not they go up to it from earth. And this differs nothing from that which the two men in white clothing, that is the two angels, said to the apostles that were looking upon Christ ascending (Acts 1:11), “This same Jesus, who is taken upon from you into heaven, shall so come as you have seen Him go up into heaven.” Which soundeth as if they had said He should come down to govern them under His Father eternally here, and not to take them up to govern them in heaven; and is conformable to the restoration of the kingdom of God instituted under Moses, which was a political government of the Jews on earth. Again, that saying of our Saviour ( Matt. 22:30), “that in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven,” is a description of an eternal life, resembling that which we lost in Adam in the point of marriage. For seeing Adam and Eve, if they had not sinned, had lived on earth eternally in their individual persons; it is manifest they should not continually have procreated their kind; for if immortals should have generated as mankind doth now, the earth in a small time would not have been able to afford them place to stand on. The Jews that asked our Saviour the question, whose wife the woman that had married many brothers should be in the resurrection, knew not what were the consequences of life eternal: and therefore our Saviour puts them in mind of this consequence of immortality; that there shall be no generation, and consequently no marriage, no more than there is marriage or generation among the angels. The comparison between that eternal life which Adam lost, and our Saviour by His victory over death hath recovered, holdeth also in this; that as Adam lost eternal life by his sin, and yet lived after it for a time, so the faithful Christian hath recovered eternal life by Christ’s passion, though he die a natural death, and remain dead for a time, namely, till the resurrection. For as death is reckoned from the condemnation of Adam, not from the execution; so life is reckoned from the absolution, not from the resurrection of them that are elected in Christ.
That the place wherein men are to live eternally, after the resurrection, is the heavens (meaning by heaven, those parts of the world which are the