Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                 Chapter Four

                                                                                                                                      Verses 16-18 continued

Jesus taught another lesson about marriage that is quite important. The Sadducees tried to trap Jesus into saying something heretical when they asked Him about marriage after the resurrection. They did not believe in the resurrection, but they were only trying to confuse Jesus. Jesus answered that humans in a sinful world often marry each other, by which He meant that they often had marriage ceremonies but without consulting God about whom they should marry. Jesus told them that when He raises His living humans from the dead, they will not participate in sinful marriages. Jesus did not mean that they would be celibate. In His new world, Christ will recreate every living human with righteous souls, spirits, and bodies. Physical bodies need physical love, so Christ will give every living human on His new earth one wife or one husband, and each marriage by God will live together in love forever. At the end of His teaching the Sadducees, Jesus told them that every living human is alive to God, and since Christ has abolished death, then Christ must raise all living humans from the regions of the dead in a general resurrection in the end of the world after they return to a willing repentance and faith in Him. Luke 20:27-38; Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 20:5; I Timothy 6:13; II Timothy 1:10.

Living humans saved by grace will have spiritual bodies like that of Christ after the Rapture of the Church, and they will live with Him in Heaven forever. Having a spiritual body means that a person can become a spirit or a physical body as that person wills. Philippians 3:20-21. At times when living humans in Heaven will themselves to be physical bodies, then they will need physical love. Christ has promised that He will give His saints whatever they ask for and whatever they need. John 16:23-24; I John 5:14-15. God desires that His intelligent creations perform creative acts. Physical love between one man and one woman in marriage ordained by God happens to be a very blessed and creative act. This fact can only mean that God will give to every saint in Heaven one husband or one wife.

When Jesus told the woman at the well to go call her husband and come back to Him, He had to have meant that she had the husband that God meant for her to have. But Jesus also sought to get this woman to realize that she was a sinner before God. When Jesus told her to call her husband, He knew that she did not consider him to be her husband. Jesus knew that when she admitted this, then He would be ready to cause her to realize that she was a sinner. The woman protested that she had no husband by which she meant that she felt that she was living in a sinful condition. When Jesus agreed with her that she had no husband, He did not contradict Himself. When Jesus told her that she had had five husbands and that the man she was with was not her husband, He simply meant that she was right to realize that she was a sinner.