Audio Transcript

If you’ve listened to the Ask Pastor John podcast for more than a few weeks, you know that we regularly explore life’s deepest sadnesses and most painful losses. This is a fitting place to hear Pastor John address hard situations, and those hard situations include couples who are unable to bear children of their own. On infertility, we have looked at amazing Bible texts with amazing promises, like Isaiah 56:4–5. That comes to mind. And you can see how important Isaiah 56:4–5 is pastorally, in the APJ book, on page 193. There, you’ll see that this same incredible promise can be applied to two sadnesses: infertility and lifelong singleness. It’s one of those essential texts you want in hand, when the time is right, in ministering to others — Isaiah 56:4–5.

Lifelong singleness is the topic again today in an email from a woman, a listener, who writes in anonymously. “Hello, Pastor John. I am 43 and a faithful Christian — have been all my life — but I have never been married. I’ve been visiting many congregations in my community and have yet to find a suitable mate. I am haunted by the story of Jephthah and his daughter at the end of Judges 11:34–40. I know the point of that story is to teach us not to make rash vows, especially to God. But when I see how his daughter wanted to spend the last two months of her life mourning that she will never be a wife or a mother, it terrifies me. It shows me that if I don’t get married, I am missing out.

“That fear is compounded when I consider Jesus’s words from Matthew 22:30. I know some teachers, including you, who use this verse to give hope for single people. But I don’t see what is hopeful about it. I resonate with Jephthah’s daughter. If people are ‘neither [married] nor are given in marriage’ in the resurrection, that means if one doesn’t get married in this life, they will never know the joys of marriage! They won’t know what it’s like to touch or be touched by someone of the opposite gender. They won’t know what it’s like to hold their own child in their arms. These blessings that such a single person may have wished for their entire lives will be unrealized for all eternity!

“Even if whatever God has in store for us is better, won’t they still wonder what they missed — what it seems everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, seemed to enjoy? My question is, if I die unmarried, yet remained faithful to Christ and have kept myself pure, will I have the same grief in my heart that Jephthah’s daughter dealt with in those last two months of her life for everything that I will never experience as well?”

Before I saw this question yesterday and had time to think about it, I was sitting in my chair over my Bible, pondering how pervasive and inevitable deep disappointments are that will never be turned around in this life.

World of Sorrows

I thought of people who are blind, perhaps from birth. They will never see the sun or moon or the beauties of a flower or the face of a friend. All will be dark until death. That will be their life on earth. I thought of people who are deaf and live in total silence all their lives — no music, no voices from a family or friend, no sweet robin’s song, no blasting thunder. I thought of people who are paralyzed because they were born that way or had an accident and perhaps can’t feel anything below their neck — paraplegics, maybe, who can’t run or walk or play pickleball, all the way to the end of their life. It never changes — all of life paralyzed. That was what they were dealt.

I thought of people who grow up in very poor, desperate conditions where they never learned to read — no Shakespeare, no Milton, no Herbert, no novels, no poems, not even a note or a letter from a friend — confined to a small world of limited experience. No reading. I thought of people who are miserable in marriages. All their hopes for what marriage was supposed to be have crashed. The romance has gone. There’s no mutual affection shown anymore — both partners in frustration and disappointment that the other doesn’t meet their emotional needs. The children are broken. All the dreams seem dashed all the way to the end. “For better or worse” — and it turned out to be worse.

I thought of refugees and people whose entire lives are decimated by war. I see the pictures today, people who as a class are hated, driven from one place to the next with scarcely any peace, any security, any comforts at all. And then there are the countless diseases, sicknesses, disabilities that people live with and die with and never experience healing or freedom from debilitating suffering.

“As we find our richest contentment in God, this life of singleness or marriage need not be wasted but full of joy.”

Now, I mention these realities in this world not to minimize this woman’s sorrows at not being married or having children. Her longings are good and right. Human beings were designed by God to be married, to be hugged in a one-flesh union, to have sexual relations that bring forth exquisite pleasures and then the cutest little persons. We were made to be cherished and respected in a lifelong union of man and woman in marriage that is deeply right, deeply human, deeply good, deeply gracious of God, and not to have it can be profoundly disappointing and painful, and I feel no need to minimize that.

Living with Realistic Hope

I mention these things because we really do need to have a biblical, realistic assessment of the possibilities of this fallen age, which is ruined by sin. And by ruined, I mean virtually everything that was designed by God for human pleasure is corrupted and, in greater or lesser ways, wrecked. Here’s Paul’s most penetrating description of our world. He said,

The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

That’s Romans 8:20–23 — subjected to futility, bondage to corruption, groaning as Spirit-filled Christians, waiting for our bodies to be redeemed from their present wasting away and dying condition. What an amazing, painful, realistic, worldly-hope-dashing assessment of the world. History is a conveyor belt of diseased, broken, frustrated, disappointed, dying, gloriously human persons and bodies. We in the West have so many suffering-ameliorating amenities that we can scarcely begin to imagine how hopeless this life feels to billions of people who don’t have a fraction of our comforts.

Looking to Our Reward

This is why the New Testament — unlike the Old Testament, including the experience of Jephthah’s daughter — is so relentlessly focused on the hope of eternal life: spectacular hope, incredible inheritance, lavish happiness being swallowed up by life at the resurrection, where the Lamb will bring us to springs of living water, and “[God] will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). Over and over again, the New Testament presents the Christian life as shot through with sorrow and pain and disappointment and affliction and rejection and persecution — all of it sustained with gladness by rejoicing in the “hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1–2).

Apart from Jesus, nobody in the New Testament suffered nearly as much as Paul did, and yet he embraced it, even his singleness, as part of his calling, even though he had a right to have more pleasures than he got. Listen to what he says:

Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? . . . But I have made no use of any of these rights. (1 Corinthians 9:4–6, 15)

The flag flying over Paul’s life of self-denial and sorrow was 2 Corinthians 6:10: “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

Sorrow Will Flee

I’m not asking our 43-year-old single friend not to be sorrowful. I’m not. If our arm is cut off, we are sorrowful. If we are not granted a legitimate lifelong desire to be one flesh with a person of the opposite sex, we are sorrowful. But we do not feel singled out. We do not feel picked on. We do not feel mistreated by God. And we do not feel hopeless, as if in the resurrection we will walk the barren hills with Jephthah’s daughter and bewail our virginity. No, we will not wail on any hill in the age to come. These are hand-clapping, dancing hills and will satisfy our deepest lungs.

Whatever we have sacrificed in this world “is [working] for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison [because] we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18). And in the meantime, as we go deeper and deeper with God, finding our richest contentment in him, this life of singleness or marriage need not be wasted or meaningless but full of meaningful fruitfulness and joy as we pour ourselves out for the present and eternal good of others.