Your Not Just Some Body
“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
When I was younger that verse did not mean as much to me as it does now.. The older I get the more I appreciate the biblical hope, of a new resurrection body.
Revelation 21:25 says, “Its gates will never be closed at the end of day because there is no night there.” When I read that verse it tells me that one day I’ll never get tired again; that one day I’ll have eternal endurance; that one day I’ll need neither posturepedic mattresses nor pj.’s; because in heaven, the land of fadeless day, where we will not count time by days or months or years, the gates of the New Jerusalem shall never close “because there is no night there.” There will be neither physical darkness, nor spiritual darkness, nor intellectual darkness, nor social darkness. The darknesses of crime and sorrow and death will never again touch family or friend, for Jesus Himself, who is the light of that city, will shine in every heart.
“Its gates will never be closed at the end of day because there is no night there.” If you live in Barrow, Alaska along the Arctic Ocean where you get six months of dreary-gray-overcast-light for six months (3 months + 3 more months) it can cause you to crawl up into a quasi hibernation existence; but everlasting light with everlasting life how sweet it is.
“So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44)
In I Corinthians chapter 15 which is often referred to as the Resurrection Chapter, notice that the death and resurrection of the redeemed is compared to seed-sowing-and-harvest. When a seed is planted in the ground, it is as though it had died and is buried. For a long time after its “death,” the seed cannot be seen, but finally it rises again as a beautiful flowering plant, or sheaf of grain, or even a lovely tree.
Jesus made this same analogy. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it die, it brings forth much fruit” (John 12:24; note also Mark 4:26-29). Our human bodies, because of sin and the curse, eventually die and are buried; but one day (like the planted seed) they will appear again, but now immortal and glorified, far greater than they were before–that is, of course, if their real inhabitants (their eternal created spirits) have been born again through faith in their already-resurrected Savior.
Our new spiritual bodies rising from the grave will be real physical bodies (like that of Jesus after He was raised), but will no longer be under bondage to gravitational and electromagnetic forces as at present, but only to spiritual forces of which we have as yet very little knowledge.
We do know, however, that our spiritual bodies will be “fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Although “it does not yet appear what we shall be. . . . when he shall appear, we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). Then in our glorious, powerful, spiritual bodies, we as “his servants shall serve him” in love and joy forever (Revelation 22:3).
Keep on Pilgrimaging on for the best is yet to be for the child of God!
Pastor Bryant