Marrying & Giving in Marriage

For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.

Matthew 24:38 & 39

The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.

Luke 20:34-36

As a believer in Fulfilled Eschatology, you most likely have come in contact with someone who asks, if the resurrection is in the past, then why do we still have people marrying and being given in marriage?' Some might even go so far as to say that since we are 'sons of the resurrection', all bets are off; there is no need to be married any longer, there is no longer anything such as sin or fornication, since there is no marriage anymore! Those who propose the former, though most wouldn't touch the latter with a ten foot pole, have missed the Story!

Besides the fact that they cannot connect the 'world' of Noah's Day & its ultimate judgment with the 'world' of Jesus' Day & its ultimate ( and final ) judgement, those who would say that the resurrection cannot have occurred yet seem to have needlessly & carelessly attached a biological & individualistic meaning to the words of Jesus. When the God of Israel charged His covenant people with adultery & issued a warrant of divorce, it was not because the Body of Moses had committed the physical act of adultery with the surrounding nations & their gods, though, no doubt many of them, individually were guilty of this crime; it was because they had forsaken their covenant with Him & had prostrated themselves before these false gods!

The Scriptural concept of marriage has a physical & individual aspect to it, no doubt; in the Institution of this Sacrament, Yahweh, our Heavenly Father, brought Eve to Adam & they became 'one flesh' ( Genesis 2:24 ), Isaac 'took Rebekah and she became his wife' ( Genesis 24:67 ) & so on, but more importantly, as the apostle Paul wrote to the Church in Ephesus, marriage is a picture of 'Christ and the church' ( Ephesians 5:32 ). The ( human ) Institution is itself simply a picture of the Marriage of Heaven & Earth!

Eschatologically speaking, this Marriage has occurred! This is why Jesus said that the 'sons of the resurrection' 'neither marry nor are given in marriage', because they are already married! Individually, of course, men & women still marry as a picture of this Greater Spiritual Truth, but corporately, as the Body of Christ, we have been married to the One who came from Heaven to take up residence in our midst! For us, there is no more 'marrying and giving in marriage', for we, the Body of Christ, have been married since the 1st century!

Charles Haddon Shank