Scripture speaks about two ages. These are sometimes called “this age” (or “the present evil age”) and “the age to come”, or “this world” and “the world to come” or “the kingdoms of this world” and “the kingdom of God”. The difference between these two ages is how God reigns.

God always has all power and authority, even in this present evil age where scripture calls Satan the God or king or ruler of this world. Even when Satan is called the ruler of this world, it is still God who holds all the power. Nothing that Satan or the other enemies of God do can stop God or even slow God down from accomplishing his purpose. Their actions opposing God are used by God to accomplish God’s purpose. We see that most clearly, of course, in the crucifixion of Jesus.

In this present evil age, God reigns indirectly. God reigns through mediators. God rules over his people through the kings and governments. God provides for his people through their families and their jobs and through the government.

But in the kingdom of God, God rules over his people directly. He provides for them directly, without any intermediaries. He himself is the shepherd. He himself provides the daily bread, directly. This is what we see Jesus doing in the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

When Jesus says that the poor are blessed because the kingdom of God is theirs, it is because in the kingdoms of this world, in this present evil age, God’s provision for the poor goes through intermediaries, and they all take a portion, so the poor are left with nothing.

Does this mean that evil intermediaries are stopping God from accomplishing his purpose? No, even from the Old Testament, God promised that he would judge the intermediaries:

“As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet? “‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says to them: See, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak sheep with your horns until you have driven them away, I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the Lord have spoken.” (Ezekiel 34:17-24)

Jesus is the real David. And the coming of the Kingdom of God is how God rights all wrongs. Jesus doesn’t come to reform this world and raise up better rulers in this present, evil age. He ends this age on the cross.

“None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:8)

When the rulers of this world crucified Christ, they ended their own evil age. It looks to us like nothing has changed since Christ’s death and resurrection. But looks can be deceiving. Christ defeated his enemies on the cross. But he chose not to destroy them. Instead, he ordained a short time to offer his enemies his mercy before his return. This offer of mercy is called “the gospel of the kingdom”. And we are living in this time.

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14).

In this period, all of God’s enemies are already defeated. They have the ability to deceive and make us think that they are still powerful enough to oppose God. But they are not.

In Matthew 24:14, note that Jesus calls the gospel the “gospel of the kingdom”, not the “gospel of the forgiveness of sins”. Forgiveness of sins is one aspect of our salvation, but the Kingdom of God is more than that. The Kingdom of God means that God is providing for and ruling over his people directly today. This includes, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, our daily bread.

In the present evil age, God taught people indirectly through mediators and teachers. But now, in the Kingdom of God, Jesus teaches us directly. This is the new covenant–the New Testament.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:29-30)

The Kingdom of God is not something you enter when you stop breathing. It is what you enter when you are baptized into Christ’s death. From the moment of your baptism, God is providing for you directly. That it his responsibility as our Father. And our responsibility is to trust Him to be that sole provider. That is what “faith” means.

“Faith” does not mean that God will open the gates of heaven for you after you die. That kind of faith costs you nothing. “Faith” means that we trust God alone for what we need, not the intermediators of the world. This changes who you are relying on today.

That brings us to today’s scripture, which is about marriage, the resurrection, and the Kingdom of God.

“Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” (Luke 20:27-38)

The Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection from the dead. They think it is a crazy idea. So they use the normal, everyday concept of marriage to try to show how much resurrection does not make sense.

But Jesus turns their argument upside down. For Jesus, the normal idea is resurrection, not marriage. Jesus uses the concept of resurrection to show that marriage makes no sense in the Kingdom of God, and that marriage is an institution that belongs only to this present, evil age.

Marriage was a mediator that God worked through in the present, evil age. But God rules over people directly in the Kingdom of God. So marriage is not found in the Kingdom of God.

The Sadducees draw an example from the law, which is another mediator which God worked through in the present, evil age. In the law, if a man’s brother dies childless, he had the responsibility to take his late brother’s wife and continue his brother’s family line. The Sadducees are saying, “The resurrection doesn’t make sense because a resurrected woman could end up with seven resurrected husbands”. But their mistake is that they try to derive the Kingdom of God from the present, evil age.

Christians make the same mistake when we forget about what the Bible says about the Kingdom of God and talk about going to heaven when we die. And we think of heaven as being like our present life with all of the bad parts removed. We think of heaven as where we see our departed family and friends. We think it would be sad and awkward to see our spouse and not be married to them, so we hope for some kind of special relationship with our spouse in heaven.

But what Jesus does, and what we Christians need to do, is to start with the resurrection as a given and think about the present, evil age in light of it. For Christians, the resurrection should be the starting and ending point for all of our thinking.

In the present evil age, people’s life source comes from their parents. But in the resurrection, God supplies His own eternal life to people directly through the Holy Spirit. Marriage, having children, and having families what God’s indirect way of providing for people once sin entered the world. Once sin and death entered the world, people would be protected by, provided for, and ruled by their parents. And spouses would find sexual fulfilment in each other instead of being overcome by lust. This doesn’t mean that marriage is evil. It is the good way that God provides for people in a sinful world.

Jesus said:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-5)

Doesn’t this mean that marriage was God’s original plan? Just because it was God’s plan for this world doesn’t mean it was God’s intended eternal state for humans. God’s intention was always that this world would be planted as a seed.

“Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment…” (Hebrews 9:27)

But God’s Kingdom will never end. That is why Jesus says that, in the Kingdom, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In the Kingdom, God will directly provide all of the things that He used to indirectly provide people through marriage. This is what it means that we are God’s children. God provides for us directly because He is our Father.

“And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9).

When you enter the Kingdom of God through baptism, you have one Father who directly provides for all your needs and rules over you directly for all things. And you have one family: the family of your Father in which Christ is your elder brother. This family is created by the blood of Christ alone, by the mercy of God alone.

These things do not happen after our physical death. It is at our baptism that we become children of the resurrection. It’s not that Jesus was resurrected, and then sometime later, in a second, separate resurrection, we will be resurrected. Scripture is clear that there is only one resurrection. Since Jesus has been resurrected, we know that that the general resurrection from the dead is now underway. Martin Luther said it like this: Christ is the head and we are the body. When a baby is born, once the head comes out, the rest of the body comes out easily!

This is why Jesus and Paul told believers (who are “children of the resurrection”) that it is better not to marry (though marriage is not a sin). Paul also makes clear that married people should not leave their marriage when they become Christian because the spousal relationship is a picture of Christ and the church. The New Testament is clear that the relationship between spouses and parents and children is a way that God indirectly cares for us in the present, evil age. But, for those who have become children of the resurrection through baptism, these relationships are replaced by God’s direct care.

Catholics (wrongly) consider marriage a sacrament. That means they believe that through marriage God directly imparts his grace. But we Protestants do not consider marriage a sacrament. That means that we (rightly) understand that our marriages are not part of the kingdom of God. That doesn’t mean we treat our marriages like trash. It does mean that we do not look for our spouses to provide for us what God alone intends to provide for us directly. And it means that the primary relationship of a Christian husband and wife—and the primary relationship of Christian parents to their children—is brother and sister in the Lord.

The reason why this is important is that these days Christians are out protesting, saying that what Jesus wants is strong marriages and strong families and that God is going to use these things to care for the next generation. But God’s care for his people is always only the kingdom of God. God’s care for people in the kingdom is direct. He provides for them directly. He rules over them directly. God’s care for this generation, and the next generation, and every generation is to offer them entrance to the kingdom of God based only on his mercy in Christ.

And in the kingdom of God, his care for us does not come through strong marriages and strong families. It comes directly from him to us without any mediation. Those who enter the kingdom who are married do not receive special care from God that single people don’t receive. There is no advantage to marriage in the kingdom of God. In fact, as Paul notes, often their marriages can interfere with Christians receiving and acting on what God has for them, because our focus is divided between the kingdom and the things of this present evil age, specifically, marriage. So as Christians, we don’t seek marriage. And we know that God did not send Jesus to reform the present age through strong families and strong marriages. As Christians, we are to seek only the kingdom of God, and the direct rule of God, and the direct provision of God.