What Is More Real To You: The Promises of God or Being Alive?

There is a moment in C.S. Lewis's fantasy novel "The Great Divorce" that has the power to permanently reshape the way a person thinks about heaven. A traveler arrives there by bus and steps off to discover something startling. The other passengers are transparent, ghostly, barely visible against the brightness of the place. But it is not heaven that seems thin and insubstantial. It is the travelers themselves. The grass of heaven is so solid, so dense with reality, that walking on it feels like walking on diamonds. The trees, the light, the air — all of it is more real than anything the traveler had ever known on earth. The things he once considered solid and permanent were, by comparison, the ghosts.

Lewis was careful to note that this is fantasy, not theology. But the principle embedded in that image is profoundly true. Heaven is not less real than earth. It is more real. And that single idea, taken seriously, has the power to change everything about how we live.

The Sadducees and the Problem of Earthly Containers
In Mark 12:18-27, a group called the Sadducees approaches Jesus with what they believe is an airtight logical trap. The Sadducees were a prominent religious faction in first-century Jerusalem who accepted only the first five books of the Bible and rejected the idea of resurrection entirely. Their reasoning was straightforward: in those five books, people die constantly and no one ever comes back. They had never witnessed a resurrection. Logic and evidence, as they understood it, demanded that death was the end.

So they constructed a hypothetical scenario drawn from a real Old Testament law found in Deuteronomy 25, which required a man to marry his widowed sister-in-law if she had no son, in order to protect her and preserve the family. The Sadducees imagined a woman who married seven brothers in succession, each dying without children. Their question to Jesus: in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?

The question is designed to make resurrection sound absurd. And it is the same style of challenge that skeptics have raised in every generation since. You really believe in a God you cannot see? You really believe Jesus is the only way to salvation? You really believe all things work together for good, even in the middle of suffering? These questions are meant to illustrate how impossible faith must be when measured against the hard realities of the world as we experience it.

Two Reasons the Sadducees Were Wrong
Jesus does not dodge the challenge. He meets it directly and identifies two fundamental errors in their thinking.

The first is that they underestimate the power of God. In Mark 12:25, Jesus explains that in the resurrection, people will not marry or be given in marriage, but will be like angels in heaven. The Sadducees had taken the most intimate and meaningful relationship available in human experience -- marriage -- and assumed that heaven must either replicate it or fail to surpass it. But they were forcing heavenly realities into earthly containers that simply cannot hold them.

Consider what marriage at its best contains: deep love, loyalty, joy, and intimacy. Now consider what mars it: jealousy, shame, misunderstanding, disappointment, and the constant friction of two imperfect people. In the resurrection, the love and the joy remain. Everything that corrupts and diminishes them is gone. Relationships in heaven will be more real, not less. More loving, not less. Whatever category you reach for to describe what it will be like, the answer is almost always better and more than you can imagine.

The second error is that the Sadducees did not know how to read their own Scriptures. Jesus quotes Exodus 3:6, where God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The point is not a grammatical one about verb tenses. The point is covenantal and logical.

A Promise Is More Real Than a Plot of Land
God made enormous promises to Abraham. He promised him land, descendants beyond counting, and blessing beyond measure. And then, as Stephen observes in Acts 7:5, God gave Abraham no inheritance in that land -- not even a foot's length. Abraham lived as a wandering tent-dweller. He died without seeing those promises fulfilled in any visible, measurable way.

So what do you do with that? Either God is a liar who lacks the power to keep his word, or the short span of a human life is simply insufficient to contain the full weight of eternal, heavenly promises. Which means Abraham must be alive. Which means the resurrection must be coming. There is no other way to make the Bible make sense.

This is the image of a plane still in flight. God told Abraham he was taking him somewhere. Abraham trusted him, boarded the plane, and died mid-journey. But dying mid-journey is not the same as the journey failing. God is not the God of the dead. He is the God of the living. Abraham will have his reward.

The reason all of this is possible is that the resurrection is not merely a future hope. It has already begun. Jesus Christ died for the sins of those who believe, and he rose from the dead as the firstborn of the new creation. Romans 8 promises that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies. Those who are united to Christ by faith will rise as he rose.

Every promise God made to Abraham finds its fulfillment in Jesus. A new heavens and a new earth. Brothers and sisters from every tribe and tongue and nation and century. Blessings greater than any eye has seen, any ear has heard, or any heart has been able to imagine.

The question that all of this presses on us is the same one the Sadducees faced. What is more real to you -- the circumstances of your life right now, or the promises of God? The things you can see and measure and feel, or the things that God has sworn to bring to pass?

Abraham counted a promise from God more certain than a deed to a piece of land. He died fully persuaded that God was able to do what he had promised, as Romans 4:21 describes. And he was right.

The grass of heaven is like diamonds. We are still on the plane. But we will land.