Marriage and Resurrection

This morning, we’re continuing our look at the End Times. As we’re closing out another church year, the readings shift toward that Day—the Day when Christ returns, raises the dead, and makes all things new. But we’re not to that Day yet. As we live our lives, we’re living in the End Times, but that Last Day has not yet come. So every day that passes brings us one day closer to when Jesus comes back.

Sadly, the Bible doesn’t give us a super clear picture of what that End will look like, or exactly what events lead up to it. All we get is snapshots here and there. We can, and do, piece these pictures together to get a pretty good idea of what it will all entail, but these readings leading up to the end of the church year only give us glimpses. We got a glimpse of the Gospel proclamation that’s a hallmark of the End. The full Gospel must be proclaimed. And that’s exactly what’s happening right now all across the globe. Jesus Christ crucified and risen is being proclaimed in every Christian pulpit around the world. We got a glimpse of what our resurrected life will look like: it will look like Him. We will be as God created us to be, like God in His righteousness, sinlessness, and selflessness. It’s a process that starts in this life and is completed in the life to come.

Today, we're listening to Jesus’ words about resurrection, in particular in how resurrection changes one of the most fundamental human relationship: Marriage. As Jesus is making His way to the cross, He has a number of run ins with the religious leaders. Sometime during Holy Week, only days away from His own death and resurrection, the Sadducees show up. In case you don’t know much about the Sadducees, Luke is kind enough to give you what you need to know. The Sadducees deny that there is a resurrection. And they’ve got what they’re sure is the definitive argument as to why the resurrection’s just a bunch of nonsense.

Now, you all know that I don’t shy away from the hard texts of Scripture. In fact, I love to lean into them, discover just how strange they really are, yet also find how they point us to Jesus. You’ve humored me over the years, but today might be one step too far. Because today, in order to talk about the Resurrection, we’re going to have to talk about what’s called Levirate Marriage. It’s weird and strange and will make us really uncomfortable, but if you’ll bear with me, we’ll come through the other side hopefully unscathed and better off for our little journey.

Levirate Marriage is the practice commanded in the Old Testament that if a man dies without having children, his brother is supposed to take his sister-in-law as a wife and make a baby with her. That child, then, would not belong to the brother who actually fathered it, but to the dead brother. It’s weird. It’s weird today; it was weird in Jesus’ day; and it was probably weird when the law was first given. I don’t think it’s ever anyone’s first thought, “Oh, my brother just died. Time to jump in bed with his wife.”

To top off all this weirdness, the Sadducees show up with this “airtight” argument about Levirate Marriage. So you’ve got this weird practice dealing with death; let’s amp up the death. Let’s say that whole weird process doesn’t just happen once, but seven times. Seven brothers die, each going through this same process with one woman, and then she dies too. Everyone dies! Weird law, ramped up to the extreme, death all around, obviously, the resurrection can’t be a thing. Death is the end; there’s no hope; it’s too complicated a knot even for God to figure out, so let’s just scrap the whole idea.

But not so fast. Jesus is pretty good at cutting through knots we don’t think can be untied. The Sadducees have it all wrong. They’re wrong about Levirate Marriage and they’re wrong about the Resurrection. They’re wrong because they don’t see a difference between this age and the life of the world to come. Marriage serves a distinct purpose in this world, a purpose that will no longer be needed in the resurrection.

Marriage was created by God before humanity’s fall into sin. It was not good for man to be alone, so God set up this relational system to fulfill our deepest desires and longings. Man and woman were created to be together. But after our rebellion in the garden, marriage took on a whole new purpose. God promised that salvation would come through the offspring of Eve. Man and woman were supposed to be together so that God would be able to send forth a Savior. These offspring were meant to carry on a family name—the name of God’s People—and a family promise—the promise of the forgiveness of sins and eternal life: Eden renewed.

This weird, foreign, and rather disturbing practice of Levirate Marriage was meant to keep that name and that promise going. It was a way to bring life out of death. In Deuteronomy, as the law is spelled out, Moses points us to this being the purpose for which it was created. Do this, Moses says, “that your brother’s name may not be blotted out of Israel.” The purpose of this practice was to keep the family name within God’s people and point us to the Promised Savior. It was a way to bring life out of death.

In the resurrection, death will have been permanently blotted out by life. In that age, where these is no death, no corruption, no names passing away, there will be no need for marriage. The loneliness that marriage was meant to solve will be done away with in our relationship with God Himself. The Savior that procreation was meant to offer has already come and finished His job. What was good and necessary and right in this age, in this world, in this life will be trumped by what is permanent and perfect and best for all eternity.

that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.

Because God is not God of the dead, but of the living. For all live to Him. Everyone who has died in the faith is alive to God. The grammar in the Greek there is actually deeper than that. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob aren’t just alive to God, they’re alive in God as well. In Him, all those who have gone before you in the faith—your parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, countless generations of those who have gone before—all those who have gone before you in the faith are alive in God. They are before His throne and worship Him day and night. They have died but are now alive in Christ.

where these is no death, no corruption, no names passing away or being blotted out, there’s no need for marriage. The loneliness that marriage was meant to solve will be done away with in our relationship with God Himself. What was good and necessary and right in this age, in this world, in this life will be trumped by what is permanent and perfect and best for all eternity.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), .

And when Christ returns and the dead are raised, they, and we, will be alive forevermore. The joys of this age will pale in comparison to the joy of the resurrection. The Resurrection changes everything. In changes these lowly bodies into heavenly bodies. It changes our imperfect relationships into perfect relationships. It changes death into life. Time and again, this is how your God works, bringing life out of death. He does it using Levirate Marriage. He does is in Jesus’ own death and resurrection. He’s working it in us even now, putting to death our sinful nature and leading us to a new way of living in this world. And He’s promised to do it at the End as well. Death will give way to life, for all live to Him. Amen.

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