The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home

by Russell D. Moore

We should expect persecution in this age, but we should also expect to find within the community of the cross a “hundredfold” the family we may have left behind. That’s in this present age. We have even more waiting for us in the life that is to come. Jesus’ saying that in the resurrection there would be no marrying or giving in marriage but that we would be “like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25) can yield a great deal of confusion. In fact, it can cause us to squirm, if we are honest. We want to go to heaven, but we see it as an uprooting of what really matters to us—friendships, family, relationships. That was what Jesus was undoing in his controversy with the Sadducees, in which he made the “no marriage in heaven” comment. These religious leaders, who did not believe in bodily resurrection, sought to trap him with a ridiculous scenario of a woman who married one brother after another, each dying. Will she be the wife of seven husbands in the new creation, they asked? They presupposed a view of the future that is not resurrection life but a kind of zombie existence—an extension of this age’s priorities and callings into eternity. The calling of marrying and populating the earth will be over, because Jesus will have presented to his Father the full number of his human children. The universe will be alive with human life and human rule. Our impoverished view of the supernatural leads us to conclude that “angelic” existence means a lonely, passionless, static boredom. The ang...