Will there be marriage in heaven?

Question 10107.

There will be no marriage in heaven in the sense of new marriages being contracted or existing ones continuing as legal and exclusive unions. Jesus said so plainly, and I am not going to soften it. What I do want to argue is that this is not the loss it first appears, because the reason there is no marriage in heaven is that the thing marriage was pointing to will have arrived.

This question usually comes from a widow or a widower, and it deserves tenderness rather than a lecture. So let us take the text seriously and then take the person seriously, because both matter.

What Jesus actually said

The Sadducees came to Jesus with a constructed absurdity. Seven brothers, one wife, each dying in turn under the levirate law. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? They did not believe in the resurrection and were trying to make it look ridiculous.

Jesus answered at Matthew 22:30 that in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. The two verbs are gameo and gamizo, the first for the man who takes a wife and the second for the father who gives a daughter. Both sides of the transaction are ruled out.

He also told them they were wrong because they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. That is worth noticing. Their error about marriage in heaven came from a shrunken view of what God can do. They assumed the age to come would be this age with the wrinkles ironed out, so they projected the levirate law forward and expected it to cause chaos. Jesus tells them the resurrection life is not a continuation of present arrangements on a longer timescale. It is a different order of existence altogether, and questions about marriage in heaven have to be asked inside that difference rather than outside it.

Like the angels does not mean sexless spirits

The comparison with angels is narrow. Luke’s version supplies the point of comparison directly: they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels. The likeness is in deathlessness, not in nature.

This matters, because people hear like the angels and conclude that in the resurrection we become bodiless, sexless and generic. We do not. The resurrection is bodily, and the risen Jesus was recognisably himself, with a body that could be touched and could eat.

Marriage exists partly because we die and need to be replaced. Remove death and one of the reasons for the institution goes with it. That is Jesus’s own logic in Luke, and it is a rather more interesting argument than we usually notice.

Why marriage was given in the first place

Marriage is a creation ordinance, given in Eden before sin, and it is good. It provides companionship, it produces and shelters children, and it is the ordinary school in which most people learn patience, forgiveness and self-giving.

But Paul tells us it was also a picture. The one flesh union of Genesis 2 is, he says, a profound mystery, and he is speaking about Christ and the church. Human marriage has always been a signpost pointing at something larger than itself.

Signposts are not needed once you have arrived. Nobody complains at the front door of the house that the road signs have stopped. There will be no marriage in heaven for the same reason there is no temple there: the reality has come.

There is a wedding, and we are the bride

Far from being marriageless, the eternal state opens with a wedding. Revelation 19:9 pronounces blessed those invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and Revelation 21 describes the holy city coming down prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

So the absence of marriage in heaven is not the absence of union, intimacy or belonging. It is the promotion of all three to a level that human marriage could only sketch. Every good thing that a happy marriage gives you is a small taste of what the church will have with Christ.

I have written more on the marriage supper of the Lamb if you want to follow that through.

Will I still know my husband or wife?

Yes. Nothing in Jesus’s answer suggests amnesia. The Sadducees’ woman was still recognisably the woman who had been married to seven brothers; that is why the question had any force at all.

Personal identity survives the resurrection. Moses and Elijah were recognisable on the mountain, and the risen Jesus was known to his friends. Whatever else is true of the new creation, it is not a place where we become strangers to one another. I have set that out in my answer on recognising people in heaven.

So the person you loved will be there, will be known to you, and will be more themselves than they ever were here. What will not continue is the exclusivity, and I want to explain why that is good news rather than bad.

Why no marriage in heaven is gain, not loss

Exclusivity in marriage is a protection made necessary by our limits and our sin. We have limited time, limited attention and hearts that wander, so God fences the relationship for our good. The fence is a mercy, but it is a fence.

In the new creation those limits are gone. There is no jealousy, no rivalry, no scarcity of love and no possibility of betrayal. Love that had to be guarded becomes love that can be poured out without danger, on everyone, for ever.

So marriage in heaven is not removed by subtraction but by expansion. What you had with one person you will have, in a purer form, with all of them, and with Christ above all. That is why I resist the instinct to describe the doctrine as a restriction. Nobody in the new creation will feel deprived of marriage in heaven, any more than a man who has come into a fortune feels deprived of his weekly wage.

A word to the widowed

I have sat with people for whom this doctrine landed like a second bereavement. If that is you, hear this. God is not going to take from you the person you love. He is going to remove the sorrow, the parting and the frailty, and keep everything that was good.

Nor does this doctrine make your marriage a temporary irrelevance. Everything you learned in it, every act of patience and forgiveness, every night you sat up, was making you into the person who will stand in that city. Nothing done in love is wasted.

And if you have remarried after being widowed, the Sadducees’ question has already been answered for you. It does not create a problem in eternity, because the arrangement that made it a problem will not exist.

What this means for marriage now

If marriage is a picture, then how we conduct it matters enormously. A husband is depicting the love of Christ for the church, whether he thinks about it or not, and the depiction is either faithful or misleading.

It also means singleness is not a lesser state. Jesus was single. Paul was single. Neither of them lacked the reality that marriage points to, and every single believer will be at that wedding as the bride rather than a guest.

So hold marriage highly and hold it lightly. Highly, because it is God’s ordinance and a picture of the gospel. Lightly, because it is for this age, and the one it points to is coming.

There is a practical edge to this that I find helpful in counselling. Couples who expect marriage to deliver what only God can deliver crush it under the weight, and they usually do it without noticing. Knowing there is no marriage in heaven quietly relieves that pressure. Your husband was never meant to be your eternity, and your wife was never meant to complete you in a way that only Christ can. Ask less of the picture and you will generally enjoy it more, which is one of those inversions that runs all the way through the Christian life.

So, now what?

If you are married, let this raise your sights. Your marriage is a thirty or fifty year sketch of something eternal. Sketch it well, and do not treat it as though it were the main event.

If you are single, whether by circumstance or by choice, take the comfort that is genuinely yours. You are not missing the reality; you are waiting for it with everyone else, and in the age to come nobody will be able to tell who was married and who was not.

And if you are grieving, take Jesus at his word about the power of God. He told the Sadducees they had underestimated it. Might you be underestimating it too?

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

Matthew 22:30, ESV