Marriage In Heaven? Part Deux

[Doc]

In Matthew 22, the Sadducees, in an attempt to discredit Jesus, came to Him with a question regarding marriage and the resurrection. Jesus answered them with these words: “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (verse 30). Jesus teaches here that marriage is a relationship to be enjoyed in this life, but it will not carry forward into the next life. While we do not lose our identity in heaven (Luke 16:23), we will not hold the same relationships that we do on earth. Our existence will be quite different from what we are used to here. The fact that there is no marriage in heaven implies at least two other things:

1) There will be no procreation in heaven; the number of the redeemed is set, and, with no death, there will be no need to propagate the race.
2) There will be no sexual intercourse in heaven. The appetites and desires of this world will give way to higher and infinitely more gratifying delights in the world to come.

For centuries, the temple and its sacrifices were at the heart of worship, but once Christ came and offered Himself as the ultimate sacrifice, the temple system and its sacrifices were no longer needed (John 4:22-23). They were “copies of the heavenly things,” and the earthly temple was only “a copy of the true one” in heaven (Hebrews 9:23-24). In the same way, the marriage relationship is a picture of our relationship with Christ (Ephesians 5:31-32). Once we are present with Christ, the illustration will no longer be needed. We will have the reality, which is far better than any earthly representation. This is why Jesus is called the Bridegroom, the Church is called His Bride, and our celebration in heaven is called the Wedding (John 3:29; Matthew 22:1-14; Revelation 19:7-9).

 

[welltan]

In Matthew 22, the Sadducees, in an attempt to discredit Jesus, came to Him with a question regarding marriage and the resurrection. Jesus answered them with these words: “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (verse 30). Jesus teaches here that marriage is a relationship to be enjoyed in this life, but it will not carry forward into the next life. While we do not lose our identity in heaven (Luke 16:23), we will not hold the same relationships that we do on earth. Our existence will be quite different from what we are used to here. The fact that there is no marriage in heaven implies at least two other things:

1) There will be no procreation in heaven; the number of the redeemed is set, and, with no death, there will be no need to propagate the race.
2) There will be no sexual intercourse in heaven. The appetites and desires of this world will give way to higher and infinitely more gratifying delights in the world to come.

I disagree that there is no sex in heaven. Usually I very quickly ask back...why? And the responder either says or blocks their underlying thought that there is no sex in heaven because there is no sin in heaven. This of course equates sex and sin as almost the same word. Why would something that can be pure and righteous even here on earth not be allowed in heaven? I agree that there is no procreation in heaven but procreation and sex are not the same thing. We also know that there is no marriage there and we will be like the angels. Therefore the most to be said is to discuss what angels do. And in that we do not know for sure. There are some that think in the Old Testament the "sons of God were angels, and the Nephilim were a result of this.Gen 6:1-4.

 

[Scarecrow]

"There are some that think in the Old Testament the "sons of God were angels, and the Nephilim were a result of this.Gen 6:1-4."

The Nephilim were the subject of one of my earliest studies, and for a couple of years I was convinced that they were the offspring of fallen angels. There was a gentleman from England that had posted a very interesting article on line, unfortunately if it still exists it is not easy to locate. While it has been some time since I studied this I remember his article proposing that the Nephilim were actually the Neanderthal. The Neanderthal were roughly 13% larger even in brain capacity then an average human. The average Neanderthal would be smarter and stronger than their human counterparts and to this day we don't know why they went extinct. The reason we often see them as knuckle dragging gorillas is that the first burial site that was found (in Neander Valley Germany) contained remains that were riddled with arthritis. With archeology being very young and not very scientific in nature the creature was horribly misrepresented to the public at the time. In more modern times when the burial sites have been excavated they have found herbs and spices on the bodies...all of which have known medicinal purposes. Also found are items such as the hollowed out leg bone of a bear that was fashioned into a flute.

To me the jury is still out on whether the "Sons of God" were actually fallen angels or the descendents of Seth...I now lean toward the descendents of Seth (righteous - Sons of God) marrying with the daughters of Cain (unrighteous - daughters of men). There seems to be no way to actually know for sure.

But one thought that I had that lingers is...could it be possible that if the "Sons of God" were indeed fallen angels AND their offspring were the Neanderthal...did they become extinct because they were sterile?

Usually when two different species breed their offspring are sterile:

While different species of the Equidae family can interbreed, offspring are almost always sterile. Nonetheless, horse/donkey hybrids are popular for their durability and vigor. A mule is the offspring of a jack (male donkey) and a mare (female horse). The much rarer successful mating of a male horse and a female donkey produces a hinny (Esox lucius).

The tiger muskellunge is a carnivorous fish and is usually sterile, hybrid offspring of the true muskellunge (Esox masquinongy) and the northern pike (Esox lucius).

*NOTE: I have not researched this for some time, so it could very well be that the Neanderthal could not possibly be the Nephilim.

 

[Doc]

Welltan,

You're right. The Bible does NOT say that there will be no sex in heaven.

It doesn't say there won't be beer in heaven, either. Or ESPN SportsCenter. Or curling.

I apologize for making an assumption not based on the Word.

Blessings,

Doc

****************************

In Heaven there is no beer
That's why we drink it here
And when we're all gone from here
Our friends will be drinking all the beer.

In Heaven there is no wine
So we drink till we feel fine
And when we leave this all behind
Our friends will be drinking all the wine.

In Heaven there is no fear
So we worry too much here
And we drink ourselves full of beer
To help us when we deal with the fear.

In Heaven there are no drugs
That's why we hang with thugs
And when the Lord pulls the plug
All the thugs will still be selling drugs, yeah.

Thugs and drugs
Beer...

In Heaven there is no sex
So let's do that next
And when our muscles no longer flex
Someone else will be having sex.

In Heaven there are no wars
Or cars, or movie stars
And when we no longer are
The world will probably still be having wars.

What the heck! Yeah!

Sex and war,
Bars and cars.
Drugs, thugs,
And delicious food.

 

[MarvelousMarvin]

For the most part, all we can do is speculate about what Heaven will be like.

But I do know this:

1 Corinthians 2:9 NKJV But as it is written: "EYE HAS NOT SEEN, NOR EAR HEARD, NOR HAVE ENTERED INTO THE HEART OF MAN THE THINGS WHICH GOD HAS PREPARED FOR THOSE WHO LOVE HIM."

So.....in Heaven:

• No procreation? No problem. If no procreation, it will be replaced by something much better.
  No sex? No problem. If there is no sex in heaven, it will be replaced by something much better.
  No football games? Uh..well..do you still want to go? :lol:

In all seriousness, there will be procreation after the Rapture, in the Millennial Kingdom.

Isaiah 65:20 NKJV "No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, Nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; For the child shall die one hundred years old, But the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed.

Sounds like something we have to look forward to - children born during the Millennium. That is not in the resurrection, that is after the resurrection.

Maybe the children are to be born to parents who somehow survived the Great Tribulation and became citizens of the Millennial Kingdom, not the Resurrected Saints with glorified bodies. But where does the Bible say that? I haven't found it yet.

Yes, the Millennial Kingdom is not Heaven. But why would procreation not continue through all eternity, even after the Millennium? Will God run out of space for the human race? Is He incapable of providing eternal life to someone born of parents who have glorified bodies, and the original sin that we all inherited from Adam has been eradicated totally so that the father will not pass a sin nature on to his children?

As already said, just speculation...

 

[Anonymous]

Scarecrow,
I have a THEORY and I recognize it for what it is. :lol: In my theory, the sons of God were children born to Adam & Eve before the fall and hence were not under the parental curse. This would answer these questions; Who were the sons of God; Why were there giants at that time?; Where did Cain find his wife? Just thinking out loud.

 

[MarvelousMarvin]

John,

That's a theory I, too, have wondered about. The Bible doesn't tell us that Adam and Eve had any children before the fall, but it also doesn't tell us that they didn't.

I've never thought through the theological implications of pre-fall progeny. Would Adam's sin nature be transmitted only to those children conceived after the fall? Or would the transmission of a sin nature be retroactive, since Adam was the head of the whole race?

It would certainly would be an exercise in speculation, akin to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin... :lol: ...probably why I haven't thought it through, there's too many important theological issues to study.

 

[Scarecrow]

"the sons of God were children born to Adam & Eve before the fall"

I have seen this brought up before and wondered about it myself. All I can comment on it is that my "gut feeling" is that there weren't any children before the fall...but I can't prove it any more than I can prove that Adam had only one wife. Gets to be pretty hairy when you go down that road...

I love to give God thanks for the things I see around me...there was a beautiful moon out last night shaded slightly by a few thin clouds...I know that what is to come is beyond human description.

 

[steve]

..................................................edited by me.

the fact that they were embarrassed by their nudity suggests that they did not realise why they were different and that the difference had no sexual connotation until after the fall.

of course, the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment given pre-fall causes a lot of problems with this theory.

 

[welltan]

All we know is that we will be as the angels. But of course it might be different then our preconceived ideas or fears. If angels are felt to be spiritual beings, the spiritual can not be measured or weighed or described by volume. If there is no sex in heaven then I agree that would be because there is something better.
Then perhaps we shall find out someday how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. I would guess all of them. If we are not pinning the tail on the donkey here than this link does it better.

http://improbable.com/airchives/paperai ... ls-7-3.htm

And whether there is sex or not, we can be sure there is wine? or no wine?

Luke 22:17-18

17 And he received a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves:

18 for I say unto you, I shall not drink from henceforth of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.

And certainly we eat there, don't we? Of course we don't need to eat to survive, but those 12 fruits in Rev 22 probably don't go to waste.

The hope of heaven might be conjecture but it is still hope. And things that have become sin here may not be sin there.

 

[Scarecrow]

well if we're going to eat in heaven then we better not forget to:

Deuteronomy 23:13-14 And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.

...don't want nobody steppin' in anything now do we...

 

[MarvelousMarvin]

welltan wrote:

And things that have become sin here may not be sin there.

Are you saying that the reason we might not experience sex in Heaven is because sex is sin? Or are you suggesting that sex outside the context of a covenant relationship (what the world mistakenly labels "marriage"), which we call sin here in this life, might not be sin in the next?

steve wrote:

of course, the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment given pre-fall causes a lot of problems with this theory.

It doesn't cause "a lot of problems with this theory," it blows it out of the water! :lol: There are some numbskulls who teach that the "forbidden fruit" was sex. "Be fruitful and multiply" is enough to completely destroy that notion. (Unless god provided Adam with a biology lab and the knowledge to make test-tube babies... :lol: :lol: :lol: )

scarecrow and john: It is also my gut feeling that Adam and Eve had no children before the fall, but we can not prove or disprove that from Scripture. As to "the sons of God," I think (subject to further study) that in the OT, that phrase always refers to beings created directly by God. That would be Adam and the angels, but not Cain, Seth, Noah, etc. If it means otherwise in Genesis 6:2, that would have to be an exception. (This theory is, as I said, subject to being changed if I ever find time to do an in-depth study of the use of the phrase "sons of God" in the OT - something that is not high on my priority list yet.)

 

[welltan]

welltan wrote:

And things that have become sin here may not be sin there.

Are you saying that the reason we might not experience sex in Heaven is because sex is sin? Or are you suggesting that sex outside the context of a covenant relationship (what the world mistakenly labels "marriage"), which we call sin here in this life, might not be sin in the next?

steve wrote:

of course, the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment given pre-fall causes a lot of problems with this theory.

It doesn't cause "a lot of problems with this theory," it blows it out of the water! :lol: There are some numbskulls who teach that the "forbidden fruit" was sex. "Be fruitful and multiply" is enough to completely destroy that notion. (Unless god provided Adam with a biology lab and the knowledge to make test-tube babies... :lol: :lol: :lol: )

I believe that there is sex in heaven or something comparable but better. I find it difficult to say that angels are neuter. Any argument that angels are neuter will quote Matt 22:30 or Mark 12:25 and falsely derive from these verses that since there is no marriage in heaven there is no sex and so it is logical that angels are nueter. However, the same verses are used to prove there is no sex in heaven because angels are nueter. The false foundation of each argument is based on the falsehood of the other. Something like proving which came first the chicken or the egg.
And I agree completely with Steve about the 'be fruitful and multiply activity' as directed by God. If there were no children then they were actively disobedient to God before the fall, and the fall would not have been the first sin but rather their disobedience to multiply would have been the fall into sin. The strongest though humorous argument against this is that Adam and Eve had not ate of the tree yet so they could have been disobedient without sinning as they had no knowledge. However, somehow that argument must prove that Adam and Eve in a chemically hot bed of a garden refrained from having sex till after the fall, or practiced birth control, or God closed Eve's womb till the fall. All that robs the Adam and Eve account of its mother of all living reputation.

 

[MarvelousMarvin]

welltan,

One argument that I have heard to "prove" that there is no sex, and therefore, no procreation, in Heaven, is that any children born would have to be tested, as Adam was in the garden of Eden. But that is actually a non-argument. Whoever came up with that theory was obviously grasping at straws, possibly because of having the false idea that sex=sin, but they did not want to argue that one for obvious reasons.

I have never studied angelology, but it seems to me that when angels are mentioned in Scripture, they are almost always referred to as being masculine. As far as I know, all angels who appeared to someone in the Bible either appeared as men, or we are not given enough information to make a determination as to gender. I am not aware of one angelic appearance by a feminine angel, OT or NT. That does not mean that female angels do not exist, just that we are not told about them. If female angels exist, their purpose would other than to be messengers between God and men, as we see with the few male angels whose appearance to humans is recorded in the Bible. But maybe female angels do not exist at all.

In the absence of Scripture that tells us otherwise, it is safe to assume that men on Earth will be men for eternity, and women on Earth will be women for eternity. Why would there not be sex in Heaven if we retain our gender identity throughout eternity? And why would there be sex without procreation?

But all this is speculation...

 

[Dr. K.R. Allen]

If there were no children then they were actively disobedient to God before the fall, and the fall would not have been the first sin but rather their disobedience would have been the fall into sin.

This is a clear speculation as I see it. The only way to know this above would be if we had a time frame as to how long it was from God's command to the time of the sexual act. Does this text answer this? What if God gave the command and Adam and Eve sinned just a few minutes or an hour or so after the command? Did they even have enough time to fulfill that command and to birth children before they sinned by eating from the wrong tree?

I always find it odd for us to insert such ideas like they had to have children before they sinned or they had to have sex before they sinned lest they violated God's command . Insertions like that into the text when we clearly do not have some crucial information to make such judgment calls seems out of place when trying to build a biblical worldview. If we took that approach to texts then are we under divine imperative to obey each and every command of God immediately with no time lapse between his command and the implementation of it? Is that really even remotely reasonable to speculate in that way? Or is it not more reasonable to think that when God gives us a command we are to take it to heart and then begin making plans to carry that out as we have opportunity?

Too, the purpose of Moses' writing was to give us an accurate historical account of where they had come from. It would fit that he gave the most straight forward chronology: God made Adam and Eve, told them what to do, they failed at it, then they birthed children who begat children who subsequently developed down to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Israel as a nation. The historical point of the Genesis text was to trace their history. Thus, it seems highly speculative and out of the scope of the purpose of Genesis (literally Book of Beginnings) to fail to mention who the first humans were from Adam and Eve when the purpose was to trace the first of the species and human race and the reason why we were all in sin.

 

[MarvelousMarvin]

Dr. Allen wrote:

What if God gave the command and Adam and Eve sinned just a few minutes or an hour or so after the command? Did they even have enough time to fulfill that command and to birth children before they sinned by eating from the wrong tree?

In all likelihood, Adam ate the "apple" within a week or so after God pronounced everything to be "very good." It could not have been minutes after, because God came down to walk in the cool of the day with His special creatures, Man and Woman, for an unknown number of days between the completion of Creation and the fall. Somehow, I think that if they had been in the Garden of Eden for as long a year, they would have had a child, and the Biblical record would tell us that. But we can't know for certain.

Any of us who have had children know that it is rare for conception to occur on the "first try" (unless you are just having a "one-night stand" and don't want a child!), and part of Eve's punishment was that God told Eve, "I will greatly multiply your...conception." So probably, before the curse which resulted from the fall, women were fertile far less frequently than after. (Maybe yearly instead of monthly? Just speculation, of course.)

So the probable fact that they did not have kids before the fall would speak to how soon after the completion of Creation they ate the "apple," not that they were disobeying the command to "be fruitful, and multiply."

 

[welltan]

.

Too, the purpose of Moses' writing was to give us an accurate historical account of where they had come from. It would fit that he gave the most straight forward chronology: God made Adam and Eve, told them what to do, they failed at it, then they birthed children who begat children who subsequently developed down to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Israel as a nation. The historical point of the Genesis text was to trace their history. Thus, it seems highly speculative and out of the scope of the purpose of Genesis (literally Book of Beginnings) to fail to mention who the first humans were from Adam and Eve when the purpose was to trace the first of the species and human race and the reason why we were all in sin.

You wrote "It would fit", welcome to the world of speculation.

There is no genealogy in the Bible that listed everyone alive at the time so why would we speculate that Genesis accounted for everyone?

There are many timelines, but here is one. Find Adam and then find Noah and then find Moses (a couple of thousand years later). Moses was not in the garden by any stretch. http://www.creation-science-prophecy.com/timelin3.gif

Also the Genesis events facts somehow made it onto and off the ark with Noah, good with the hammer and the bottle not sure about the pen. I find it remarkable that we expect Moses, who was there when the Law was given to write Genesis just as another part of the Law when he and the Law didn't show up till a couple of thousand years later.