In a comment posted here, a reader named Eric Breaux asked for my response to a couple of articles by two well-known Christian writers and preachers, Randy Alcorn and John Piper. You can read the articles here:

The questions that Randy Alcorn asks in his article are already answered in these articles here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life, which I invite you to read:

Since I’ve already answered those questions, I won’t repeat the answers here.

I also won’t give a point-by-point response to everything said in each article. Rather, I’ll focus on what I see as the primary error of each writer on the subject of eternal marriage. This article is an edited and expanded version of comments in response to Eric that I posted here and here.

Randy Alcorn: Does earthly marriage determine spiritual marriage?

The key error in Alcorn’s article is contained in this quote from his article:

Again, reading Matthew 22, I sense that the whole point is that Jesus gave an answer to the Sadducees that said they were wrong in thinking that earthly partnerships (call them marriage or one flesh or child-bearing relationships or whatever you would call them with your position) will continue in the resurrection.

Alcorn sees that Jesus is saying that earthly partnerships don’t continue in the resurrection. His whole article is based on the premise that earthly marriages don’t translate into heavenly marriages. He apparently thinks that earthly marriages are God-given, when in fact many of them are merely human-made.

What Alcorn doesn’t see is that marriage in heaven is not based on earthly marriages that are about literally becoming one flesh (i.e., having sex) and bearing children. Marriage in heaven is also not determined by whether a priest, minister, or Justice of the Peace declares two people one in marriage. It is not based on whether a couple is legally, ecclesiastically, or socially recognized as a married couple. None of these things matter in the least in the spiritual world. The Sadducees were in error because they had the mistaken notion that earthly marriage would determine heavenly marriage.

Alcorn repeats the Sadducees’ mistake

Alcorn makes the very same mistake that the Sadducees did. He thinks that earthly marriage determines spiritual marriage. And he thinks that since it would be impossible, for example, for a woman who has been married to seven different husbands here on earth to be married to all of them in heaven, this means there can be no marriage in heaven.

Both the Sadducees and Alcorn have an earthly, physical-minded view of marriage. They think that earthly marriage is the only kind of marriage that exists. Therefore they reject marriage in the afterlife because the conditions of marriage here on earth don’t exist in the afterlife. All of this is covered in the first two of my three articles that I linked earlier.

The reality is that earthly marriage does not continue in the spiritual world. Only spiritual marriage does. And spiritual marriage has nothing to do with whether a person was joined in legal or religious marriage by human beings here on earth. Rather, it is based on whether a couple has been joined together in spirit by God. It is what God joins together, not what humans join together, that no human being is to separate (Matthew 19:4–6). And the marriages that God joins together are marriages of the spirit, not mere earthly, legal, and physical marriages.

God is not dependent upon humans

In response to the Sadducees, Jesus said not only that they were in error because they did not know the scriptures, but also that they were in error because they did not know the power of God (Matthew 22:29).

Alcorn, also, does not know the power of God. He thinks that God is constrained by the marriages we humans make here on earth. He thinks that if our human-made marriages don’t continue in heaven, then there can be no marriage in heaven at all.

Clearly Alcorn doesn’t even believe that God joins people in marriage, because he believes that all marriages will be put asunder. He therefore rejects both the scriptures and the power of God when it comes to marriage. By giving his human judgment that all marriages end at death, Alcorn is violating the Lord’s own commandment that what God has joined together, no human being is to separate.

God is not dependent upon human institutions and human marriages. God joins together the hearts and minds of two people, regardless of the human marriage licenses and wedding ceremonies and social recognition that make an earthly marriage. The marriages that will continue in the spiritual world are the marriages that God joins together. The earthly marriages that we humans make here on earth will cease to exist unless there is also a God-made marriage of hearts and minds between the two people.

John Piper: Is heaven completely different from earth?

My first reaction to John Piper’s article is that his claim that “the end of marriage in eternity is good news” will ring hollow for people who have experienced the deep human connection of spiritual marriage.

Piper promises some vague undefined joy that will be greater than the joy of marriage, without giving any conception of what that joy will be, or why we should accept his word on this. No matter how hard he labors to convince us that there is some unknown thing in heaven that is far greater than marriage, those who have experienced true marriage love will continue to find his rejection of eternal marriage to be a sorrowful and painful thing.

In short, Piper is laying heavy burdens, hard to bear, on people who have experienced true love—or who long for it.

Is heaven nothing like earth?

Piper seems to think that the joys we have in heaven will have no relationship whatsoever to the joys we have here on earth. He is asking us to believe that nothing we experience here on earth translates into anything that we will experience in heaven. According to Piper, God is just going to erase everything we have done or experienced here on earth, and substitute entirely different things of which we have had no prior experience at all.

If Piper is right, then God is putting us through a colossal waste of time here on earth. Why have us go through all sorts of learning and growing experiences here on earth that have nothing to do with anything we will be doing and experiencing in heaven? It would be like putting children and teenagers through twelve or sixteen years of school and then, when they graduate and become adults, telling them, “Nothing you’ve learned in school has anything to do with what you will be doing as adults.” The whole idea is ludicrous.

Does ice cream become sex?

Piper’s examples confirm that he is thinking of life in the spiritual world as something that has no relationship whatsoever with our life on earth. For example, he says:

The most exquisite sexual ecstasies in this age are like a child’s enjoyment of ice cream. There is as much distance between sexual pleasures in this world and the ecstasies of the spiritual body in the age to come as there is between a child’s enjoyment of ice cream and the pleasures of his marriage bed twenty years later.

But that is comparing apples and oranges. Here, in contrast to Piper’s false analogy, is the analogy that God makes in the Bible:

He answered, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4–5)

When children grow into adults and get married, they don’t stop eating ice cream and have sex instead. Rather, they leave behind their primary relationship with their parents, and have their primary relationship with their spouse instead. As children, they (ideally) had a relationship of love with their parents—and this was a good relationship. As adults, they have a relationship of love with their wife or husband—and this is a far greater relationship. That is why God has us leave behind, not ice cream, which we can continue to enjoy as adults, but rather living in the house of our father and mother, for the far greater relationship of living together with our partner in marriage.

God does not change ice cream into sexual intimacy. God did not put us here on earth and give us various relationships and experiences only to yank all of them away from us after death, and substitute something completely different. Rather, here on earth God gives us earthly versions of all of the same things we will be doing in heaven. And people who are spiritually minded here on earth can get just a little taste of what these earthly experiences and relationships will be like in heaven.

The old faulty Christian concept of heaven

The traditional Christian idea of heaven is that we will spend eternity in rapturous contemplation of God. This is known as the “beatific vision,” and it is the general concept of heaven held to in most of traditional Christianity—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. This view of heaven is based primarily on a literal reading of visions recorded in the book of Revelation, such as Revelation 4 and Revelation 7:9–12. These visions picture various creatures and multitudes of human beings all arrayed around the throne of God.

However, the visions recorded in the book of Revelation were never meant to be taken literally. (See: “Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?”) They are symbolic and metaphorical visions meant to convey spiritual meanings to readers whose eyes are open to see them. Unfortunately, today’s Christians are focused mostly on the letter that kills rather than on the spirit that gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6, and see my article, “Today’s Christianity: Vastly Void of Truth”).

It is true that in heaven everyone is arrayed around God as a common center. But that doesn’t mean all they do is worship and pray all day. Rather, they live active lives of love and service to one another just as we are meant to do here on earth, all the while turning to God as the center and source of everything they have, everything they do, and everything they are.

Earth is preparation for heaven

Just as our eighteen or twenty years of growing up as an infant, then a child, then a teenager, prepare us for our life as an adult, so our threescore and ten years here on earth prepare us for living in the spiritual world. Children and teens are continually engaged in many activities that they will be engaging in as adults, only it is mostly practice rather than doing the real thing.

Once we reach adulthood, we begin to actually do the sorts of things we played at and practiced as children. If we loved to build things, now we’ll build houses for people to live in. If we loved to learn things, now we’ll teach those subjects to children, teens, or adults. If we loved to play cops and robbers, now we’ll be police officers protecting others from criminals. And so on.

Piper is mistaken about heaven in general, and about marriage in heaven in particular, because he thinks heaven is going to be something that has no relationship whatsoever to anything we’ve ever experienced here on earth—except maybe church. He thinks God is going to take away everything we’ve experienced and learned here on earth, and replace it with something completely different.

But that’s not how God, or heaven, works. God gives us an apprenticeship here on earth so that we can practice the things we will be doing to eternity in heaven. That apprenticeship includes human relationships such as marriage.

Heavenly marriage is greater than earthly marriage

What is true is that all of the things we do and experience here on earth, including marriage, will be far greater in heaven than they are here on earth. We will then be in our spiritual bodies, living in the spiritual world, unconstrained by our heavy physical bodies and by the dead and unresponsive nature of physical matter. For people who have had real marriages here on earth, marriage in heaven will so far surpass what they have experienced here on earth that they will indeed think of it as being all new (see Revelation 21:5).

However, this doesn’t mean marriage will be an entirely different thing in heaven than what it is for spiritually married people here on earth. Rather, it means that good marriages here on earth will be raised to a whole new level in heaven, just as everything else we do and experience here on earth will be raised to a whole new level in heaven.

When little children play house, it can be a lot of fun. But actually being a married couple living in your own home is a whole order of magnitude greater than our games as children. Playing house looks forward to actually being married and making a home together with a husband or wife. It has many of the same elements in rudimentary form, but it is not the same as what young adults experience when they get married and make a home with their partner. In the very same way, the marriages we have here on earth will be raised to a whole new level in the spiritual world.

Piper’s primary error

In short, Piper’s primary error is in not understanding the relationship between our life here on earth and our life in heaven. Piper thinks that heaven will be something completely unrelated to our life here on earth. Apparently he thinks we’ll spend eternity in the celestial equivalent of a Sunday worship service, and that everything else we have done all week will simply vanish into thin air.

The reality is that heaven takes our entire life here on earth and raises it to a whole new level. This includes marriage, which is the closest and deepest interpersonal relationship (as compared to our relationship with God) that we humans are capable of.

Our life on earth is a preparation for our life in heaven. Everything we do and everything we experience and all of the relationships we engage in are preparations for the spiritual and heavenly versions of those same things.

When we arrive in heaven, like the little children who played house and then grew up to experience the reality of married life as adults, we will experience the far greater spiritual reality of everything we have done and all of the relationships we have experienced here on earth. That includes the relationship of marriage.

For further reading: