Awkward!, Marriage in Heaven, Conservation of Energy, Millennials, Confrontation, Personal Choice

12/23/19    Omar  (Click HERE for video)

Wouldn’t heaven be awkward?” a young man named Omar asked me.  “I mean, what if during my life I had two wives, who would I be married to in heaven?”

Omar had grown up in a Catholic family, but had abandoned Catholicism in favor of his own theories based on the law of conservation of energy: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form into another or transferred from one object to another.”  Like many people his age I’ve talked with, he reasons that since our thought processes are basically electrical impulses in our brain, then since energy can’t be destroyed it just changes form after we die.

When I talk with them, people who believe this often precede statements about their beliefs with words like “I feel like…” and then describe their preferred ideas about just what happens to that energy, whether it is swallowed up in a vast ocean from other souls, or somehow keeps its original identity in some other form.

I’ve been wondering why so many people uniformly hold to this belief and no one seems to get these ideas from an outside source like a religious text or a popular teacher.  It just seems to be a logical thought progression from millennials, based on a strange mix of pseudo-science and the wishful thinking of a generation of young people.

Maybe its based on the desire to avoid awkward situations, like the one question Omar had for me about Christianity.  I can’t help but wonder what kind of effect it is having on an entire generation to grow up with one’s social life more and more online, where one can avoid the confrontation and awkward situations that occur during real-time, face to face interactions.

Maybe the “I feel like” statements come from a generation in which personal choice is paramount, where one has so many options in so many arenas that they believe they can create their own reality.  From choosing among 87,000 drink combinations at Starbucks, to 353 million product choices on Amazon, to the growing list of different sexual preferences and “genders”, this generation takes personal choice for granted even into eternity.

I told Omar about the similar question Jesus was given, about a hypothetical situation in which a woman was married to a succession of 7 brothers, all of whom died, and to whom would she be married in heaven?  Awkward!  Jesus based his answer – that there would be no marriage as we know it in heaven – on the authority of scripture, saying “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” (Matt 22:29)

But wait! Don’t we get to make a choice about that?  From the very beginning, there have been so many creative choices given to man, so many creative ways to name the animals, so many trees to eat from in the Garden.  But there is a King who reserves the right to limit our choices, to say there is one tree you may not eat from, and to say there is but one path to salvation. 

To a generation for whom the avoidance of confrontation and the veneration of personal choice have been carried to an extreme, that makes established religious belief just a little awkward.

Thanks, Omar, for allowing me to record our conversation!  It can be seen at https://youtu.be/pus5szkRh-k