There will be no marriage in heaven - bereaved relative very upset.

[hopeforhappiness]

I have a relative who is grieving painfully and rather angrily after the loss of his wife in January. I believe his grieving is now unhealthy and unnatural. He continues his daily chores exactly as he did under his wife's insistence. He won't allow himself any recreation or new pastimes because it would be disloyal to his wife.
But like most of the family he will entertain a sentimental type of spiritualism. He wants to restore everything to the way it was when they were together and if there is an afterlife it has to be one where he is married again to his wife.
I said that his wife was in a great place, if she was "in Christ". This brought him up short and he listened. However when I explained that in the next life marriage as he and I understood it would be transcended and transformed and she would be married to Christ.
He really didn't like that.
I realised at that moment the precious things that God has given us but which can become a snare for us if we don't let them go. And how difficult it will be for all of us as we near our end to let go of this world.

 

[disciple Clint]

I have a relative who is grieving painfully and rather angrily after the loss of his wife in January. I believe his grieving is now unhealthy and unnatural. He continues his daily chores exactly as he did under his wife's insistence. He won't allow himself any recreation or new pastimes because it would be disloyal to his wife.
But like most of the family he will entertain a sentimental type of spiritualism. He wants to restore everything to the way it was when they were together and if there is an afterlife it has to be one where he is married again to his wife.
I said that his wife was in a great place, if she was "in Christ". This brought him up short and he listened. However when I explained that in the next life marriage as he and I understood it would be transcended and transformed and she would be married to Christ.
He really didn't like that.
I realised at that moment the precious things that God has given us but which can become a snare for us if we don't let them go. And how difficult it will be for all of us as we near our end to let go of this world.

What he is doing is not healthy, can you suggest that he join a grief group, he needs to deal constructively with his loss. By the way he will be even more married in heaven because we are all the bride of Christ, the love he shared with his wife will still exist and be even more intense. It can be hard to focus on how much better off our depart one is when we are in such pain but time heals.

 

[Tolworth John]

He won't allow himself any recreation or new pastimes because it would be disloyal to his wife.

Would you be able to get him to watch theanimated film ' UP'
Yes not very spiritual, but the main character is grieving for his wife andtakes on the task of visiting the place he and his wife dreamed of going to.
The film ends with him reviewing their photo album and he discovers his wifes last entry.

" Thanks for the adventure. Now go and have another!"

It might help him realise that life goes on and that change is not being disloyal.

 

[hopeforhappiness]

It certainly is unhealthy but such is the family culture that it would be regarded as callous and even traitorious to argue that one needs to Move On....
But maybe a bereavement group would be in order. It should be Christian though.
" Thanks for the adventure. Now go and have another!" - his wife had said in her last days that the husband would remarry. He regards that as some sort of gross disloyalty and even weakness.

 

[hedrick]

Ben Witherington observes that Jesus didn't say no one in heaven would be married, but that no one would get married (i.e. enter into a new marriage). I should note that this is not the typical view of this passage.

"I would suggest that Luke’s expansion of his Markan source at Luke 20:36 understands quite well the drift of the discussion. In the eschatological state we have resurrected beings who are no longer able to die. Levirate marriage existed precisely because of the reality of death. When death ceases to happen, the rationale for levirate marriage falls to the ground as well. When Jesus says in v. 25b that people will be like the angels in heaven in the life to come, he does not mean they will live a sexless identity (early Jews did not think angels were sexless in any case; cf. Gen. 6:1–4!), but rather that they will be like angels in that they are unable to die. Thus the question of the Sadducees is inappropriate to the conditions of the eschatological state. I would suggest that Jesus, like other early Jews, likely distinguished between normal marriage and levirate marriage. In Mark 10 Jesus grounded normal marriage in the creation order, not in the order of the fall, which is the case with levirate marriage (instituted because of death and childlessness and the need to preserve the family name and line). Thus Jesus is intending to deny about the eschatological state “that there will be any natural relation out of which the difficulty of the Sadducees could arise.”"

Witherington, B., III. (2001). The Gospel of Mark: a socio-rhetorical commentary (pp. 328–329). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

 

[RevealedTruths]

The Bible does not state that there will be no marriage in 'heaven'. Matthew 22:30 is a verse that Satan likes to take out of context and use as prooftext that in the age to come, God will turn humans into sexless, ethereal ghosts (in other words that God will destroy His own image in man), but it really doesn't say any of this. Just that the rules of sexual competition will no longer apply.

 

[disciple Clint]

The Bible does not state that there will be no marriage in 'heaven'. Matthew 22:30 is a verse that Satan likes to take out of context and use as prooftext that in the age to come, God will turn humans into sexless, ethereal ghosts (in other words that God will destroy His own image in man), but it really doesn't say any of this. Just that the rules of sexual competition will no longer apply.

So what does Matthew 22:30 say in your bible?

 

[RevealedTruths]

So what does Matthew 22:30 say in your bible?

What I wrote in the first message you quoted.

 

[FutureAndAHope]

I have a relative who is grieving painfully and rather angrily after the loss of his wife in January. I believe his grieving is now unhealthy and unnatural. He continues his daily chores exactly as he did under his wife's insistence. He won't allow himself any recreation or new pastimes because it would be disloyal to his wife.
But like most of the family he will entertain a sentimental type of spiritualism. He wants to restore everything to the way it was when they were together and if there is an afterlife it has to be one where he is married again to his wife.
I said that his wife was in a great place, if she was "in Christ". This brought him up short and he listened. However when I explained that in the next life marriage as he and I understood it would be transcended and transformed and she would be married to Christ.
He really didn't like that.
I realised at that moment the precious things that God has given us but which can become a snare for us if we don't let them go. And how difficult it will be for all of us as we near our end to let go of this world.

Although the bible says we will not be given in marriage in heaven, I believe that refers to sexual relations. We will still know our families, or wives and children.

 

[RevealedTruths]

Although the bible says we will not be given in marriage in heaven, I believe that refers to sexual relations. We will still know our families, or wives and children.

It actually doesn't refer to sexual relations either (how do you think the children from Isaiah 11 and 65, Ezekiel 37 etc. will be procreated?), just the principles of competitive sexuality.