Say What? No Marriage in Heaven?

So what were they? What would you bring back?

Elf.

Elf?

Alf.

Alf.

Alf.

Who remembers what, who remembers what Alf cherished? What he...

Remember?

No, he wanted to eat cats.

But their currency was...

Wasn't it lint?

Yeah, like lint from, from the dryer trap.

What else, what else would you bring back?

Longmire.

Longmire. Longmire is one of those shows that was on AMC for those of you that don't care.

Longmire was on AMC for three years. It was actually their most viewed show and they canceled it for some reason.

And so Netflix picked it up and they kind of did what a lot of shows do. They kind of make their changes.

And from seasons four, five and six are fine, but they're not as good as seasons one, two and three.

Anyone else, what would you bring back?

Little Fire.

What?

Little Fire.

Little Fire, what is this?

Little Fire, is it a song? Should I make one up right now?

Oh, alright.

Alright, well I was thinking about, anyone familiar with the soda blue knee high?

So when I was a kid we would go to the bowling alley and I'm old enough that when you went to the bowling alley,

the soda machine was actually like glass bottles.

And knee high, N-E-H-I was the name of a soda company. It's been bought two or three times since then.

But it had like a blue raspberry, it was like a blue cream soda, is basically what it was.

But it was the one thing I really loved about going to the bowling alley.

And then the bowling alley got a new soda machine that was actually like plastic bottles.

So they didn't have knee high anymore and the knee high stopped making knee high.

And I need to talk to my therapist about it I think.

Another one I was thinking about is a show called My Name is Earl.

Anybody watch that? It's not that it's my favorite, but it sticks out for a very specific reason because of the way that it ended.

My Name is Earl ran from 2005 to 2009, it had four seasons.

And this is true. Even though they had been told that there would be a fifth season,

the executives canceled it right after the final episode of the fourth season.

And what really makes that sting is that the director, the writer actually said,

hey, we're planning on ending season four on a cliffhanger to be continued. Is that okay?

And they said, yeah, that's just fine. And then they canceled it.

And so no one ever got to find out what happened after that last episode.

It literally ends to be continued. It's not like some cliffhanger just like, oh, it's a cliffhanger.

It said to be continued. It hurts when our favorite things get discontinued.

And so for some of us, it's going to be difficult to hear that Jesus' plan is that there's an end to marriage.

Say what? Dun dun dun. I still remember the first time this came up in my marriage.

Newlywed Greg wasn't quite wise enough when newlywed Cynthia asked him if he thought that we'd be together forever.

I wasn't wise enough to just say, of course, baby, we'll be together forever.

I had to bring up Matthew 22. Well, yes, in this life, yes, I do think so.

But it's only one of a million things I'd go back and not say.

And now I'm going to preach an entire sermon on it. So let's go ahead and jump in.

We're going to be in Matthew chapter 22.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

And I'm going to give you a parental warning that I'm going to be using some words about things that happen inside of a marriage.

Wink, wink, wink, wink, things that happen between people.

And if you don't want your kids that are still in the room to hear those words,

then you are welcome to send them either to Treehouse or have them have a coffee out in the lobby.

And then we can I don't know that I don't think this is on out there.

But just so you know, there's going to be some words said that you may have to explain on the way home in the car.

That's not what you want. You've been warned.

All right. Matthew 22, it goes Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, very beginning of what's called the New Testament.

I like to call it the Second Testament.

And we have a tradition of giving the scriptures our full attention when we read them.

One of the ways we do that is by standing together. You're welcome to sit as well.

Let's give the scriptures our full attention as we read this.

Matthew 22, starting in verse 23.

That same day, the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question.

Teacher, they said, Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offering for him.

Now, there were seven brothers among us.

The first one married and died. And since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother.

The same thing happened to the second and third brother right on down to the seventh.

Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven since all of them were married to her?

Jesus replied, You are in error because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.

At the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage.

They will be like the angels in heaven. Let us pray.

God of every tribe, every tongue, every color, every nation, we thank you for the scriptures.

I pray that whatever you have for us to learn today, that it would stick, that it would become a part of the framework of our faith, that we would be more like your son, Jesus.

Amen. Amen. You can all have a seat.

I think the first thing that we got to cover just real quick is who are the Sadducees?

When I was a little kid in Sunday school, they helped us remember who they were because it'd be like, see, the Pharisees, they weren't fair, you see.

And then the Sadducees, because they don't believe in the resurrection, they'd say, they don't believe in the resurrection, and so they're sad, you see.

You know, these little mnemonics. Of course, this reduces them down to like one thing.

But the Sadducees were a religious sect within Judaism that had only been around for about 200 years at the time that Jesus was doing his ministry.

But they had become extremely influential because their sect, their section of Judaism included most of the leading priestly families.

And so for all intents and purposes, they controlled the temple.

And if you controlled the temple in Judaism, you controlled quite a bit.

Theologically speaking, the Sadducees were the conservatives.

They were the fundamentals of their day.

They didn't care for the miraculous. They didn't believe in the afterlife, the resurrection.

They didn't believe in angels.

Primarily because they only followed the first five books of scripture, which was called the Torah or the Pentateuch.

It's Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

The Pharisees, right, they get a bad rap.

It's the kind of thing that we do.

But they were actually much more open theologically speaking than the Sadducees were.

See, the Pharisees accepted the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the wisdom literature like the Proverbs, the poetry of the Psalms.

For the Sadducees, there was nothing new under the sun.

But not because Ecclesiastes 1.9 said it, because Ecclesiastes was far too new for them.

It says pause for extreme laughter.

That's a little Bible joke.

Did you get it?

Because it came after the first five books.

It comes down to this.

If Moses didn't say it, then the Sadducees probably didn't believe it.

If it wasn't in those first five books, and because the Torah didn't have anything that it said about resurrection or eternity,

or at least they didn't think that it did, they didn't believe it.

So the Sadducees, what they do is they think that they can trick Jesus into agreeing that there's no resurrection by using a ridiculous argument.

In Latin, this kind of argument is called reductio ad absurdum, which means reduction to absurdity.

It's the kind of argument that is supposed to be so absurd and contradictory that it's impossible to ignore how wrong the conclusion is.

A woman married to seven brothers?

What?

Is she going to be in a polygamist relationship with seven husbands for all eternity?

Well, of course not.

That's absurd.

Therefore, there's obviously no resurrection.

What they didn't count on was that instead of their story proving the absurdity of resurrection and eternity,

their story proved the absurdity that marriage is eternal.

Before we get more into that, I want to...

I also want to think...

I also think that their story proves the absurdity of how we treat women.

This story makes it clear that to them, women had one primary purpose.

Childbirth.

We don't always think of it like this, but culturally speaking, marriage was for men.

Because marriage was for making babies so that men could continue their line, their name, their lineage, their influence.

If a man's wife didn't bear him a child, he could leave his wife in his will to his brother-like property.

Why?

So that she could get pregnant and carry on his name.

Marriage, situationally speaking, was for men.

Today, the battle over marriage isn't that different.

It's just that our modern arguments have shifted from who has a baby to who's having sex.

And so, marriage can be used to control who gets to have it, when they get to have it, or what kinds of sex they can have.

And the side effect, or even the direct intent of these views of marriage, is that it reduces women down to baby makers and sex machines for men.

But I do not think that Jesus thinks of marriage and women this way.

If you look back, if you actually go back two chapters in the book of Matthew, you'll find that this time it's the Pharisees that are challenging Jesus.

And they're asking Jesus about marriage and divorce.

And if you read it, it's clear that Jesus cares deeply about marriage, but you might be surprised how he cares.

Because if you're paying attention, you'll see that his confrontation about divorce is directed squarely at men.

And how frivolously they would discard women for their next partner.

Jesus speaks up for women.

He doesn't reduce them by confining and defining them with one role of wife or mother.

That brings us to what he has to say to the Sadducees.

When he confronts the Sadducees, this is probably one of the most direct and no-holds-barred responses to an argument that Jesus gives in all of the Gospels.

Not only does he say, you're wrong, then he says, you don't know the Scriptures.

And then he says, nor do you know the power of God.

There's no other way to describe this but harsh.

Remember, their name, the word Sadducee, actually comes from the root for the word to be right.

And he tells them directly, you are wrong.

And then they had all memorized every word of the Torah.

And then he says, but you clearly don't know the Scriptures.

And they didn't believe in the miraculous or the resurrection, so he says it plainly, you are limiting what God can do.

And as if he hadn't already dropped bombs, he completely flips the absurdity of their argument by saying,

not only are you wrong about eternity and resurrection, but marriage is what will change at the end.

Okay, but why?

There's a few layers to this answer, okay?

So hang on.

One is that presumably we will live forever.

So we have to ask some questions about what's the nature of living forever.

And if we live forever, we have to ask what role does sex and marriage and childbearing have anymore?

Because first, right now, we have to have children.

We have to have children or humanity would not exist.

Societies would crumble.

China used to have a one-child law.

Did you guys know about this?

They had a one-child law.

Oh, sorry.

Law, law, law, law, law.

But then China found out that their workforce was getting older.

And they didn't have enough young people to continue to expand their society,

to continue to prop up the financial obligations that they had.

And so six years ago, six years ago, they made it okay to have two.

And it's not that you couldn't have more than one kid.

It's just that if you did, it probably meant that you were wealthy

because you had to pay extra money if you had extra kids.

And then last year, they actually said that you can have three kids without any penalty.

Because our societies right now on this earth are contingent on having children that will carry our societies on.

One question about eternity is will we need new children?

I don't know.

I tend to think that Jesus really loves kids.

If you read the Gospels and see the way that he talks about them,

you would go, well, I can't imagine an eternity that didn't have any of those

when he seemed to be so enamored by them.

But Jesus also doesn't think that we should reduce women down to being our baby makers.

So by taking marriage off that eternal table,

he's directly confronting their assumption that that is what women are for.

And again, the woman in their story is just there to be a wife,

handed down from one brother to the next.

But for Jesus, she's her own person.

She doesn't need to wonder who she'll be married to in eternity.

Jesus isn't interested in reducing her or any other women down to one single role.

In his version, she gets to experience the resurrection and eternity like everyone else

as her own person perfected in God's presence.

So Jesus takes marriage off the eternal table

because in the kingdom, at the resurrection, men will have no position of cultural authority

or relational superiority over women.

So the last question might be then, what happens to sex in eternity?

I'll tell you two basic schools of thought.

Really pay attention, okay?

Either there could be no sex or there could be free sex.

Let me explain both of those a bit.

Those on the theological side of free sex in eternity might say something like this,

because we will finally love each other perfectly.

Because having sex with someone you're not married to would no longer damage a marriage.

And because the colloquial protection of family lines will be gone.

And because presumably we'll still have our body parts.

Why wouldn't we use them?

Now, on the other hand, while some may want that to be the reality,

the no sex in eternity side might say that believing we will have the freedom to have sex

with anyone we want in eternity isn't based on perfect love.

It's based on our actual earthly desires.

And that's that far too often we make sex the point.

We make sex the goal.

We make sex the reward.

I did good. We had a good date. Why didn't you reward me?

And if some of us are truly honest, some of us hope that we will have free sex in heaven

because that's what we want now.

We see our marriage as just keeping us from doing whatever we want with whoever we want.

Or we see our marriage as keeping our spouse from doing whatever they want with whoever they want.

When here on earth, sex is actually only one tiny percentage point of the totality of the kind of relationship

God hopes we will experience together here on earth.

We distort it.

So those are the two views. Do you want to know what I think?

I like asking that question because you're a captive audience.

I'm going to tell you.

Here's the truth about sex in eternity.

The Bible doesn't say.

As far as I can tell, the Bible has absolutely nothing to say about whether we will have sex in eternity

or whether we can have children in God's new creation.

Nothing.

We just know that marriage, as we currently know it, will not be.

And that somehow, that will be good.

So I hope that if we walk away with anything today, I hope that it's one of the things I think Jesus is trying to say to the Sadducees.

And it's that reducing women down to baby machines, making sex the point, misses the point.

So as I close, let me say this.

When it comes to marriage, this is my legitimate view.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray,

He taught them to pray by saying, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus has given us a little peek into what eternity looks like.

So I think that our view of marriage here on earth is meant to be informed by God's will for relationships in heaven.

Mainly, that sex won't be the point.

And I think that should inform how we think about marriage now.

In particular, how we pressure people to get married, often because of sex.

You want to have sex? You better get married quick.

How can we treat people...

What are your phrases?

I think it should inform how we treat people that aren't married.

How sometimes they're treated like they're incomplete because they don't have...

Because they don't have a partner.

And I think that it should inform how we gatekeep who can marry and who can have sex like same-sex couples.

Because so much of the conservative modern Christian perspective on marriage is wrapped up in who can sleep with who.

But...and stay with me.

If it isn't an issue in eternity, why is it the main reason so many people get excluded from church here on earth?

I left this out earlier, but the theological concept of resurrection in Judaism,

by the time Jesus was doing his ministry in the first century,

the theological concept of resurrection had only been around for less than 200 years.

The Sadducees didn't like it because they didn't see it in the part of the Bible they believed in.

The Sadducees didn't like it because it was a newfangled theology.

And yet here was Jesus saying that new idea, you know what?

Give it a shot.

And that thing that you're obsessed about, it's not the thing you should be obsessed about.

Just because a theological idea is relatively new does not mean that it's wrong.

And I think that we should have a sense of kindness and gentleness

as we discuss things like this with people that don't see it the same way that we do.

There's no need for absurd illustrations.

There's only a need for love.

Let us pray.

God, I pray that your spirit of understanding would be all about us today.

You would help us to be kind and gentle, that we would be quick to listen and slow to speak, slow to anger.

That the things that we get caught up on, that you would teach us how to no longer trip on them,

because they are not the stumbling blocks on the way to eternity.

Fill our hearts with joy that there is a resurrection coming.

Fill our hearts with peace as we seek humility in how we understand each other.

Amen.