What Is Will Not Always Be

What is now will not always be. I can remember that it was not too long ago where one could simply go find multilevel bookstores and get lost in browsing through the titles. In many instances there would also be a large section for music. But times have changed. People are taking advantage of new technologies to get their books and music, so a trip to the local bookstore is less common. Numerous bookstores have closed down, and stores that once had large music sections are, at best, down to an aisle of selected titles. What is now will not always be. That is really the mistake of what the biblical writers understood the Sadducees had committed. They thought the way things are will always be with respect to their reasons for denying the resurrection.

The Sadducees denied the resurrection, which meant when the body died the soul likewise perished. As for the future judgment, this was also rejected. They were simply for the here and now. When confronting Jesus Christ on the resurrection, the Sadducees appealed to the levirate law in Deuteronomy 25:5-6, and try to present a conundrum based on an astronomically impossible scenario. The problem went this way: “Moses said, ‘IF A MAN DIES HAVING NO CHILDREN, HIS BROTHER AS NEXT OF KIN SHALL MARRY HIS WIFE, AND RAISE UP CHILDREN FOR HIS BROTHER.’ Now there were seven brothers with us; and the first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother; so also the second, and the third, down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had married her” (Matt. 22:24-28). The point was clear. Jesus, we cannot believe in the resurrection, for what kind of world will the afterlife be with all the problems of sorting out who’s wife belongs to who with all the levirate marriages going on? Whether or not such a thing was common practice in the first century is debatable, but the point hits home.

Jesus simply notes to them what is now will not always be. He says, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:29-30). It is not so much that men will become angels, but just as angels have a completely different life experience than earth dwellers, so too will the saints in the resurrection. The world to come brings a new epoch of time where the present order things will give way to things to come. The present way of doing things, such as marriage, will not always be. Something else is to come, and the thing that is to come far, far, greater.

In his book entitled Miracles, C.S. Lewis observed, “The letter and spirit of scripture, and of all Christianity, forbid us to suppose that life in the New Creation will be a sexual life; and this reduces our imagination to the withering alternative either of bodies which are hardly recognisable as human bodies at all or else of a perpetual fast. As regards the fast, I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you are chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer ‘No,’ he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except the glimpses, the other things which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.” There is something far greater to come, which the here and now perspective of the Sadducees could not comprehend.

Jesus goes even a step further in declaring: “But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God: ‘I AM THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Matt. 22:31-32). The point is profound. We cannot say, “God was the God of Abraham…Isaac…and Jacob.” Instead, we declare God still is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for these patriarchs share in the hope of eternal life, as with the rest of the saints in the kingdom of heaven. God is the God who raises the dead from the grave.

How great is the promise of the resurrection. Our present bodies fall subject to disease, death, and decay. Yet, the way things that are now will not always be. One day Jesus Christ will return, and the saints will be resurrected. Evil does persist in this world, but the way things that are will not always be that way. The Righteous King will appear a second time and will make things right. The day of reckoning will come. So there is hope beyond what is here and now. What is will not always be.

~ WGN