“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #57
“Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body. And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power” (1 Cor. 6:13-14).
In this passage, Paul is giving us a glimpse of our physical life on the other side of the resurrection. The kind of food we have now and the kind of belly we have now will both be destroyed. This ought not to be understood as a subtraction, as though in all the food will be taken away in the Great Marriage Supper of the Lamb. No, our kind of food will be taken away, not because it is the real kind of food, but rather for the opposite reason. Our food in the here and now is pretty thin soup—not adequate for the realities of that greater banquet. For that reason, our idea of food and our kind of belly will be “destroyed.”
Paul reasons analogously with the matter of fornication. The body is for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body. Something beyond all mortal reckoning is going to happen to us in the resurrection, concerning which transformation our experience with sex in this life is just a dim flicker. Marital love in this life prepares us for that time, while fornication is a disrupting or retarding influence. So if our bodies are “for the Lord,” we ought not to do anything with our bodies now that interferes with God’s plan.
If sex as we know it exists in Heaven, then the Sadducean question stands. Whose wife will she be? Sex as we know it would necessitate polygamy and polyandry in the resurrection. But it does not follow from this that God has exhausted all the options. God is good.