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I mentioned in chapter one that on one occasion as a seminary student I asked my professor what heaven is like. It was a naïve question, because we don't have any information from pilgrims who have gone to that foreign country and have come back to give us a detailed description of what they've found. People ask me all the time, "Will I know my parents?" "Will I know my wife?" "Will we be recognizable?" "How old will we be in heaven?" "If we die when we are ninety, will we stay aged forever?" and "Will children who die be young forever?" All these questions assault us as we try to comprehend and conceive what heaven will be like. When people ask me such questions, I have to say that I don't know the answers.
One very popular question has to do with Jesus' statement that "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven" (Matt. 22:30). People wonder, "What did Jesus mean when He said that?" This statement from Jesus has provoked all kinds of speculation. I've read books that say that when we're in heaven we're going to be sexless because angels are sexless. But the Bible doesn't say that angels are sexless, and it certainly doesn't say that we will lose our gender identity when we go to heaven. Jesus simply says there will be no marrying and giving in marriage. That comes as a disappointment to people who would like to stay married to their spouses forever. Does Jesus mean that death ends the intimacy that is enjoyed by husbands and wives, that that relationship is abolished? I don't know.
The phrase "marrying and giving in marriage" is used in the Bible in the description of the expansion of wickedness that reached its zenith in the days of Noah, when people were doing what was right in their own eyes and were filling the world with violence. Jesus says, "In the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark" (Matt. 24:38). The idea is that life at the coming of Christ will be like it was in the days of Noah, when people were marrying and giving in marriage.
This statement by Jesus could be understood in at least two ways. First, it may refer to the suddenness of the appearance of divine judgment. He may be describing a situation in which people are going about the normal activities that characterize life as we know it, such as marrying and giving in marriage. In that case, all Jesus means to say is that His appearance will be unexpected.
Second, there's a theory that I can't confirm, but which I find fascinating and interesting. It is the idea that the phrase "marrying and giving in marriage" was a Jewish idiomatic expression for a low view of the sanctity of marriage in a degenerate culture where there was no sense of permanency to marriage. In other words, it was a situation in which people were getting married, quickly divorcing, then marrying again, time after time, and that was characteristic of the decadence of the age of Noah, which provoked God to bring the flood. Thus, it could be that Jesus is saying here that when we get to heaven, we're not going to have this cycle, this facile pace of marrying and giving in marriage. Maybe that's what He meant. I don't know.
The statement that there will be no marriage in heaven prompts us to ask, "Does that mean that the joy that accompanies the relationship of intimacy that God have given us in this world is over?" Here is my speculation, which has no foundation whatsoever in anything that's said specifically in Scripture. What if, in heaven, we are so sanctified that we can enjoy an indepth, intimate, personal relationship with every other inhabitant of heaven, one that exceeds in intimacy and in joy the most joyous, personal, intimate relationship we have now? I think there's sound reason to believe that such relationships will be possible in heaven, that we'll be able to relate as closely, as openly, and as warmly to a thousand others in heaven as we do to our spouses now. In fact, once sin has been removed, we'll have a deeper personal relationship with people that we don't even know now than any relationship we enjoy in this world, because when we are glorified as human beings, all of the barriers to deep, personal relationships and communication that are put there because of sin will be gone. Maybe that's the secret Jesus is hinting at when He says there will be no marriage or giving in marriage in heaven.
We're not the first to ask such questions. The apostle Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, spent a good deal of time talking about the concept of heaven as it relates to the resurrection of Christ. In the fifteenth chapter
of that letter, Paul gives a marvelous defense of the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus and demonstrates that it is central to Christianity.
I realize that there are theologies today that seek to de-mythologize the New Testament and to retain the vestiges of Christianity without embracing the resurrection. I had a roommate in college who went into the ministry.
When he had to go before the presbytery to be examined on his doctrine, he asked me: "Should I go with the resurrection of Christ or not? Should I tell the presbytery I believe that Christ was raised from the dead?" I asked, "What do you believe?" He said, "I don't think He was." I responded: "You're morally bound to say that you don't believe in the resurrection of Christ. You can't conceal that from the examining board of the presbytery."
In the end, he did conceal it, and he was ordained. Ironically, a few years later I had to come before the same presbytery to be examined, and the examiner was that same man. He had to look me in the eye when he asked me whether I believed in the resurrection.
In any case, this was a major issue in the Corinthian church, and Paul gives a marvelous defense of the resurrection. He argues that if there is no resurrection, all kinds of things follow logically. But after he gives his defense of the truth of Christ's resurrection, he then answers two other questions: "But someone will say, 'How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?'" (v. 35). Who hasn't asked those questions?
Let me remind you that one of the most important lines found in the Apostles' Creed is the statement, "I believe in the resurrection of the body."
This affirmation does not have to do with Christ's resurrection. To be sure, the apostles believed in the resurrection of Christ, but the creed here refers to our confidence that we will participate in the bodily resurrection of Christ. When we recite this affirmation, we're saying that we believe that our bodies will be raised from death and will be perfected, and that our bodies and souls will be reunited. That's what it means to say, "I believe in the resurrection of the body."
So Paul raises these questions: "How are the dead raised? And with what body do they come?" If you believe in the resurrection of the body, what are you talking about? Paul goes on to say, "Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain—perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to each seed its own body" (vv. 36-38). Here he borrows a statement almost verbatim from Plato and Socrates, an analogy
drawn from nature. You plant a seed in the ground. Then you pour water on it, and you keep watering it and exposing it to the sunlight. Why do you do that? You do it because you're trying to cause the germination of life. You want that seed to produce a flower or a vegetable or grass. You want new life to come forth, so you water it. Does the water impart life to the seed?
No. The water kills the seed. It makes it rot, because the seed has to rot and die, as it were, before the germination takes place. It is like the metamorphosis of the caterpillar to the butterfly. The one has to be changed into the other. That's what Paul is saying. "What you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be." If we want grass, we don't throw grass in the dirt. We throw grass seed in the dirt. If we want flowers, we don't take the bloom from the flower and throw it on the ground and water it. You have to take seeds from the flowers and put them in the ground and water them.
When I was a child, my mother helped me plant a garden. We sent away for little packages of seeds for flowers and vegetables. She tediously showed me how we had to plant the seeds in straight rows and how to space the seeds so that there would be room for the mature plants to spread. After I had planted all of the seeds in the order that she told me to plant them, I had to take the packages that the seeds came in and put them on popsicle sticks like signs in the ground where I had put the seeds. That was so I would know where I had planted each kind of seed before the actual plants emerged. The best thing I produced in my gardening was seed packages on sticks. That was about the extent of my green thumb.
But Paul is pointing out something elementary and basic to life—that there are all kinds of bodies in the world, all kinds of living things, all kinds of grains, flowers, and vegetables. They all come from seeds, and different seeds produce different kinds of bodies. He says, "All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds" (v. 39). What else is there about bodies? "There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory" (vv. 40-41). Paul is saying, "Open your eyes to the wide diversity of reality that you experience—all sizes, shapes, forms, and structures of existing entities in the universe: stars and moons and trees and mountains and grass and waterfalls." If you just
look at the animal kingdom, you'll see this myriad diversity of life. Do you think that in our experience we've seen every conceivable kind of life that there is and every conceivable kind of body there is? In our fantasies and science-fiction movies, the creative imaginations of the screenwriters produce all kinds of aliens that represent different kinds of life and different kinds of bodies. But Paul is saying, "There is a kind of body that no one has yet seen." Christ gave a foreshadowing of this when He came out of the tomb with the same body that He took into the tomb, with a body that had continuity with the one that was buried, but a body that had been changed.
He had a glorified body, and Paul is saying here that there's a whole new dimension of life and of bodily existence for which we are being prepared.
Paul continues: "So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption" (v. 42). He's not just talking about sin here, but about perishability. The body that I have now is getting old and weak; it's decaying; it's undergoing a kind of loss of strength and vitality. I long for a new body. My next body will be incorruptible. It will be invincible. It won't age. It won't decay. It won't wear out. It won't rot. It won't break. It won't get sick. Paul adds: "It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being.' The last Adam became a life-giving spirit…. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly" (vv. 43-45, 48). He concludes with this— think of it: "And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man" (v. 49). We will have bodies like the body of Christ.
We've asked the question, "When we get to heaven, will we be able to recognize people who are there?" Certainly their outward appearances will have changed, and we're accustomed to recognizing people strictly on the basis of outward appearances. I like to play around with oil paints. I'm a novice at it, but I once undertook to paint a portrait of Martin Luther. I had to do it in stages. The first stage was a very rough outline, where I tried to get the proportion of the head right and get the ear lined up with the nose and so on. I spent one night working on the easel and just roughing in the basic proportions of the portrait of Luther. When I had finished and cleaned up my paints and walked away, I stood back and looked at the painting from
about thirty feet away. I said to my wife: "Vesta, look at that. If someone else was painting that portrait, and I came in and saw it from here in its raw and unfinished state, I would instantly know that that was a portrait of Martin Luther." That's not a testimony to my artistic ability. I'm merely saying that even though it was so incomplete and so unlike an exact replica of Luther's face, there was something on that canvas that I could recognize.
In the same way, Jesus' body was different when He came out of the tomb.
It was so different that people did not immediately recognize Him. But there were times when, with a second glance, they could see that it was Jesus. Your departed friends and relatives, when you see them in heaven, will appear different than they did in this life, but when you see them, you will know them, and they will know you.