Saturday, November 7, 2009

1 Corinthians 15:35-41

"But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?' You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory."

The scoffer makes light of the reality of the resurrection. “How is it possible,” he laughs, “that a body could decay to nothing and then come back to life?” Paul responds by pointing out that the death of a seed brings about the life of a plant. When you place a seed in the ground, you don’t look for that seed again. Its death brings about new life.

Likewise, the Christian’s physical death will bring about new life. He shall be raised. I believe that there will be some kind of connection to our physical bodies, but they will not be what we now know them to be now. It’s not as if our hands, feet, skin pigmentation and follicle distribution are going to be exactly reconstituted at our resurrection after the decay of death does away with them. Our bodies will be raised, but we will not be as we now are. God will use our physical bodies to give us new heavenly bodies.

The scoffer dismisses the truth of the resurrection as unreasonable. But his supposed reasonableness is in fact foolishness. God will bring the dead to life, and He will do it in a way that will likely surprise even the believing recipients.

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