

Resurrection of the Prophesies 

Masoud: You know, one example, a great example is Psalm  110, the prophecy about Melchizedek, which was there for hundreds of years, but it was dead. It was a dead prophecy. Now it came to the time of Jesus and the fulfillment of those prophecies:

The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make all your enemies your footstool.

Nobody understood what that meant. It was a dead word, it never had come to life. But when it came to Jesus before his crucifixion, they were looking for a false witness from Him to accuse and condemn Him. So they asked: "are you the Christ?". And He said (Mark 14:62):

Jesus said, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

By this answer He was taking everybody back to the prophecy that was dead in Psalm 110. He was now saying, it's time for this prophecy to be fulfilled. And that's what He had also said previously (Matthew 5:17):

Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.

Let me put it this way:

The word of God was, was never supposed to be dead.

The word of God was supposed to bring life.

But, It was dead for a long time. But when it came to Jesus, He brought resurrection to every word. And now it can happen to us also, the same word.

Let's see. We have heard the Bible, the word, the prophecies. We have had certain reading of the scripture, but they were kind of dead to us. No meaning, no understanding. But now Jesus is bringing everything to life. So there is a resurrection of that which was dead inside of us, which is when we don't anymore build a tomb for the prophets, meaning bury their message inside of us because of the law. But we allow the Spirit to come and breathe on dead bones as we talked about in the last session. And that gives life to that word. And that word comes out of the tomb.

Rose: And that's when we become the profits in the kingdom of God. Why? Because now we are the greater profit Dan, John the Baptist, because we don't say here is the Christ and we are not like the old prophets. That's the old crisis coming.

We are the true profit. Why? Because the word of God now is alive in us. And what, when the word is becomes alive, then we become the testimony and we become a profit for someone else or even for, for our own life.

And before we close the session, I really like to see this in the book of revelation chapter 19. So if you go to the book of revelation chapter 19, and so what we, what we already talked here that the father that was dead is the message of the old, the masters dabbles even given to the truth to the fathers, Abraham, and it was the message of Christ as the son of God. But here, I want to see two things here. Look at verse 10 in revelation chapter 19.

And I fell at his feet to worship him....

So here's the angel that has shows the message to John. And now John says, okay, I fell at his feet, worship him.

... but he said to me, see that you do not do that. 

Okay, we just wanna stop here and we don't have time to go through all the details. We will hopefully one day. But, but John is really a true disciple of Jesus. He's not a false teacher. He's not a false prophet. John is the disciple of Jesus. So he doesn't worship angels. He knows he worships only the Lord Jesus Christ. But what happened is here he falls in front of this angel. Why? Because most probably this angel was showing the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's why he tought that it is the Lord Jesus.

That's why he fell to worship. But here's what happened is so see that you do not do that. The angel says, don't do it. Basically, I am not God just worship God basically. But he says, I am your fellow servant and of your brother and who have the testimony of Jesus worship God for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. What does he say? He says, okay, the testimony, first of all, I am one of your brethren. I am fellow servant. We deal and we are going to see shortly that the servants also in the Bible, they are the prophets. The prophets of God are the servants of God because they have the message to brink. But here he says, okay eh, the, the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. What happened to Jesus? The word became flesh and died, buried and was raised from the dead.

Rose: So that is the testimony of Jesus. It becomes the spirit of prophecy for us. What does it mean? That what was fulfilled in Jesus must be fulfilled in us as well. We heard the word of God. Then the word was killed because of the legalistic understanding, because we never believed the word. It actually happened to Masoud and I. In the beginning we heard the word, but didn't believe it. So what happened was it was buried inside of us. But now it is raised because the spirit came. And we have become the fellow-servants, the prophets that have a resurrected message inside of them prophesying and preaching the kingdom of God!

Revelation chapter 11 verse 18 says:

The nations were angry and Your wrath has come and the time of the dead that they should be judged.

Here again we see the dead and they need to be judged. And right after that prophets are mentioned:

That you should reward Your servants, the prophets.

So who were the dead? The prophets! The message of the prophets! The Word of God that was dead inside of us. This verse says the time has come that the judgment of God would raise them and reward His prophets. We can see the servants are the prophets.