After the worship service yesterday I found myself engrossed in a conversation about whether or not there would be sex in eternity. Sex is such a beautiful and wonderful gift from God that it is hard to imagine eternal life without it. Yet from Scripture it seems that sex is one of those areas of our lives where there is a discontinuity between this life and the next.
In answering the Sadducees question about marriage at the resurrection in Matthew 22 Jesus says, “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” Prior to the resurrection of our bodies we exist as spiritual beings in heaven without the physical capacity for sexual relations, but at the resurrection are bodies will be raised in power and glory (I Cor. 15:43). And if Jesus’ resurrection is a template for ours there is no reason to suspect that we will lose our “maleness” or “femaleness” at the resurrection. Jesus’ point in Matthew 22 is not necessarily that angels are unable to have sex (there are different opinions about that), but that they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. And sex outside of marriage is sin. If it seems ridiculous to think that we will retain our sexual identity at the resurrection yet never have sex we need only to think of the example of Jesus. Jesus retained his “maleness” when he was raised on the third day, yet he is not having sex! It would seem that marriage in this life and the sex that goes along with it are provisional and temporary giving way to something far greater at the resurrection when we are (body and soul) with Christ for all eternity in the New Creation.
C. S. Lewis says the following on this subject: “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 alternatives either of bodies which are hardly recognizable 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 ate 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 which excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it. Hence where fullness awaits us we anticipate fasting. In denying that sexual life, as we now understand it, makes any part of the final beatitude, it is not of course necessary to suppose that the distinction of sexes will disappear. What is no longer needed for biological purposes may be expected to survive for splendor. Sexuality is the instrument both of virginity and of conjugal virtue; neither men nor women will be asked to throw away the weapon they have used victoriously. It is the beaten and the fugitives who throw away their swords. The conquerors sheathe theirs and retain them. “Trans-sexual” would be a better word than “sexless” for the heavenly life.” (Lewis, Miracles, chapter 16.)
