by Randy Alcorn
Christ replied, "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven" (Matthew 22:30).
There's a great deal of regret and misunderstanding about this passage. A woman wrote me, "I struggle with the idea that there won't be marriage in heaven. I believe I'll really miss it."
But the Bible does not teach there will be no marriage in Heaven. In fact, it makes clear there will be marriage in Heaven. What it says is that there will be one marriage, between Christ and his bride—and we'll all be part of it. Paul links human marriage to the higher reality it mirrors: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:31-32).
The one-flesh marital union we know on Earth is a signpost pointing to our relationship with Christ as our bridegroom. Once we reach the destination, the signpost becomes unnecessary. That one marriage—our marriage to Christ—will be so completely satisfying that even the most wonderful earthly marriage couldn't be as fulfilling.
Earthly marriage is a shadow, a copy, an echo of the true and ultimate marriage. Once that ultimate marriage begins, at the Lamb's wedding feast, all the human marriages that pointed to it will have served their noble purpose and will be assimilated into the one great marriage they foreshadowed. "The purpose of marriage is not to replace Heaven, but to prepare us for it."264
Here on Earth we long for a perfect marriage. That's exactly what we'll have—a perfect marriage with Christ. My wife, Nanci, is my best friend and my closest sister in Christ. Will we become more distant in the new world? Of course not—we'll become closer, I'm convinced. The God who said "It is not good for the man to be alone" (Genesis 2:18) is the giver and blesser of our relationships. Life on this earth matters. What we do here touches strings that reverberate for all eternity. Nothing will take away from the fact that Nanci and I are marriage partners here and that we invest so much of our lives in each other, serving Christ together. I fully expect no one besides God will understand me better on the New Earth, and there's nobody whose company I'll seek and enjoy more than Nanci's.
The joys of marriage will be far greater because of the character and love of our bridegroom. I rejoice for Nanci and for me that we'll both be married to the most wonderful person in the universe. He's already the one we love most—there is no competition. On Earth, the closer we draw to him, the closer we draw to each other. Surely the same will be true in Heaven. What an honor it will be to always know that God chose us for each other on this old Earth so that we might have a foretaste of life with him on the New Earth.
People with good marriages are each other's best friends. There's no reason to believe they won't still be best friends in Heaven.
Jesus said the institution of human marriage would end, having fulfilled its purpose. But he never hinted that deep relationships between married people would end. In our lives here, two people can be business partners, tennis partners, or pinochle partners. But when they're no longer partners, it doesn't mean their friendship ends. The relationship built during one kind of partnership often carries over to a permanent friendship after the partnership has ended. I expect that to be true on the New Earth for family members and friends who stood by each other here.
God usually doesn't replace his original creation, but when he does, he replaces it with something that is far better, never worse. Mormons attempt to have marriages permanently bound for eternity, but this disregards Christ's direct statement. Being married to Christ will be the ultimate thrill.
What about our children? What about my relationship to my daughters and sons-in-law and closest friends? There's every reason to believe we'll pick right up in Heaven with relationships from Earth. We'll gain many new ones but will continue to deepen the old ones. I think we'll especially enjoy connecting with those we faced tough times with on Earth and saying, "Did you ever imagine Heaven would be so wonderful?"
The notion that relationships with family and friends will be lost in Heaven, though common, is unbiblical. It denies the clear doctrine of continuity between this life and the next and suggests our earthly lives and relationships have no eternal consequence. It completely contradicts Paul's intense anticipation of being with the Thessalonians and his encouraging them to look forward to rejoining their loved ones in Heaven.
WILL THERE BE SEX?
As we saw earlier, we'll maintain distinct genders in our resurrection bodies. We'll be male or female. But will there be sex in the sense of sexual relations? If human marriage existed on the New Earth, by all means I would expect it to include sex. Sexual relations existed before the Fall and were not the product of sin and the Curse; they were God's perfect design. Since the lifting of the Curse will normally restore what God originally made, we would expect sex to be part of that. Given what we know about continuity between this life and the next, marriage and sex seem natural carryovers.
However, as we've seen, Christ made it clear that people in Heaven wouldn't be married to each other. He wasn't talking merely about the present Heaven, but "in the resurrection." He was specifically saying there will be no marriage among resurrected people on the resurrected Earth.
Because sex was designed to be part of a marriage relationship, marriage and sex logically belong together. Because we're told that humans won't be married to each other, and sex is intended for marriage, then logically we won't be engaging in sex.
This appears to be, then, an exception to the principle of continuity. However, since there's a different sort of continuity between earthly marriage and the marriage of Christ to his church, there may also be some way in which the intimacy and pleasure we now know as sex will also be fulfilled in some higher form. I don't know what that would be, but I do know that sex was designed by God, and I don't expect him to discard it without replacing it with something better. There's a unique metaphysical power to sexual union. It's no coincidence that pagan worship often involved sexual acts. As immoral as these acts were, they recognized a transcendent spiritual nature to sex. This otherworldliness is again a signpost—and it suggests that sexual relations in this world foreshadow something greater in the next world.
Certainly we should reject all christoplatonic assumptions that sex, which God called "very good," would be unworthy of Heaven. Rather than viewing marriage and sex as bad things to be replaced by good ones, we should view them as good things somehow transformed or resurrected into better ones.
If we won't have sex in Heaven and if in Heaven there's no frustration of desire, then it appears we won't desire sex. This isn't because we won't have physical de sires, of course—we'll desire food and water. But what we will desire—and always enjoy—is the relational intimacy that was the best part of sex. We may discover, as we lookback, that sex prefigured what it means to be lost in intimacy with Christ. Once we're married to him, we'll be at the destination that marital sex pointed to as a signpost.
Will our resurrection bodies have sex organs? Since men will be men, and women will be women, and since there will be direct continuity between the old bodies and the new, there's every reason to believe they will. Is that inconsistent, since they wouldn't be fulfilling a function for which they were designed? Not necessarily. Jesus was a perfect man, yet he was single and abstained from sex. Unmarried people on Earth have been called to celibacy, but they are still fully human.
If I knew that never again would I recognize
that beloved one with whom I spent more than
thirty-nine years here on earth, my anticipation
of heaven would much abate. To say that we
shall be with Christ and that that will be
enough, is to claim that there we shall be
without the social instincts and affections
which mean so much to us here. . . . Life
beyond cannot mean impoverishment, but the
enhancement and enrichment of life as we
have known it here at its best.
W. GRAHAM SCROGGIE
The earth will have been filled with people conceived through procreation, and we will experience deep intimacy with Christ, our bridegroom. So the purposes of sex will have been fulfilled. We'll participate in what sex was always pointing to—deep and engaging relational intimacy. We won't imagine we're missing out.
A single woman told me she would feel great loss if she went to Heaven never having had a great romance. But our romance with Christ will far exceed any earthly romance. No romance is perfect, and many end in disappointment. Our romance with Christ will never disappoint.
Someone wrote, "What will fill the void of marital intimacy in Heaven?" There will be no void. We'll have greater marital intimacy with Jesus than we ever had in the best earthly marriages.
A man whose wife died of cancer wrote me, "We could no longer have sexual relations, but our depth of partnership became greater than ever. Our relationship came to transcend sex." This will presumably be true of our human relationships in Heaven.
In response to the disappointment some feel at the idea of no sexual intercourse in Heaven, C. S. Lewis wrote,
I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer "No," he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don't bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.265
WILL WE BE REUNITED WITH INFANTS WHO HAVE DIED?
We'll be reunited in Heaven with all believing loved ones. But what about infants, small children, and those who are mentally handicapped or have died too young to believe in Christ?
In Adam, all mankind sinned (Romans 5:12). We're conceived sinners (Psalm 51:5). Thus, children, as well as the mentally handicapped, have a sin nature and are separated from God. If God were willing to tolerate a certain number of sins but no more, then children who die young may not have reached their limit, thereby qualifying for Heaven. But Scripture teaches that the presence of any sin is enough to separate us from God (James 2:10). To say "Well, of course children are saved" won't suffice—given their sin natures, there is no "of course" about it.
A doctrine of infant salvation appears to require that children are conceived saved, then remain saved until they reach a certain age, at which point they become lost. But Scripture teaches we're conceived lost and remain lost until we become saved.
Scripture makes no reference to an "age of accountability," and it certainly doesn't teach the moral innocence of children. Charles Spurgeon said, "Some ground the idea of the eternal blessedness of the infant upon its innocence. We do no such thing. We believe that the infant fell in the first Adam 'for in Adam all died.'. . . If infants be saved it is not because of any natural innocence. They enter heaven by the very same way that we do: they are received in the name of Christ."266
Any person's salvation comes only through Christ's work (1 Timothy 2:5). Unless a person is born again, he or she can't enter God's Kingdom (John 3:3). How could a child be born again without consciously choosing Christ?
Scripture opens the door to the answer to this question through its teaching that God has a special love for children. Christ taught that we need to become like children to enter God's Kingdom, and he made a point of embracing children when his disciples wanted to exclude them (Matthew 19:13-14). He said "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them" (Luke 18:16). Christ used children as examples of faith (Matthew 18:2-4). In Ezekiel 16:21, God expresses his anger at the killing of children and refers to them as "my children."
Jesus says that the angels assigned to children "continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 18:10, NASB). Clearly, this is special treatment, suggesting there may be other acts of special treatment, including salvation apart from the normal process of confession and repentance. Because of such passages, I believe that God in his mercy and his special love for children covers them with Christ's blood.
In Psalm 8:2, David says, "From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise" (quoted by Jesus in Matthew 21:16). The inclusion of infants is significant because they would not be conscious of giving praise; it would have to be something instinctive. So, although children are sinners who need to be saved, God may well have a just way to cover them with Christ's blood so they go to Heaven when they die.
An interesting passage tells us that John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit in his mother's womb (Luke 1:15, NASB). This suggests that God conferred a righteous standing—or at least a special, spiritual, sanctifying work—on John even though he was too young to confess his sinfulness or consciously yield to God. If God did that with John, couldn't he do it with other children?Similarly, David says God had been his God since his mother bore him (Psalm 22:10). God told Jeremiah he'd known him since before he was formed in his mother's womb (Jeremiah 1:5).
The most common biblical argument used to support infant salvation is David's statement about his infant son who died: "I will go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23). It's possible that David was saying either that he would die and go to the grave (joining his son in death but not necessarily in Heaven) or that he would die and, in fact, join his son in Heaven. I personally think David, in his agony, was consoling himself with the belief he would one day join his son in Heaven.
Although I believe God makes special provision for children to welcome them into Heaven, I'm concerned that this doctrine—which is at most implied and certainly not directly taught in Scripture—has been twisted in a way to make many people feel indifferent about two heartrending situations: abortion and children dying of sickness and malnutrition. I've written more elsewhere on the dangerous aspects of this subject.267
Perhaps in Heaven many people will meet their children who were aborted or their children who died in miscarriages (even some miscarriages their mothers weren't aware of). Many parents will be reunited with children who died at an early age. Perhaps these children will grab our hands and show us around the present Heaven. Then one day, after the final resurrection, we'll enjoy each other's company on the New Earth—and experience its wonders together.
If children do go to Heaven when they die, why doesn't God tell us that directly? It may be that he anticipates the twisted logic and rationalization it might foster in us. It might take from us the sense of urgency to see our children come to faith in Christ. It might cause us to be less concerned about the sacred God-given task of extending physical and financial help to the underprivileged and getting the gospel to children around the world. We must do what God has called us to do, which includes protecting, rescuing, feeding, evangelizing, and discipling children.
In Heaven, both we and they will be grateful for all we did on their behalf.
WHO WILL OUR FRIENDS BE IN HEAVEN?
Augustine and Aquinas—two of history's most influential theologians—imagined that in Heaven people would focus exclusively on God and that relationships between human beings would be minimal or insignificant.268
These great theologians were swayed by Christoplatonism. For the most part, they didn't seem to grasp that the eternal Heaven will be on Earth, where people will live and work in a relational society, glorifying God not merely as individuals but as a family in rich relationship with each other.
Near the end of his life, however, Augustine significantly changed his view of Heaven. He said, "We have not lost our dear ones who have departed from this life, but have merely sent them ahead of us, so we also s
hall depart and shall come to that life where they will be more than ever dear as they will be better known to us, and where we shall love them without fear of parting."269 He also said, "All of us who enjoy God are also enjoying each other in Him."270
Do you have a close friend who's had a profound influence on you? Do you think it is a coincidence that she was in your dorm wing or became your roommate? Was it accidental that your desk was near his or that his family lived next door or that your father was transferred when you were in third grade so that you ended up in his neighborhood? God orchestrates our lives. "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live" (Acts 17:26).
Since God determined the time and exact places you would live, it's no accident which neighborhood you grew up in, who lived next door, who went to school with you, who was part of your church youth group, who was there to help you and pray for you. Our relationships were appointed by God, and there's every reason to believe they'll continue in Heaven.
God's plan doesn't stop on the New Earth; it continues. God doesn't abandon his purposes; he extends and fulfills them. Friendships begun on Earth will continue in Heaven, getting richer than ever.
Will some friendships be closer than others? Augustine claimed, "In the city of God there will be no special friendships. . . . All special attachments will be absorbed into one comprehensive and undifferentiated community of love. . . . The universalized love of heaven permits no exclusive, restricted circles of friends."271
But how does this position stand up to Scripture?