Meditations in Matthew Twenty-two: Marriage in the New Age

We reject Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” He claimed Moses and other great thinkers “set at naught books and traditions” by speaking “what they thought.”¹ Emerson said they gave no heed to consistency. 

This is a falsehood. Moses spoke what God revealed to him. He said, “I stood between the LORD and you at that time, to shew you the word of the LORD” (Deut 5:5; emphasis added). God’s word is consistent and never-changing. “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven” (Psa 119:89).

We should prize, not spurn, consistency as we interpret the word of God. The harmony God embedded in Scripture is not a bogeyman.

Our prophetic model (inmillennialism) seeks to show the consistency of God’s word. Jesus’s response to the Sadducees’ no-resurrection argument (Matt 22:23–33) tests its ability to do so.

Our last post (here) showed one element of Jesus’s answer (Matt 22:37–38). The Sadducees denied postmortem existence and, therefore, bodily resurrection. Jesus pointed out that Moses’s writings prove life beyond the grave. In them, God referred to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as living beings. So, the Sadducees’ first premise was wrong. Inmillennialism has no problem with this observation.

Our difficulty arises from another argument Jesus used. The Sadducees assumed that resurrected bodies would be like those people have before death. If so, the situation they proposed—a woman with seven successive husbands (Matt 22:29–33)—would present an insoluble problem in the resurrection. Whose wife would she be?

The accounts in Matthew and Mark present no problems for inmillennialism. Jesus said, “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matt 22:30).² In Mark, Jesus says, “Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God? For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven” (Mark 12:24–25). Inmillennialism affirms the bodily resurrection, so it is consistent with these accounts. 

Luke’s account contains terms that can raise doubts about our perspective.

And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” (Luke 20:34–38 ESV)

Inmillennialism “retains the two-age model of the Old Testament.”³ For Jesus and the apostles, this age referred to the Mosaic age and that age to the messianic age. Do Jesus’s words create a problem for our model?

Many commentators would say they do. They assume this age means the messianic age and that age is the eternal state. They shift both ages forward compared to the inmillennial model. Robert H. Stein is an example. Speaking of this age, he says, “This expression means human beings in their present earthly life.”⁴

 This shift would not cause a problem if the contrast between the two ages was isolated to this passage. This is far from the case. “The terminology of the two ages is the key concept for understanding biblical eschatology. A proper understanding of how this age and the age to come fit together renders biblical eschatology both understandable and coherent.”⁵ We must get the two ages right to show the consistency of Biblical prophecy.

Geerhardus Vos provides the following examples of passages containing the two-age distinction: Matt 12:32; 13:22; Luke 16:8; 18:30; 20:35; Rom 12:2; 1 Cor 1:20; 2:6, 8; 3:18; 2 Cor 4:4; Gal 1:4; Eph 1:21; 2:2, 7; 6:12;  1 Tim 6:17; 2 Tim 4:10; Titus 2:12; Heb 6:5.⁶

 Some of these speak of the next age as “the age that is about to come” (Heb 6:5).⁷ This is because Jesus tied the end of the Mosaic age and the full start of the messianic age to the Temple’s fall (Matt 24:1–3, 34). 

This is a fundamental element in our prophetic model. How can we remain consistent with our definitions of this (Mosaic) age and that (messianic) age in Luke 20:34–38?

We do so by comparing Jesus’s statement about marriage to those he made about death. Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26; emphasis added).

Jesus made an absolute statement about believers—they will never die. But this did not exclude physical death during the messianic age. God would transform death for believers in the coming (messianic) age. When believers would die, they would go to be with the Lord (2 Cor 5:8). They would live with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God (Luke 13:28) and reign with Christ (Rev 20:4–6). They would experience physical death but not spiritual death.

The second stage of this promise would begin at the end of the messianic age. God would defeat physical death in the bodily resurrection of believers (e.g., 1 Cor 15:24–26). From that point forward, believers would not die physically.

Marriage underwent a similar transformation in the age transition. In the old age, marriage determined covenant participation and status. One must be able to trace his genealogy to Abraham to preserve his covenant status. This was the point of the levirate law the Sadducees cited (Matt 22:24; cp. Deut 25:5–10). The right to the priesthood presents another example (Ezra 2:62). In the new age, genealogies would be useless for such purposes, even dangerous (1 Tim 1:4; Titus 3:9). 

Marriage to ensure covenant status no longer exists in the messianic age. This does not mean marriage has ceased altogether. But, just as with death, a fundamental change has occurred. And, like death, another change is coming. After the resurrection at the end of the messianic age, marriage will no longer occur in any sense. This is the ultimate outcome of the messianic age.

The following table summarizes our reasoning:

Conclusion

Here is our amplification of Jesus words:

The sons of this [Mosaic] age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that [messianic] age and to the resurrection from the dead [at its conclusion] neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore [spiritually in the messianic age and physically after the resurrection], because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. (Luke 20:34–36 ESV)

This interpretation preserves a consistency found in many New Testament passages. This age is the Mosaic age, and that age is the messianic age.

We do not deny having Emerson’s “little mind.” But this consistency is not the hobgoblin of it.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essay on Self-Reliance (East Aurora, NY: The Roycrofters, 1908), 23, 9.
2. The work of art showing a Jewish bride in the above image (here) and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
3. Here, for example.
4. Robert H. Stein, Luke, vol. 24 of The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 502.
5. Jonathan Menn, Biblical Eschatology (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2013), 39. Emphasis added.
6. Geerhardus Vos, “Eschatology of the New Testament,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, ed. James Orr (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1956), 2:980.
7. Kenneth S. Wuest, Expanded Translation of the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), Heb 6:1–8.