A Diamond Is Forever…But Is My Marriage?

Which lasts longer, a diamond or a marriage? Hmm, good question.

We’re all familiar with the slogan, “A diamond is forever,”^[i] but is the same true about my family? My marriage? Well, the answer is simple, as long as you know what theological framework you’re coming from.

In the Classical Christian Framework[ii] (including Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and non-denominational Christians), lifelong marriage is a sacred institution ordained by God. It is a means to experience the greatest joys of life—companionship, intimacy, and procreation. It’s also a means to bear children and nurture them in an environment of care and affection. Marriage is a way for us to most closely approximate the love Jesus has for us. It is central to nearly any Christian faith community.^[iii]

But in some future day, marriage and family will be a distant and insignificant memory. The idea that either can extend beyond death doesn’t fit within the Classical Framework. In fact, it’s impossible. Why? Well, simply put, the Classical Framework doesn’t allow for us to have marriage in the resurrection because we can’t have children in heaven—only God will be creating anything then.

And even if don’t want additional children in heaven, but just want to keep our spouse and children from mortality, then that means we will all—male and female—be celibate for eternity. But it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense for God to create us with reproductive parts for eternity if we only need them for a few short years in mortality. That’s why some Classical theologians have come to conclusion that we’ll all be male in heaven, or at least not have a biological sex. But if that’s true, then we really don’t have marriage or family either.[iv]

On the other hand, the idea of everlasting marriage and family fits together quite nicely in the Mormon Christian Framework. Mormon Christians take the doctrine of the physical resurrection and follow that to its logical end—since our gender stays with us forever, so do our marriage and family. And that’s not even the primary reason it fits. For Mormon Christians, to be like our heavenly Parents, the institution of the family must be forever. And to pattern ourselves after them, we must enter into the union of marriage and create a family of our own.

To sum it up, in the Classical Framework, lifelong marriage is good and approved by God. In the Mormon Framework, everlasting marriage is essential and enables us to be like God.

What Did Jesus Think of Marriage?

Hold on, doesn’t Jesus himself say that there is no marriage in heaven? Well, let’s take a look. Matthew 22 gives an account of a group of Sadducees asking Jesus about marriage in the hereafter.^[v] They give him a hypothetical scenario of a woman who marries a man, and after the man dies without any children, she marries his brother. He also dies before having children, and the cycle repeats until she has married seven different men, all of whom die without any children, after which she herself dies. The group of Sadducees then asks whose wife of the seven men she will be.

Now before we get to Jesus’ answer, there are a few things we have to understand about this whole episode. First, the Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection, so in asking about the resurrection, their aim is to catch Jesus in his words and prove his doctrine false. The Sadducees would be happy if Jesus were to give the answer that they may have expected—that the woman would be married to all seven men in the resurrection. Of course this would make him look foolish, as Jewish custom didn’t allow for women to have more than one husband at a time. They may have supposed that his only other option would be to deny the resurrection. It was a brilliantly hatched plan, or so it seemed.

Second, we should also understand where this whole hypothetical situation is coming from. Tobit, an ancient Jewish book of scripture,^[vi] tells the story of Sarah, an unfortunate young woman who marries seven different men, but each man dies before they can have any children together. In fact, the men are killed by an evil demon before any of the marriages are ever consummated. But that’s not the end of the story. She ends up meeting an eighth man, a young lad by the name of Tobias. They marry, and through divine assistance, he survives the wedding night and they live happily ever after.

While we cannot say for sure that this is what the Sadducees had in mind,[vii] it fits perfectly with Jesus’ answer. “Whose wife of the seven will she be?” the Sadducees ask him. He replies, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:28-29). In light of the Sarah and Tobias story, Jesus’ response suddenly makes a lot more sense! In Jewish custom, a marriage isn’t valid unless it is consummated, so if the Sadducees really understood the scriptures, they would not even ask this question. They would know that Sarah was not officially married to any of the seven men, but only to Tobias.

Their question also reveals that they do not understand the power of God—the divine aid that saved Tobias from the husband-killing demon. An angel tells Tobias that Sarah “was set apart for [him] before the world was made” (Tobit 6:18). The Sadducees couldn’t see that this was literally a match made in heaven! It’s a beautiful love story really, but misunderstood and misused in an attempt to catch Jesus in his words.

Fortunately, he doesn’t fall for it. He tells them, “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:28-30). Brilliant! Without having to go into a lengthy doctrinal discourse that wouldn’t be understood by Sadducees anyways, he instead says simply that the woman and men don’t have to worry about marriage in the resurrection. Jesus knows she is already married to one, and therefore there is no need for her to “marry” or be “given in marriage” in the resurrection. Her marriage is already complete! Jesus’ response to the trick question gets a perfect ten—he asserts the reality of the resurrection, refuting the Sadducees, but doesn’t fall into their trap by saying the woman will be married to all seven men.[viii]

Another passage often used to show that Jesus is against marriage is his reference to eunuchs in the kingdom of heaven. But again, context is everything. Ironically, what Jesus says is not only in harmony with everlasting marriage, but is one of the strongest defenses of it.

In this dialogue, Jesus is teaching the Pharisees the enormous importance and magnitude of marriage. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh,” (Matthew 19:5) he says, quoting Genesis 2:24. He then expands on that: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matthew 19:6). Clearly, Jesus’ idea was that marriage is of great consequence and lasting significance.

The Pharisees, trying to test him, then asked him why Moses would allow for divorce if marriage was so permanent. Jesus tells them that it was “because of [their] hardness of heart” (Matthew 19:8), but that it wasn’t this way from the beginning. The disciples then chime in, insisting that if the relationship between a husband and wife were so bad that it would lead to divorce, then “it is better not to marry” (Matthew 19:10). Emphasizing the enduring nature of how a marriage should be, Jesus agrees saying that there are all sorts of reasons people don’t marry, including “eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12).

When understood in context, it becomes evident that the point Jesus is making is not that we shouldn’t marry, but rather that the significance of marriage is so weighty and the bonds of marriage are so enduring that it would be better not to marry than to marry and afterward break one’s vows and terminate the marriage. That’s a hard pill to swallow, as even Jesus acknowledges: “He who is able to accept this, let him accept it” (Matthew 19:12). But it’s clear that Jesus’ teaching here has nothing to do with abstaining from marriage to get to heaven, but has everything to do with the eternal and everlasting nature of the covenant of marriage.

And besides Jesus’ teachings about marriage, are there other indications in the Bible that it is meant to be forever? There are quite a few, but perhaps none sum it up so beautifully and succinctly than Paul’s teaching on everlasting marriage. “In the Lord,” he says, “neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman” (1 Corinthians 11:11).

A Diamond or Marriage?

The fact of the matter is that living as families makes sense because it corresponds with everything in our human experience—it fits with reality. Can you imagine living just as an individual, having no mom, no dad, no brother or sister, no spouse or child, no cousin, aunt, or uncle? There’s no one to rely on when we need help, no one to share our joys and pains, no companionship. It would be a lonely existence. Most of the meaning of life would be sucked right out.

After all, why would God have us live in families on earth just to abandon them a few decades later? He could have just zapped us into existence on this earth, but instead he makes us vulnerable and helpless infants, and puts other people in charge of birthing us and rearing us. And these aren’t just any old people—they are our family! What a beautiful design!

Mormon Christians see our earthly families as a parallel to our heavenly family. Simply put, human sociality is a model for the divine. There is a mom, a dad, and children, brothers and sisters. While there are many great families after which to pattern our own, there is one blueprint of a perfect family union—the family of God. God instituted the family on earth so that we can pattern ourselves after his own heavenly family, and we have divine seeds planted within us that give us an inborn yearning to have a family like his. We have families so that we can be more like God!

Without everlasting marriage and family, the romantic, spousal love between a husband and wife cannot truly be forever. Sure, they can still love each other in heaven, but only as much as they love the angel at heaven’s pearly gates, or the neighbor who lives on the corner of their gold-paved street. It’s just not quite the same.

Likewise, the love between a parent and child cannot truly be forever. Your daughter is no longer your daughter, but just another of God’s creations. You love her, there’s no doubt about that, but not in any special way. She’s not your daughter anymore. Your son is no longer your son. There is no family.

The Mormon Framework says otherwise. You can love your daughter not just as another creation of God, but as a child, your child. You can love your son as your son. You can love your mom as your mom, and your dad as your dad. Your spouse is yours forever.

So going back to our initial question, “Which lasts longer, a diamond or a marriage?”

From the perspective of Classical Christianity, we’d have to grant that a diamond in fact is longer lasting. But as a matter of fact, a diamond is not truly forever, but just for a really, really long time. Unfortunately for diamonds, there is the law of entropy, which says that all material things left on their own will eventually decay. A diamond like the one on an engagement ring will be around for billions of years, but it will eventually degrade into graphite dust.

Fortunately for us, entropy can never degrade a marriage or family. A diamond may not be forever, but in Mormon Christianity, marriage and family are.

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[i] This slogan was coined by the copywriter Frances Gerety for a 1947 ad campaign for the De Beers Group.

[ii] See The Thing About Christians and Mormons blog post for more about the Classical Christian Framework.

[iii] The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, also known as the Shakers, are an example of one group of Christians who practice celibacy and eschew marriage.

[iv] There are other problems with those theories too. If we’re all male in heaven, then all you ladies would have to become male to enter the kingdom of heaven. How would you feel about that? (See Yes, There Is Such A Thing As The Perfect Woman blog post for more on how women are not meant to be like men, but in fact are created to be as they are.) And the main problem with not having a biological sex is that such a thing literally does not nor cannot exist. There are cases of mixed sexual characteristics in humans, which is known as hermaphroditism, but since the default for a human embryo is to develop female sex characteristics, and only a Y chromosome alters the development to male sex characteristics, then if there are genetic mutations in the code for male sex characteristics, the embryo will by default develop female-like sex characteristics. A classical example of this is people with Turner’s syndrome. Though they are missing an X chromosome, they still develop female sex characteristics (though not fully developed). Thus it’s impossible for anyone to truly lack a biological sex.

[v] Similar accounts are also found in Mark 12 and Luke 20.

[vi] This book was included in the Septuagint, an ancient version of the Hebrew Bible, but is excluded from modern versions of the Hebrew Bible. It is included in the biblical canons of a majority of Christians, including most Orthodox and Catholic traditions, but generally considered apocryphal by Protestants.

[vii] The Sadducees’ scenario involves seven brothers, while the story of Sarah does not require that the seven husbands are brothers. Despite this potential difference, there are enough similarities to reasonably conclude that the Sadducees were inspired by Sarah’s story, if not borrowing directly from the book of Tobit.

[viii] The retelling of this episode in Luke 20 however does require a little more explanation. In this version of the story, Jesus responds by saying, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20:34-35). Luke’s account generalizes the statement so that Jesus is clearly not referring to Sarah and Tobias, but the “sons of this age.” Again, Jesus does not feel the need to begin a lengthy sermon digging into the complexities of marriage in the hereafter. He just needs a catchy one-liner to affirm the resurrection while not falling into the trap—and getting those blasted Sadducees off his case. His response though still doesn’t pose a problem as Jesus is clearly talking about the act of marrying, not the status of being married. He says that when we are resurrected, there will be no more marrying or giving in marriage, no more courtship or engagements, but he does not rule out the institution of marriage existing in the resurrection. From the context of Jesus’ complete teachings on marriage (see for example Matthew 5:31-32 or 19:5-6), it’s clear that he held marriage in the highest esteem, so it is not beyond reason that he too believed and taught the everlasting nature of marriage and families.