Ask Pastor Mike Live

Guest (Male): K-687, great question. Pastor Mike, I'm reading off of our chat line on YouTube. Speaking of Valentine's Day earlier in the program, why wouldn't we be able to experience romantic love in heaven in a right, marriage-driven way, if it's one of the pleasures of life?

Pastor Mike: It is one of the pleasures of life, and you're right, this is a great question. C.S. Lewis addressed this, I think it was in Mere Christianity. He said if someone thinks about what God told us about heaven—there's no marriage or giving in marriage—by that we assume there's no sexual, romantic kinds of affection. How can we have the ultimate joys of heaven without that?

He illustrated it with a little boy, a pre-adolescent little boy who likes eating chocolates. That's the ultimate pleasure for him, and he's equating that to us talking about romantic love. He says if this man says to the little boy, "Just wait until you get married, it's amazing," and however he wrote it, obviously very eloquently, if you're trying to explain to a little boy that the joys of what you're going to have in marriage and romantic love are so much better than chocolates, he just can't compute that. To him, eating chocolates is the ultimate pleasure. It's really not the ultimate pleasure; there is something better for you.

That's how Lewis equates that in a way that there is something so much better. What we enjoy is the closeness of relationship. Romantic affection is the bonding of two people. Whatever God is going to replace to have people being able to fellowship in a way where there's ultimate enjoyment of those relationships and the diversity of who we are—even male-female relationships—it's about the difference being an attraction. Like a puzzle piece having connections.

If that's the case, whatever God has planned for fulfilling that part of us as human beings wanting to be close to people we love, God is going to grant it and it'll be way better. I guarantee if there is nothing even close in the same kind of category as romantic pleasure, you're not going to miss it. You're going to say, "I don't need that because I got this." That's what I would say about it.

In this world, part of what God needed to do in designing the world, he needed to design us to get hungry so we'd eat food to energize our body and live. He also designed it so that we would fall in romantic love—at least normally most people—and get married and procreate and have more children so that mankind would continue on. We thirst because we need water, we ache for hunger because we need food, and we've been given this neat thing that God does to draw male and female together so we can reproduce in a marriage context and the world continues on.

God says there's still going to be eating in the eternal state. That's pretty clear, and I deal with that in my book, 10 Mistakes People Make About Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife. One of the mistakes we make is thinking we won't have taste buds, teeth, an esophagus, or a stomach. We'll have all those things in a perfected way. So the question is really what we will have if we're not going to have romantic love. I'm not sure we won't have some version of romantic love, and whatever version it is is going to be better. If it's completely categorically excluded, which it might be—we don't have a ton of information about the eternal state—it's going to be better. There will be nobody saying, "What were we hoping to have?" because this is way better.

All right, still on YouTube here because we only got a minute or two left.