Will we be married in Heaven?

June 30, 2:54 PMMethodist ExaminerJames-Michael Smith

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Earthly marriage is just a foretaste...but of what??

Periodically Methodist Examiner  is devoted to answering questions submitted by readers.  If you have a question about the Bible, God, religion, spirituality or cultural issues, feel free to submit it to jamesmichael7@yahoo.com.

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"My husband and I are both saved, Love the Lord, read the Bible, pray together, worship together, etc. However as most Christians do, we still have questions…..so we talked for hours last night about whether or not we will know we are “married” when we get to heaven. I was wondering what is your belief on marriage in heaven. Just curious."

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This is a great question...and one that's at least 2,000 years old! 

A form of this question was posed to Jesus by a group of religious leaders called the Sadducees just a few days before His crucifixion.  The Sadducees were a group of 1st century Jewish aristocracy who did not believe in the Resurrection. 

[Here we should backtrack for a minute and note that for centuries before the New Testament era, the common belief among faithful Jews was that at the end of history, God would raise everyone from the dead and judge between the wicked and the righteous.  Passages in the Hebrew Bible like Daniel 12 and Ezekiel 37 were seen as providing the basic Biblical foundation of this event.  In fact, the belief in this future final bodily Resurrection of the dead was what fueled the Maccabean martyrs in their resistance against their Greek oppressors...and it was also fueling anti-Roman zealotry during the time of Jesus!  This is why the Sadducees rejected such a belief.  For them, the status quo under Roman rule was a pretty good deal.  They had no desire to embrace such a dangerous notion as Resurrection!  For more on this, see this article by N.T. Wright]

So, looking to challenge this upstart teacher from Galilee, and hopefully put Him in His place before He brought more trouble on Jerusalem from Rome, they posed this question to Him:

Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"

Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."

Mark 12:18-24

Now at this point a couple of things are helpful to know.  1) Jesus was being asked this question in a common rabbinic way meant to bring out the absurdity of the position of one's opponent.  2) The question is referring to the practice in the Ancient Near East known as "levirate marriage", and discussed in Deuteronomy 25:5-10.  Levirate marriage was the practice whereby if a man died without having produced a family heir, his brother was expected to try to impregnate his widow in order to provide her with an heir and continue the family line and inheritance. 3) The question is not about life immediately after death.  Rather, it is about life after the Resurrection--what N.T. Wright has dubbed "life AFTER life after death." 

So before forming a detailed theology of the afterlife from this passage, as many have tried to do, it is crucial that we realize that that was not the purpose of the question or of the answer Jesus gave.  When studying the Bible, often it is just as important to recognize what the text does not say.  Some have taken Jesus words to mean that when people die they become angels (this is behind the pop notion of people "getting their wings", having halos, etc.).  But Jesus doesn't say that at all.  What He says is with respect to "marrying" and "being given in marriage", people will be LIKE the angels.  But what does this mean?  New Testament scholar Ben Witherington puts it this way:

The case put forward by the Sadducees is particularly extreme. Not only had six brothers attempted and failed to impregnate the woman in question, but she had also outlived them all and was single when she died. It is perhaps this last fact which prompts the question: Whose spouse will she be in the resurrection?  ..Jesus stresses that in the age to come people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say there will be no marriage in the age to come. The use of the terms "γαμουσιν" (gamousin) and "γαμιζονται" (gamizontai) is important, for these terms refer to the gender-specific roles played in early Jewish society by the man and the woman in the process of getting married. The men, being the initiators of the process in such a strongly patriarchal culture, “marry,” while the women are “given in marriage” by their father or another older family member. Thus Mark has Jesus saying that no new marriages will be initiated in the eschatological [resurrection] state. This is surely not the same as claiming that all existing marriages will disappear in the eschatological state. Jesus, then, would seem to be arguing against a specific view held by the Sadducees about the continuity between this life and the life to come, a view involving the ongoing practice of levirate marriage.  In the eschatological state we have resurrected beings who are no longer able to die. Levirate marriage existed precisely because of the reality of death. When death ceases to happen, the rationale for levirate marriage falls to the ground as well. When Jesus says...that people will be like the angels in heaven in the life to come, he does not mean they will live a sexless identity (early Jews did not think angels were sexless in any case; cf. Gen. 6:1–4!), but rather that they will be like angels in that they are unable to die. Thus the question of the Sadducees is inappropriate to the conditions of the eschatological state...In Mark 10 Jesus grounded normal marriage in the creation order, not in the order of the fall, which is the case with levirate marriage (instituted because of death and childlessness and the need to preserve the family name and line). Thus Jesus is intending to deny about the eschatological state “that there will be any natural relation out of which the difficulty of the Sadducees could arise.”

Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2001), 328.

So rather than saying that all marriages will be done away with, or that people will be sexless androgynous beings, Jesus is more likely saying that the question of levirate marriage, with its notions of family provision and the treatement of widows will no longer be an issue. The question of what exactly the relationship will be among spouses in the Resurrection remains largely unanswered by Jesus

So, will you and your husband be married in the New Creation?  Yes...but not primarily to each other! 

You see, the final consumation of all human history, when God renews the world, judges evil and comes to dwell with His people, is described using a key metaphor--that of a wedding (Revelation 21-22).  Earthly marriage, from the very beginning, was given to provide intimate companionship between people as well as to reflect the ultimate intimacy we will one day enjoy with God Himself.  Earthly marriage is, and has always been, a shadow of a true Heavenly reality. 

Thus, the joy, companionship, love, and intimacy you and your husband enjoy will be infinitely magnified in depth and in scope (i.e. we will all experience that depth of intimacy with one another and more importantly with God of which marital sexual intimacy is only a precursor).

But what will this look like?  The Bible simply doesn't give us enough detail to fill in the specifics...intentionally, I would argue!  But what it does give us are promises made by One we can trust.  And based on those promises, we can get a glimpse of what God has planned for us, albeit in a general rather than specific manner.  Christian and astrophysicist Hugh Ross ponders the answer to your question in one of his books on the possibilities available to God not bound by time and space as we are:

"The biblical pictures of the new creation suggest the absence of virtually all relationship-limiting factors...Jesus refers collectively to believers in the new creation as His bride, and He says that we all will be one as He, the Father, and the Holy Spirit are one. The oneness of all believers refers to God’s presence with all of us simultaneously and to our unity in love and truth. Such oneness dramatically enhances our relationships with each other...With this new capacity for knowing and being known by, loving and being loved by all other human beings in the new creation, our need for marriage and a nuclear family is fully met. We no longer will need to focus our relationship resources on one spouse, our own children, our other family members, and our selected friends. We will continuously enjoy with all other members of the heavenly family something far superior to the pleasures of the very best of times in our earthly relationships, including marriage."
[Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astrophysics Reveal About the Glory and Love of God (Colorado Springs, Colo.: NavPress, 1999), 225.]