From FSAOF blog (fsaof.blogspot.com
Will there be Family Reunions in Heaven?
These questions were asked by the Sadducees. They asked if a woman had been married to seven different men, whose wife would she be in the next life. Jesus’ response was: “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” The passage ends with an even more baffling statement: “God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living?” What does that mean? Perhaps the whole thing is a non-answer to the question. Or if it is an answer, it suggests that the afterlife is very different from the relationships we have in this life.
Paul says about resurrection that there are two kinds of bodies, “a physical and a spiritual body". One is like a seed the other like a full grown plant. Think how different the two are from each other. In Romans he assures us that we die into God. He writes “we do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” So, if there is an afterlife, what will it be like?
John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest and physicist thinks he knows. In his book the Faith of a Physicist, he writes: “the physical resurrection is a perfectly coherent hope, in which our souls function along the lines of DNA, carrying the unique pattern of each one inside our bodies, and when we die is used by God to create new bodies, in any future world of God’s choosing.”
What do you think? I
must confess I don’t have a clue. But I am confident that the One
who raised me up in life will raise me up in death. We die into
God. What more that means, I do not know, but that is all I need to know.
Dr.
John Sullivan
Former
Officer Canada
Ordained
Minister at The United Church of Canada
Studied Homiletics and Liturgics at Claremont School of Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary and University of TorontoClaremont School of TheologyPrinceton Theological Seminary and University of Toronto
Salvation Army Traing College, Toronto
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