The Resurrected Body

Bad Company Revisited

We continue with our series on the early church. One thing that we have identified is that the early church had the same kind of issues that we have today. Paul has been addressing the issue of the Resurrection being called into question by the believers. Sadly, that is happening today in churches across the developed nations. There was a pastor in the Episcopalian realm that recently delivered a sermon stating that the Resurrection is not that big of a deal. In fact, this particular quote unquote pastor went so far as to say that there is no resurrection and really the entire point of the gospel is just to get us to treat each other nicely.

Now, I want to make something clear. As believers, we had better be nice. We had better look at people with love, even people we do not necessarily agree with. We can disagree with someone without getting hateful. Jesus disagreed with a bunch of folks during His time on earth and He never got hateful. We have to remember that we represent Jesus wherever we go. We are His ambassadors. Later Paul will write to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 5:20

2 Corinthians 5:20 CSB

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”

So let’s never forget that we are God’s ambassadors. We might be the only Bible that anyone ever reads. We must give an accurate portrayal of Jesus to everyone. To claim Christ, but then to be hateful to people is not going to do anything to promote the faith. Instead, it is going to drive folks away. All that to say, being nice and loving is important.

However, Christ and His mission goes way beyond just teaching people how to be nice to one another. Christ came to show us what it looks like to deny the self, die to self, and take up our crosses to live for Him. He came so that we could live abundantly with the LORD here on earth and for all eternity. He came to sacrifice Himself so that we could be forgiven of our sins and be blameless before the LORD God Almighty. He came so that when God looks at us as His people, He does not see our sins, but He sees His Son. Jesus didn’t just come to teach us to be nice, but He came to set us free.

If Jesus had really just come to teach us to be nice then He would not have had to drink the cup. Remember, He is in the garden of Gethsemane and asks that He not have to drink the cup. What was in the cup? The cup was filled with God’s wrath. If His mission was simply to teach us to be nice and all smiley with everyone, the cup wouldn’t be necessary. To remove the resurrection is to water down the Gospel. If we water down the Gospel, then it’s not the Gospel. It’s another version of worldly teachings. I always love talking to people that say they don’t believe in Christianity because it was made by man and the Bible was just written by man. I respond, that is interesting considering that the Bible teaches us to go against our human nature. Part of our problem today and back then is that folks wanted to humanize God’s message. It won’t work. It’s not authentic.

To give a little visual, I have a diet coke and a real coke. If we pour it out into a cup, they look pretty similar. Some folks can’t even tell the difference between a diet coke and regular coke in the taste. The diet coke can fool us. However, if diet coke was packaged in a regular coke can, there is a way to tell whether it is real or authentic. Here we have two pitches of water. We take the coke and put it in one and look how it drops to the bottom. So what’s going to happen when we put the diet in? It’s not going to sink. Look, it floats. So what’s the point? The point is that if someone is selling a Christian ideal but is denying the resurrection, you know that you are dealing with diet Christianity. It’s not real.

Today, we are going to look at what the resurrection body looks like. If you have your Bibles, please turn them to 1 Corinthians 15: 35-49

1 Corinthians 15:35–49 CSB

But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have when they come?” You fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow—you are not sowing the body that will be, but only a seed, perhaps of wheat or another grain. But God gives it a body as he wants, and to each of the seeds its own body. Not all flesh is the same flesh; there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is different from that of the earthly ones. There is a splendor of the sun, another of the moon, and another of the stars; in fact, one star differs from another star in splendor. So it is with the resurrection of the dead: Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written, The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. Like the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; like the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

What will our bodies look like?

Paul is answering an obvious question here. What kind of body will we have on the other side of our resurrection? That’s a good question to have. There are some misconceptions today about what it is going to look like when we get to heaven. We see it on TV and in movies. In cartoons, a character dies and then his or her spirit is carried off into heaven by their newly gained wings. There is the idea that when we die and go to heaven, we get wings and become angels. That is not true. That is not accurate. As neat as it would be to be an angel when we get to the other side, that’s not how it works. Paul answers that by talking about what kind of seed we sow.

Harry and Charlie are every day working their garden. They have all kinds of stuff in there. They plant the seed and they expect that seed to yield a crop of the same plant, not a different kind.

If we plant corn, do we expect tomatoes?

Of course not! If we plant corn, we expect corn. If tomatoes popped up, we would probably be confused and then have to go back and check whether we sowed the proper seed or not. We expect to get back what we put in. So the way we can look at our resurrection in a similar way. We don’t drop down into the ground and then pop back out as something else. If that’s the case, then we would say that we are believers in reincarnation. That’s not Christian, though, that’s Buddhism. Resurrection is not reincarnation. We are not suddenly transformed into something else.

Resurrection is not reincarnation

Matthew 17:2–3 CSB

He was transfigured in front of them, and his face shone like the sun; his clothes became as white as the light. Suddenly, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with him.

This is known as the Transfiguration. Some select disciples go with Jesus to this mountain and they watch Jesus transform. That is not to say that Jesus lost His physical characteristics. The text does not say that at all. Instead, the text simply says that His face shone like the sun and his clothes were super shiny. It was still Jesus they were looking at, He was just in His glorified form. John gives a description in Revelation of what Jesus looks like. He is shiny and glorified. John falls on his face out of worship and fear because he sees Christ and His holiness. All that to say that on the mount of transfiguration, Jesus did not become something new. Instead, He showed His glorified reality. The disciples are not suddenly asking themselves, “where did Jesus go?” They know that He is right there with them.

One thing that I think is really cool about this encounter is the fact that Moses and Elijah are present on the mount. They are talking with Jesus. That tells us that these two heroes of the Old Testament, two heroes of the faith are there in Christ’s presence and they too are walking around in some kind of a resurrected form at this point. There is debate on what happens when we die. Some folks believe that we are stuck in the tomb until the day of the LORD. There are Scriptures that back that up. Others believe that we go straight to paradise when we take our last breath. I will say that when Jesus promises the criminal that is crucified next to Him that he will be in paradise with Jesus that night, it indicates that there is paradise waiting for us. Another bit of Scripture that backs that up is what we read here in Matthew. We have these two heroes of the Old Testament, who did not know Jesus in His human form, are there with Him on the mount. They are also identified as Moses and Elijah. How did they know? I am certain that they were not wearing name tags, but the disciples knew who these two were. They are not described as being angels or having wings or anything like that. They are the same Elijah and Moses from the Old Testament. Their physical bodies are the same, but their spiritual side is now fully developed.

So when we die, we continue to remain who we are. When I pass on from this earth and get to heaven, I will still be Andy. The big difference will be that I will not be stuck in sin anymore. I will continue to be me. I guess one way to look at it would be from the superman perspective. We all know Superman, right? He is an alien from the planet krypton. He gets super powers from the sun while he is on earth so that he can do all kinds of fancy and wonderful things like flying, stopping bullets, having x-ray vision, etc. All really cool things that he can do. To hide his identity, he puts on glasses and acts like the meek and mild Clark Kent. He’s the same guy whether he is dressed as Clark Kent or as Superman. In a similar fashion, we will be the same person when we are resurrected. We will be in our glorified form.

All that to say, if you do not like yourself, then I have some bad news for you! That’s one thing the world tries to get us to do, right? To escape from who we actually are. That’s why there are all of these products out there that help us change our appearance. On the extreme end are the people that get plastic surgery to change what they look like. The great irony here is that they will probably reset to their original appearance when the time comes.

Paul then jumps into the difference between the physical and spiritual. There are two sides to us, the spiritual and the physical. We have two Adams, there’s the first Adam and the second Adam, Jesus. The first Adam established our physical appearance.

Genesis 1:26–27 CSB

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.” So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female.

So here we have God creating mankind in His image. We are created to have emotions, just like God has emotions. We are created to have dominion over the earth, just like God has dominion. Adam and Eve were placed in paradise, every need was met and they enjoyed fellowship with God Almighty. There was no fear of Him whatsoever. They were told to be fruitful and multiply and not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Pretty simple to follow that, at least we would think, right? But they were given free will. They could choose. That’s another amazing thing about God, He loves us so much, He gives us the option to choose Him and love Him. He could have made us all subservient to Him without any ability to choose for ourselves, but He put that in us and allowed us to make choices. Adam and Eve, they made a bad and selfish choice, and it doomed us, their offspring. They chose to eat the fruit and introduced sin into the world. As a result, we taste physical death at some point in our lives.

Genesis 3:19 CSB

You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.”

Part of the curse is that man will return to dust after he passes away. Pretty amazing that God made us all up out of the materials we see on earth. When we die, we return to the earth. However, our souls continue to go on. Paul uses the agricultural reference to how this goes, though. Our sinful bodies are sown into the ground and we are raised again glorified and without sin. These bodies we are in are truly amazing. Every seven years do you know what happens? Our entire cell structure has been replaced by new cells. We don’t even know that it is happening, right? We don’t feel it when we are young. We don’t start feeling it until we get older and the only reason we feel it is because the cells don’t necessarily replicate the way that they once did. There’s degradation in the system and that is when we start to feel it!

Our Bodies Could go on Forever

God gave us these bodies that can last forever. The only reason there is the degradation in the system is because of our sin. That is what God warned Adam and Eve would happen if they were to eat from the tree. The wages of sin are death. God gave that condition early on in His leadership of mankind so it is not like we can say we were unaware. What Paul is getting at here is that Adam was our physical prototype. He is the one that humanity is based on. We look at human beings and see that they all have the same features. Adam and Eve had the same features back then as we do today.

Jesus, on the other hand, is the prototype for the Spiritual self. It is through His atoning work on the cross that we are healed from our sin. Jesus did what Adam could not do, He made His flesh and spirit align with the will of the Father.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, and yes I know we talked about this a few weeks ago, He is praying. That cup had God’s wrath in it.  Jesus really wants that pain to be taken away from Him. However, He closes His prayer by saying “Not my will, but your will be done.” Jesus, fully human, feeling true physical pain and anguish asks that it be removed, but He wants to do the Father’s will before anything else. That’s where Adam and Eve failed. Their mentality was not your will, but my will be done. Jesus says, not my will, but yours be done. What we have in Jesus is the One that merges the physical with the spiritual. They are not at opposing sides. The flesh does not outweigh the spirit. Instead, the flesh does what the spirit says.  That is why Jesus has the authority over death.

         In Revelation when John meets Jesus we read in Revelation 1:17-18 When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man.  He laid his right hand on me and said, “Don’t be afraid! I am the First and the Last, and the Living One. I was dead, but look- I am alive forever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and Hades. 

         Since He holds the keys of death and Hades and we are His people, then one day we will be victorious over this.  One day we are going to pass from this world and then we will one day be in glory.  The corruptible will be buried and we will be incorruptible.