Marriage
Read Mark 12:13-27.
Warning: I may shake up some preconceived notions here. And I may upset some people. But I think what I have to share is Biblical—so, you've been warned! :)
We have no point of reference, and so we compare everything to what we already know. That's the mistake the Sadducees make when they come to Jesus, thinking they had a question that was really going to trip him up. It's a complicated legal question (religiously legal...and aren't all of those complicated?), but it boils down to this: if a woman marries seven brothers and they all die before her, whose wife will she be "when we all get to heaven"? (An aside...if a woman had married the six previous brothers and they had all died, how might the seventh brother feel about marrying her?)
Jesus tells them they are "badly mistaken," mostly because they do not understand what life in the kingdom of God is like. They do not understand eternity. There is a reason our marriage vows end with the words "till death do us part." Jesus says it quite plainly here: there is no marriage nor is there giving in marriage in the kingdom of God. Marriage is a state for this life, not for eternity.
Why is that? Well, think about the purposes of marriage. One purpose is for procreation, and that's not something that will happen in the kingdom. Another reason is that marital partners complete one another. Male and female both reflect the image of God; neither of us on our own reflect all that God is. We need each other. We complete each other. Together, we reflect more fully the image of God to our broken world. But in eternity, we will be fully the way we were meant to be, and all of our needs and wants and desires will be made complete in Jesus. We will be in the presence of perfection, God himself. That's why the Scriptures call Heaven the "wedding feast of the Lamb" (Jesus) and uses marital imagery to refer to the church and to Jesus. In eternity, in the kingdom, Jesus completes us. He is truly, then, all we will need.
This truth is disturbing to some who speak of marital partners being together once again in eternity. I do believe we will know each other (and we'll also know people we didn't meet, like how the disciples knew Moses and Elijah on the mount of the Transfiguration), but the quality of relationships will be changed. The needs we have will change. We will be fully who God intended us to be, and the brokenness that pervades this earth will be gone. All will be well. So our relationships will be perfectly the way God intended them to be from the start. And because the only frame of reference I have is this earth, I do not know what that will look like completely. I just know Jesus will be there, and that will be enough.
Many of our ideas about eternity are shaped more by Dante (The Divine Comedy) or by our cultural assumptions than they are by Scripture. Jesus would say to us the same thing he says to the Sadducees: "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?" (12:24). May it not be so of us. May we not hold onto our cultural assumptions so strongly that we refuse to allow room for God to do something entirely new. Whatever eternity looks like, whether it meets our "expectations" or not, rest assured that it will be two things. It will be more than we can imagine now (1 Corinthians 2:9). And it will be perfectly what we have needed, desired and longed for all our lives, even if we didn't know it.
Warning: I may shake up some preconceived notions here. And I may upset some people. But I think what I have to share is Biblical—so, you've been warned! :)
We have no point of reference, and so we compare everything to what we already know. That's the mistake the Sadducees make when they come to Jesus, thinking they had a question that was really going to trip him up. It's a complicated legal question (religiously legal...and aren't all of those complicated?), but it boils down to this: if a woman marries seven brothers and they all die before her, whose wife will she be "when we all get to heaven"? (An aside...if a woman had married the six previous brothers and they had all died, how might the seventh brother feel about marrying her?)
Jesus tells them they are "badly mistaken," mostly because they do not understand what life in the kingdom of God is like. They do not understand eternity. There is a reason our marriage vows end with the words "till death do us part." Jesus says it quite plainly here: there is no marriage nor is there giving in marriage in the kingdom of God. Marriage is a state for this life, not for eternity.
Why is that? Well, think about the purposes of marriage. One purpose is for procreation, and that's not something that will happen in the kingdom. Another reason is that marital partners complete one another. Male and female both reflect the image of God; neither of us on our own reflect all that God is. We need each other. We complete each other. Together, we reflect more fully the image of God to our broken world. But in eternity, we will be fully the way we were meant to be, and all of our needs and wants and desires will be made complete in Jesus. We will be in the presence of perfection, God himself. That's why the Scriptures call Heaven the "wedding feast of the Lamb" (Jesus) and uses marital imagery to refer to the church and to Jesus. In eternity, in the kingdom, Jesus completes us. He is truly, then, all we will need.
This truth is disturbing to some who speak of marital partners being together once again in eternity. I do believe we will know each other (and we'll also know people we didn't meet, like how the disciples knew Moses and Elijah on the mount of the Transfiguration), but the quality of relationships will be changed. The needs we have will change. We will be fully who God intended us to be, and the brokenness that pervades this earth will be gone. All will be well. So our relationships will be perfectly the way God intended them to be from the start. And because the only frame of reference I have is this earth, I do not know what that will look like completely. I just know Jesus will be there, and that will be enough.
Many of our ideas about eternity are shaped more by Dante (The Divine Comedy) or by our cultural assumptions than they are by Scripture. Jesus would say to us the same thing he says to the Sadducees: "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?" (12:24). May it not be so of us. May we not hold onto our cultural assumptions so strongly that we refuse to allow room for God to do something entirely new. Whatever eternity looks like, whether it meets our "expectations" or not, rest assured that it will be two things. It will be more than we can imagine now (1 Corinthians 2:9). And it will be perfectly what we have needed, desired and longed for all our lives, even if we didn't know it.
AMEN!!!
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