Will There Be Sex in Heaven?

Will there be sex in heaven? What does the Bible say about this?

We Will Be Like the Angels

Jesus said that after we enter into the kingdom, we’ll be like the angels of God; but He did not say we will become angels of God. Angels have been around a lot longer than humans (Job 38:4-7). When Jesus was asked about irreconcilable differences for a woman who had married seven different brothers because of their subsequent deaths, they were trying to test Jesus and asked Him, “Whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife” (Mark 12:23). We should note that the Sadducees didn’t believe in miracles, angels, or even the afterlife; so they wanted to trap Jesus into answering an irrelevant question. They wanted to know which brother she would be the wife of (Mark 12:18-23). Jesus corrected them by saying, “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25). We will be like the angels in the sense that we can’t marry or bear children anymore. Obviously, angels can’t have sex anyway because they were created by God and they are eternal; therefore, they have no need to have children.

Eternal Bodies

What believers will experience after death, or at Jesus’ return, is that they will have both a physical and spiritual body. Both will be completely incorrupt (1 Corinthians 15), meaning it’s the end of death (Revelation 21:4). We will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but this doesn’t mean we become angels at Jesus’ return or after death. We are never told we will be angels, only that we will be like them in the sense of no marriage or children (and, obviously, no more sex). We will have eternal life in a body that cannot die, become diseased, or even be injured, just like the angels. We will be like the angels but not angels; and since angels cannot be killed because they are spirit beings, neither will we face the threat of death anymore. Those things have all passed away by then (Revelation 21:4), so being like something is not the same thing as being that something. Paul asks the Corinthians, “Do you not know that we are to judge angels” (1 Corinthians 6:3a), showing that we are not going to become angels but will be like them by having a spirit body and eternal life.

We Will Be Like Him

The Apostle John gives us a clue about what we’ll be like after death or at Jesus’ return in writing, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). John also wrote, “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12), “who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). The children of God should look like their Father; and if we’ve seen Jesus, we’ve seen the Father (John 14:9). We know from the Mount of Transfiguration that Jesus’ Shekinah glory is the very glory of God because Jesus is God! He was revealed to John along with James and Peter that day. And who wouldn’t fall on their face at the sight of that? Even though we are not going to have the full glory of God as Jesus does, we will be like Him (to a point, that is) (1 John 3:2).

The Kingdom

If we are alive at Christ’s coming, then we will not so much enter into heaven; rather, heaven comes down to us, as we read in Revelation 21:1-3 where John “saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’” The bride of Christ is the church, and the Bridegroom is Jesus Christ. When we see what the kingdom will be like (Revelation 21, 22), we should realize that the greatest joy of all won’t be sex–it will be the glory of and basking in the presence of God, as “God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3), and “they will see his face” (Revelation 22:4). Won’t that be reward enough? Isn’t love greater than sex? Isn’t entering into the joy of the Lord at His return the greatest pleasure?

Conclusion

I have actually heard from more than one Christian that if there’s no sex in heaven, they wouldn’t want to go there. How tragic, because if you don’t go to heaven, there is only one other place to go (Revelation 21:8). I fear these believers are so wrapped up in this world and its pleasures that they’ve not really understood Jesus’ words that “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12). Many single Christians have done this. What a hard road, but they strive to fulfill the two greatest commandments of all, and in this order: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). Our highest priority should be to love God and obey Him, and we obey Him because we love Him. But we are also to love our neighbor. My friends, heaven’s infinitely greater than any physical act we could ever do, including sex. The Bible never explicitly says there will be no sex in heaven; but I believe that even if there were, it’d be so down on our list of priorities that it would have lost its significance in our lives.