How are we as Christians to interpret Matthew 22:23:32 In heaven there will be no marriage

Faith & Science Conversation
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you failed to read the 3 translations that I just gave you where that in fact is exactly the case…Latin vulgate, KJV and NIV! These are all translated into English and clearly make the claim pain came after sin.

The point is, none of the bible translations that I referenced even in the attached link in my previous post ignore the “sharp increase” in childbirth pain. Clearly, this “sharp increase” is a significant statement. One cannot simply state…oh but it hurts anyway. That would be a gross understatement and misleading.

As I said earlier, even if Genesis is read as an allegory, this is a very straightforward statement. The reality is one either accepts what is written or simply throw out your Bible and take up some other world view. The bible talks extensively about the “pains of child birth” even in spiritual terms when it refers to things other than literal childbirth. These pains are usually connected with sin.

Romans 8:22
20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time. 23 Not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he can already see? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet see, we wait for it patiently.

26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know how we ought to pray, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.

Jeremiah 12:4
How long will the land mourn and the grass of every field be withered? Because of the evil of its residents, the animals and birds have been swept away, for the people have said, “He cannot see what our end will be.”

Theologically, there is no getting around this.

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would you mind providing biblical references for this?
I suggest that because when Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room, he had already “ascended to his father” and returned. Looking directly at Thomas in John 20:24 he said, "“Put your finger here and look at My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Stop doubting and believe.”

then when Christ ascended to heaven " suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. Acts1: 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven.”

“this same Jesus” is a pretty straightforward statement…if I said to you this same man who drove away from you in a car was returning again to pick you up again, I’m sure that is exactly what you would interpret it to mean. A physical man with the same appearance, the same features would come and get you…most likely in a car!

The disciples clearly believed that their scar bearing physical saviour would descend down from the clouds to get them. The Bible talks quite extensively about “the son of man” and its pretty obvious the figure being referred to is the physical Jesus.

BTW I should mention at this point that one of the interesting facts about the incarnation is the belief that when the Lord took on the form of humanity, it was permanent! He will always bear those scars and be human.
Some might say, how is this possible if he lives forever…well that’s not really a problem as Adam and Eve were originally created to live forever, so humanity is not the restriction here…ageing is a consequence of sin not humanity.

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1 Corinthians 15:35 But some one will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36 You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. 39 For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. 50 I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

The resurrected body is physical as in bodily but spiritual not physical/natural (i.e. it is not according to the laws of nature). It is not of the stuff of the earth or operating according to the perishable laws of nature/matter (which includes the chemical and biological nature of our physical bodies). But as Jesus demonstrated is more powerful/capable (as God who is spirit is more powerful) rather than less so. This is no ghost. But it doesn’t belong to the earth and so Jesus did not remain on the earth but left it to be with the Father.

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Beating the dead horse a bit more…

Cards on the table: I don’t read Latin. And in this case I have no need for it, because there’s no need to deal with a translation of a translation. Let’s look again at these:

ESV:

“I will surely multiply

Which NIV? Mine (1973, 1978, 1984) says:

“I will greatly increase”

image

“Increase” and “multiply” imply > 0 to begin with.

Not sure which NIV you’re using. But it would be interesting if the NIV didn’t agree with the NIV. How to deal with that? It’s hard to maintain an absolutely literalist view of Scripture, when all popular, widely used translations themselves don’t word-for-word parrot each other. And what to do with the Hebrew itself?
We need to walk carefully and wisely.

As far as the “pains of child birth” go, you’re right. It’s all over the Bible. Interesting that the entrance of the Kingdom of God is seen as a birthing process. There is a depth of richness in that comparison, which includes anticipation, contractions, life, struggle, and the like. Interesting that it’s not compared to other painful things like wounds in battle. This is pain that leads to something new the way a birth does. Can’t get away from that either.

It’s a good example of the depth that poetic language can provide without necessarily being understood literally. I certainly hope no woman is tasked with literally giving birth to the Kingdom of God or our adoption as children of God!

And how fascinating that Romans 8 ties these birth pangs with adoption as well as natural birth. I’d never put that together before. Thanks for helping me see that connection. Such a depth of poetic language that shows so much more than a literal reading, which in this case, really wouldn’t make sense.

I also wanted to highlight a few questions from earlier that haven’t been answered. This one from @Christy

And this one from me:

And further to your most recent reply to me:

The reality is that the Bible is a complex library of materials, reflecting a number of world views and ancient time-periods as well as genres and purposes. I am familiar with your views from around the Forum, and I strongly disagree that a non-literalist view means I have no real use for the Bible or am aligned with a non-christian (that’s what you’re implying, isn’t it?) world view. The claim is unsupportable around here. You are surrounded by Christians who are working hard to make the best sense of the Bible while maintaining a faithful understanding of the world around them as well as what is now understood about the texts themselves. We nearly all come from different backgrounds and experiences, so we bring different things to this table. But most of the people coming to the table are followers of Jesus, that is, Christians.

All of this to come back around to:
Assuming Genesis is a literal description of the beginning of life, pain has always been associated with childbirth, although no woman experienced it pre-sin, so there’s no way to understand how to compare the situations.
Pregnancy and childbirth are an enormous burden for women.
The verses in the Bible that could be taken to describe procreation in eternity are not straight-forward enough to base doctrines on and are likely poetic.
God promises rest for his people; women are part of the people of God; there is nothing restful about pregnancy and childbirth ∴ women will not be required to bear children in God’s rest.

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There is no procreation or any impulse or instinct toward it at all in the transcendent, except by resurrection. All developmental failure post-procreation, dependent on it, all nurturing failure, all attachment issues, all relational-socialization failures, all inevitably disordered passions, will be healed. We will be new creations in every way psychologically. No longer pre-wired faultily, biasedly, by evolution for merely natural experience. For Love is competent.

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What a fascinating question. I’ve been rolling it around in my head since I first saw it. I think part of the answer is already avaliable, and we see it with more than just music.
Evolutionary stategies to survive, particularly long enough to procreate, don’t just end with the impulse or ability. Although they no longer serve the original purpose, they have become enculturated. While humans create culture, culture affects and alters us as well. There is a constant interplay and flux between humans and cultures, but they are inseperable.
Survival and procreation don’t need upper tiers of Maslow’s heirarchy. Our ancient ancestor’s were not real concerned about “self actualization”. But we’ve run with that. We “waste” all manner of resources on culturally-valued things that have exceeded their evolutionary usefulness, even society building. Craft, ie “Low art”: was really good enough, but we couldn’t leave it alone. No longer is art useful, but must exist unto itself. And humans can’t stop making it, spending fortunes to house it, and spending money and time simply to be with it.
Even craft couldn’t remain “low.” We have Orenberg lace (along with Shetland, Icelandic, Estonian, German……) knitted from exquisite fine goat’s hair and silk with beautiful (time-consuming) stitches in a brilliantly-engineered, complex SQUARE (plus all the other culturally magificnent ways to create triangles and squares and circles that far exceed the need to keep warm or attract a mate), preferred by menopausal women.
Science for the sake of better safety, health, etc. were good enough (gee! Even good, reliable placebos have gotten the species through in a lot of cases!), but no. We couldn’t stop our selves with meeting needs. Curiosity drives the species in every direction of exploration and inquiry.
We have gone off the rails.

We will be able to appreciate music, because we have learned to already, in ways that have nothing to do with evolutionary purposes. If we have anything left of our Selves in the resurrection, this will be part of them.

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God is Spirit defined by consciousness. We are spiritual conscious beings created by God for companionship. Our lives here on earth are for the purpose of developing personalities and character. It is as though God created this universe as a kind of greenhouse for the growing and nurturing of souls. We are flawed by the legacy of evolution which may have been the only way we could have created but left us with the legacy of animal survival. When the Apostle Paul writes that he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t do what he knows he should do and does what he knows he shouldn’t do, he is expressing this dilemma.

I believe that in Heaven we will be part of a collective spiritual consciousness without physical bodies. Therefore, the creation will be complete and there will be no need for procreation.

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I don’t really agree with this view of humanity because it’s overly dualistic and privilieges the soul over the body. I think it gets detrimental to see our physicality as inherently flawed. God himself entered physical creation and became embodied at the Incarnation and the resurrected Jesus who sits at the right hand of God is an embodied human being.

This is in direct opposition to what 1 Corinthians 15 teaches.

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Humans and animals are both said to be living souls “nepesh” filled with the breath/spirit “ruah” of God.

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I respectfully disagree with your interpretation of Corinthians 15. Verse 50 states, " What I mean, my brothers, is this: flesh and blood can never possess the Kingdom of God, and the perishable cannot possess immortality." (TNEB) My entire point in the post was to point out that the consciousness that God has been bestowed on us, is the only imperishable aspect of our existence.

tneb

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Yes, the imperishable spiritual BODIES won’t be flesh and blood as we know now, but it’s clear we don’t spend eternity as disembodied souls.

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The physical body is perishable because it is not what it is by its own nature but because of the arrangement and interaction of its composite parts: elementary particles interacting to make up atoms, atoms interacting to make up molecules, molecules interacting to make up cells, cells interacting to make up organs, organs interacting to make up the physical body. All these particles behave according to mathematical space-time laws having nothing to with us but with physical forces which can easily disrupt all those relationship to tear us apart. To me it seems like the pixel makeup of npc characters in a game – all operating according to a computer program. I don’t see how can this be the real us.

So I believe in a spiritual reality where things are what they are by their own nature and not because of some happenstance behavior of composite pixel/particles. But the artificial character of this physical reality gives us a chance to make something real in the character/nature we make for ourselves by choosing what to do with all the happenstance we are given. So I believe what we choose and create is what we really are. And therein lies all the warnings of religion to be careful what we choose and do. For the one thing we will never escape is ourselves – that which we have chosen to become. And so I do not believe in this notion of some that we are windup toys of some divine toymaker only doing what he made us to do.

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OK, I will try just one more time to address this topic. Do you expect God to be embodied? Embodiment is limiting and God is unlimited. God has brought the universe into existence through thoughts which is another way of saying through consciousness. God brought us into existence through the embodiment of self -aware consciousness which developed slowly through the process of evolution. In the fulness of time, God sent Jesus into the world to reveal the true nature of God and provide a pathway to Salvation.

Upon death our spirit, consciousness, leaves our bodies and reunites with the unlimited consciousness of God. This collective consciousness is the final Kingdom of God in Heaven. This does not mean that we will not recognize loved ones or share thoughts and love with them, but we will be witnesses and participants in God’s work throughout this universe and perhaps untold numbers of other universes. Of course, this is highly speculative, but it gives me comfort.

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His consciousness is not ours, although ours is in His.

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So evolution is taken into account as grounding our species having acquired the capacity for self aware consciousness and yet that same self aware consciousness is thought to persist without a body after death. If that is so where and how would that immortal self awareness have resided before it’s becoming embodied at birth? Or else how can birth create that which requires no body beyond death?

I find it more puzzling than comforting but different strokes for different folks I suppose.

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God is a Trinity and I expect the Son to be embodied.

Where do you get this? The Bible said the world was brought into existence through his word. Granted that might be metaphorical and anthropomorphic, but nowhere does the Bible say the world was thought into existence.

That’s all fine and you are of course entitled to your speculations, but some of us prefer to begin our speculations with what the Bible says, not just what we imagine.

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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is a reference to Jesus in the first sentence of the Gospel of John. It also reveals something about the nature of God. The Greek “word” for word is logos, and by extension, refers to language. Since language is the outer manifestation of inner consciousness, this opening sentence could be interpreted as a declaration that Jesus is the embodiment of God’s consciousness. This also implies that God is unembodied, unlimited, consciousness.

Part of the difficulty of comprehending the power of consciousness is that it is one of the most profound mysteries of science. The idea that reality is dependent on conscious observation has found increasing support among physicists as more and more evidence is found in quantum research that the building blocks of nature are only probabilities until they are measured by a self-aware conscious observer. Therefore, it is not so farfetched to conclude that the universe resides in the consciousness of God. After all, God did bring it into existence.

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The Trinity was happy in itself, an incomprehensible union. We were created by God to increase his joy as an adoptive Father, and Jesus’ joy as well.
 

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The other thing that often gets left out of these conversations is the word that the NIV translates as “childbearing” is actually the word to conceive (as shown in your screenshot). Now, conception is not usually painful! So what is this talking about?

I think it’s talking about the impact of sin on our relationships with our children. Certainly in my own relationship with my own daughter, the greatest pain I’ve experienced wasn’t the physical pain of childbirth, but the pain of sinning against my daughter. (And we have a good, loving, happy relationship!) But my own sin is where my deepest regrets and griefs are.

(Which isn’t to minimise physical suffering, of course – I just don’t think that that is what the verse is talking about.)

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Interesting observation.
However, conception is a long way away from the relationship that comes first through child-bearing. I don’t see a way that your interpretation gets closer to the text, in spite of the devastating impact sin has on relationships.

You might want to check on scholarship on the decisions to translate the Hebrew word into “child bearing” in so many English versions. Do translators know less now than St. Jerome or the 17th century translators?