Hi, Nathan W Bingham here. If you were with us last month for our national conference in Orlando, you had the opportunity to see the official announcement of Ligonier Ministries' new children's curriculum, Growing in God's Word. Over the course of a year, this new curriculum helps churches, families, and schools guide K through 5th grade children through an overview of the Bible. This 52-lesson curriculum is designed to help you nurture children in the Christian faith, that they may discover their place in God's story of salvation in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Each lesson reinforces the truths of Reformed theology and the Bible's unifying covenantal framework.
You can explore this curriculum, join the waitlist, and request preview samples at growinginggodsword.org. Please pray for the upcoming release of Growing in God's Word. and that the next generation would be helped to be faithful to Christ.
Now onto today's episode of Renewing Your Mind. We have many questions about heaven. Will I know my parents?
Will I know my wife? Will we be recognizable? How old will we be in heaven? Will our bodies be old and stooped? Or if we died when we were 90, will we stay aged forever?
And what about children? I mean, all these questions assault us as we try to comprehend and conceive what heaven will be like. There's no shortage of questions when it comes to the topic of heaven, and although some of those questions can be answered clearly from Scripture, other answers are mere speculation. So we need to handle the topic carefully while at the same time looking forward to that moment when we will see God face to face.
One thing is certain, it won't disappoint. I'm Nathan W. Bingham and this is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. This week we have spent a couple of days considering the very serious topic of hell, a topic that many shy away from.
Well, for the next two days R.C. Sproul will explore a much more enjoyable subject, heaven, and until tomorrow you can study both of these topics in greater detail when you request access to the entirety of both teaching series along with two books from Dr. Sproul by giving a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. We hope these resources help you to treasure what is to come for the believer and help you as you warn the unbeliever to flee to Christ. Here's Dr. Sproul on heaven and our future resurrection. On one occasion as a seminary student, I went up to my professor after class and said to him, Professor, tell me what heaven is like. And really it was a kind of naive question because we're told that this is a situation where we don't have any information from pilgrims who have gone to that foreign country and have come back from it and given us a detailed description of what they found.
This was one of the fascinating things of the early days of exploration in Western society when the people who would go out in their sailing vessels and do exploration and discover new countries and come back and give glowing reports of what life was like in the new world and so on. But remember again, Shakespeare refers to that faraway land of the place in whose born no traveler has returned. And in Hamlet, soliloquy, we recall his ambivalence between life and death, to be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or by opposing end them. What was he contemplating? He was contemplating suicide. He says to die, to sleep, perchance to dream.
He contemplated the positive side of restfulness. But then he spoke of that unknown, mysterious dimension of what's over there and the possibility that when we die we go to something worse. And indeed that would be the case for those who fall into the jaws of divine judgment with their deaths.
And he said, conscience does make cowards of us all and make us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of. See, we may fear the grave because of a guilty conscience, because we don't know that where we're headed is a place of bliss or a place of final punishment. But again, the problem is we don't know precisely what things are like in heaven. And I have people ask me all the time, will I know my parents?
Will I know my wife? Will we be recognizable? How old will we be in heaven? Will our bodies be old and stooped? Or if we died when we were ninety, will we stay aged forever? And what about children? I mean, all these questions assault us as we try to comprehend and conceive what heaven will be like.
And I have to say to people when they ask me, I don't know the answer to that question. Well, they'll say, well, what did Jesus mean when He said, when people ask the question, well, the man's had five wives or so in this world, and they predeceased him, and he dies and goes to heaven, which one of those women will be his wife? And Jesus responded by saying that in heaven there's no marriage or giving in marriage, but we are like the angels. Boy, has that statement from Jesus provoked all kinds of speculation. I've read books that say that when we're in heaven, we're going to be sexless because angels are sexless.
Well, the Bible doesn't say that angels are sexless, and it certainly doesn't say that we will lose our gender when we go to heaven. It doesn't say that. Jesus simply says there'll be no marrying and giving in marriage. What does He mean? That comes as a disappointment to certain people who would like to stay married to their husband or their wife forever. Does Jesus mean that death ends the intimacy that is enjoyed by a husband and a wife, that that relationship is now abolished? I don't know. What does He say? He says there's no marrying or giving in marriage.
Let me just comment on that. That phrase, marrying and giving in marriage, is used one other time in the Bible with respect to the biblical description of the expansion of wickedness that reached at zenith in the days of Noah, where people were doing what was right in their own eyes and were filling the world with violence. And the idea is that the coming of Christ at the end times will be like it was in the days of Noah when people were marrying and giving in marriage.
Now, that could be understood two ways at least. One is that it may refer to the suddenness of the appearance of divine judgment, where people are going about the normal activities that characterize life as we know it, marrying and giving in marriage. And that all Jesus means to say is that in the final analysis, the suddenness of His appearance will be like that. There's another theory that I can't confirm to you or prove to you, but one that I find fascinating and interesting, and that is the theory that the phrase marrying and giving in marriage was a Jewish idiomatic expression for a low view of the sanctity of marriage in a degenerate culture where there was no sense of permanency to marriage, that it was a situation in which people were getting married with great facility, then quickly divorcing, then marrying again, and then giving up on that marriage and marrying again, you know, three, four, five times.
And that that was characteristic of the decadence of the age of Noah, which provoked God to bring the flood. And it could be that what Jesus is saying here when they ask the question, well, when this guy gets to heaven, who will his wife be? And Jesus said, that's not going to be a problem in heaven because we're not going to have this cycle, this facile pace of marrying and giving in marriage. Maybe that's what He meant.
I don't know. Another possibility is that He's saying that in heaven there's no longer going to be marriage as we know it. And we say, well, does that mean that the joy that accompanies the relationship of intimacy that God has given us in this world is over? Here's a thought, pure speculation.
This is vintage Sproul. This has no foundation whatsoever in anything that's said specifically in Scripture. What if this? What if in heaven you were so sanctified that you could enjoy an in-depth, intimate, personal relationship with every other inhabitant of heaven that exceeds in intimacy and in joy the most joyous, personal, intimate relationship you have now? And I think there's sound reason to believe that that possibility certainly will be for us there in heaven and that I'll be able to relate as closely, as openly, and as warmly to a thousand women in heaven as I do to my wife now.
In fact, I'll have a deeper personal relationship with people that I don't even know now than any relationship I enjoy in this world once sin has been removed, because when we are glorified as human beings, all of the barriers to deep personal relationship and communication that are put there because of sin will be gone. And maybe that's the secret Jesus is hinting at when He says there'll be no marriage or giving in marriage in heaven. Now, again, we muse on these matters and ask all kinds of questions.
We're not the first to ask them. Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Corinthians spent a good deal of time talking about the whole concept of heaven as it related to the resurrection of Christ. We remember the great fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians where Paul gives this marvelous defense of the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus and demonstrates in that section that the resurrection of Christ is central to Christianity and essential to Christian faith.
I realize that there are theologies round and about today who want to demythologize the New Testament and retain a kind of Christianity without embracing the resurrection. I had a roommate in college who went into the ministry, and I remember the day of his ordination exams. He was going to go before the presbytery to be examined on his doctrine.
I wasn't going to be examined that year because I was going to graduate school. And my friend looked at me before he went before the presbytery and said in a spirit of panic, should I go with the resurrection of Christ or not? And I said, what do you mean? He says, well, should I tell the presbytery I believe that Christ was raised from the dead or not? I said, well, what do you believe? He said, I don't think he was.
And I said, well, you're morally bound to say that. If you don't believe in the resurrection of Christ, you can't conceal that from the examining board of the presbytery. Well, he did conceal it. And he was ordained, and the irony was a few years later I had to come before the same presbytery and be in front of 200 clergy to be examined, and the examiner was my friend. And he had to ask me those questions and look me in the eye when he asked me, did I believe in the resurrection? And he was afraid.
I was going to say, yes, I do, but do you? But I wasn't to put him on trial there. But in any case, this was a major issue in the Corinthian church, and Paul gives this marvelous defense of the resurrection, this logical progression when he says if there is no resurrection, then there are all kinds of things that would follow from it. But after he gives that defense of the truth of Christ's resurrection, he then answers another question in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians beginning in verse 35. But someone will say, how are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come? I mean, someone will ask that question.
Who hasn't asked that question? How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come? Again, let me remind you before I continue with Paul's exposition here that one of the most important lines found in the Apostle's Creed is the statement, I believe in the resurrection of the body, resurrectionis carnus.
It's the original language. I believe in the resurrection of the body. And keep in mind that that affirmation of the Apostle's Creed is not a statement about Christ's resurrection. To be sure, the Apostles believe in the resurrection of Christ, but that refers not to the resurrection of Christ's body. It refers to our confidence that we will participate in the bodily resurrection of Christ. We're saying that we believe that our bodies will be raised from death and will be perfected and will be reunited with our souls. That's what it means to say, I believe in the resurrection of the body. Well, so now Paul is raising the question, how are the dead raised, and with what body do they come? If you believe in the resurrection of the body, what are you talking about? Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies.
Here he borrows a statement almost verbatim from Plato and Socrates, an analogy drawn from nature, that you take a seed and you plant it in the ground. And then what do you do with it? You pour water all over it. You pour water all over it, and you keep watering it and exposing it to the sunlight.
Why do you do that? Well, because you're trying to see the germination of life, right? You want that seed to produce a flower or a vegetable or grass. You want new life to come forth, and so you water it. Why? So that the water will impart life to the seed?
No. What does the water do? It kills the seed. It makes it rot, because the seed has to rot and die, as it were, before the germination takes place. Just like the metamorphosis that is involved in the transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly.
The one has to leave and be changed into the other. And that's what Paul is saying. What you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be. It isn't like if we want grass that we run out in the yard and throw grass in the dirt. We throw grass seed in the dirt. If you want flowers, you don't take the bloom from the flower and throw it in the ground and water it. You have to take seeds from the flower and put it in the ground and water it. He said, but this is mere grain, perhaps wheat or some other grain.
But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to eat seed its own body. When I was a kid, my mother made me plant a garden and sent away for these little packages of seeds. And we had flowers, and we had vegetables in the garden. And she showed me tediously how we had to do these things in a straight row and to space the planting so that there would be room for the mature plant to spread and so on. And after I got all of the seeds planted in the order that she told me to plant them, then I had to take the packages that the seeds came in and use popsicle sticks and sort of make a sign out of the seed package and stick that sign in the ground where I had put the seeds.
Why was that? So that I would know what kind of seed I planted where before the plant emerged. And so the best thing I was at gardening was to grow not so much flowers but seed packages on sticks.
That's about the extent of my green thumb. But Paul is pointing out something elementary and basic to life, that there's all kinds of different bodies in the world, all kinds of different living things, all kinds of different grains, different flowers, different vegetables, and they come from different seeds. And different seeds produce different kinds of bodies. All flesh, he says in verse 39, is not the same flesh. There's one kind of flesh of men, another kind of flesh of animals, another of fish, another of birds. What else is there about bodies? There are celestial bodies, terrestrial bodies, earthly bodies, heavenly bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one kind, the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, another glory of the star, for one star differs from another star in glory.
So is the resurrection of the dead. Paul saying, open your eyes to the wide diversity of reality that you experience, all different size, shapes, forms, and structures of existing entities in the universe, stars and moons and trees and mountains and grass and waterfalls. And if you just look at the animal kingdom, you'll see this myriad diversity of kinds of life. Do you think that in our experience we've seen every conceivable kind of life that there is and every conceivable kind of body there is?
In our fantasies and sci-fi movies, the creative imagination of the screenwriters produce all kinds of R2-D2s and Yodas and aliens and ETs that conceive of different kinds of life and different kinds of bodies. And Paul is saying there is a kind of body that no one has seen yet, save that what was manifested by the resurrected Christ, who came out of the tomb with the same body that He took into the tomb, but with a body that had continuity with the one that was buried, but also discontinuity because it had been changed. It was now a glorified body. And what Paul is saying here is that there's a whole new dimension of life and of body life and of bodily existence for which we are being prepared. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption. It is raised in incorruption.
Now here it's not just talking about sin, but it's talking about perishability. The body that I have now is getting old. It's getting weak. It's decaying. It's undergoing a kind of loss of strength and vitality.
It's corrupting. I long for a new body, but the next body we'll have is incorruptible. It will be invincible. It won't age. It won't decay. It won't wear out. It won't rot. It won't break.
It won't get sick. It is sown in dishonor. It's raised in glory, sown in weakness, raised in power, sown in natural body, raised as spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body, and so it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. And as was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust, and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are heavenly. And he concludes with this. Think of it. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man. We will have a body like the body of Christ. If asked the question, when we get to heaven, we'll be able to recognize people who are there.
Certainly, their outward appearances will have changed, and we're accustomed to recognizing people strictly on the basis of outward appearances, and that whole idea of cognition, of being able to identify certain traits of people is an incredibly strange thing. I've rejuvenated an interest in oil painting. I like to play around with oil paints. I'm a rookie.
I'm a novice at it. But I undertook a project recently to paint a portrait of Luther, and I had to do it in stages where in the first stage is a very rough outline where you just try to get the proportion of the head right and get the ear lined up with the nose and so on, and before you work it down to the detail dimension. And I had spent this one night working on the Esau and just roughing in the basic proportions of the portrait of Luther. And when I was finished and cleaned up my paints and walked away, I stood back and I looked at the painting from about 30 feet away, and I said to my wife, I said, Vesta, look at that.
She said, what? I said, you know, if I just came in here and somebody else was painting that portrait, and I saw it from here in its raw and unfinished state, I would instantly know that that was a portrait of Martin Luther. Now, that's not a testimony to my artistic ability. What I'm saying was there was something already there on the canvas, even though it was so incomplete and so unlike an exact replica of the face of Martin Luther, there was something I could recognize in that and say, that's Luther. Now, Jesus' body was different when He came out of the tomb.
It was so different that people did not immediately recognize Him. But there were times with the second glance, they could see that it was Jesus. Your departed friends and relatives, when you see them in heaven, will appear different from how they appear now. But what I'm going to say to you is this, when you see them, you will know them, and they will know you.
So don't worry about that at all. For the believer and the believing family, death is not the end. We will see each other and know each other in eternity.
You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul from his five-part series on heaven. How much time have you spent studying the topic of heaven?
We might think about it, talk about it even, but to ensure we're thinking and believing rightly, we need to turn to the Scriptures to see what it says about it. You can study heaven in greater detail when you request access to the five messages and the study guide, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 8 100 435 4343. When you do, we'll also unlock Dr. Sproul's series on hell and send you two of his books, What Comes After This Life and Saved From What. Simply show your support of Renewing Your Mind and the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries by giving a donation at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. And we'll send you two books and unlock two teaching series in the free Ligonier app. And if you'd prefer ebook editions of those books, or you live outside of the US or Canada, a digital-only version of this week's offer is available when you donate at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you for listening each day and for making Renewing Your Mind possible through your regular generosity. Tomorrow, R.C. Sproul will explore more of what we know about heaven turning to the Book of Revelation. You won't want to miss Thursday's episode here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.
