This Body Must Be Raised

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:51–58)

We begin where we will end — with the life-energizing therefore of 1 Corinthians 15:58. Therefore, since death is defeated, and our perishable bodies will be raised imperishable — “Therefore . . . be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” Since you who treasure Jesus Christ above all things will never taste the pangs of death, and will live forever in new glorious bodies in the personal presence of Jesus — therefore, don’t dillydally in your studies; don’t dawdle away your precious life; abound in (that means do lots of it!) the work that the Lord gives you to do. Love your life! Squeeze out of it everything you can for the glory of Jesus. Don’t be a slacker.

The language of verse 58 is a paradox. “Be steadfast, immovable” — like a great oak tree — “doing lots and lots of work.” What a crazy and wonderful picture of a Christian, of a student of Bethlehem College and Seminary. We’re trying to make steadfast, immovable oak trees out of you that don’t budge on any truth (immovable!) — but get moving! And go all over the world filling up your lives with Christ-exalting action.

“Jesus did not pay his blood for your body only to see it thrown away at death.”

Because of the resurrection of your bodies into the presence of Jesus, your labor here is not in vain. There is a correlation between labor now and life in the age to come. Otherwise, verse 58 makes no sense. Henry Alford, one of my favorite commentators (who died the year this church was founded, 1871), said on verse 58, “To say that our labor is not in vain is to say that our labor will be fully rewarded. . . . Our life and labor are not in vain but have meaning, purpose, direction, and their proper final reward.” The resurrection of the dead gives purpose, direction, and death-defying incentive to your life. You won’t fly your plane into an office tower in New York, but you will risk your life to take the gospel to the people who did.

The reason I know 1 Corinthians 15:51–58 by heart is because I spoke it in dozens of funerals over my 45 years at this church. Oh, what glorious news we have for families and friends of believers who have died. I would ten times rather preach at a funeral than at a wedding. Ecclesiastes 7:2 says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.” Oh, indeed, they lay it to heart. At funerals they lay it to heart. Let us just say that at weddings there is a good deal of God-blessed distraction. So, give me a funeral, where people are standing on the brink of eternity, hungry for good news about the resurrection of the dead, clinging on every word. “Tell us, Pastor John. Tell us something amazing about our deceased loved one and our own life that remains.”

Why a Resurrection?

My assignment today is to take up the last two lines of the Nicene Creed. I’ll give them to you in the original Greek, because dozens of you in this room can translate them. (There might be one less common word that you won’t know. It’s the first one.) The last two lines read,

Prosdokōmen anastasin nekrōn.
Kai zoēn tou mellontos aiōnos. Amēn.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come. Amen.

The question that I want to try to answer in this message, which I think takes us to the deepest purposes of God in the resurrection of the dead, is this: What’s behind the word must in 1 Corinthians 15:53? “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” Whose necessity is that? Who says that the resurrection of the body must happen — is necessary?

There’s only one possible answer: God. Human beings don’t have the power to say, “This must be! There must be a resurrection of the body!” The devil doesn’t have the power to say, “There must be a resurrection of the body.” This is a divinely established necessity. God says, “I have decreed that it is so. So it must. This perishable body must put on the imperishable.”

And my question to God is, respectfully, “Why?” I’m going to try to build a four-step answer from what I see in the New Testament.

Step 1: Jesus’s Body

There must be a bodily resurrection of God’s people because the risen Jesus today has a body.

The clearest text that states this is Philippians 3:20–21: “We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” So, today, Jesus Christ has a glorious body. After he rose from the dead, Luke tells us that he ate fish to prove that he was not a ghost (Luke 24:43), and now we learn from Paul that he never laid aside that physical body when he ascended into heaven.

But why? Why did the Son of God keep his incarnate form of bodily existence when he returned to the Father? Why didn’t he reverse the descent of Philippians 2:5–8? Why didn’t he rise from the dead, lay aside the human form, lay aside the likeness of men, lay aside the servant form, and be utterly done with the self-emptying, and take his seat with all his prior divine glory at the Father’s right hand?

“The resurrection of the dead gives purpose, direction, and death-defying incentive to your life.”

My answer is that it is fitting that the one who sacrificed his body to provide a covering for all of our sins, and who stands before the Father in heaven today as our advocate and intercessor, should do so in the very body that represents the sacrifice that he made on our behalf. I think that’s implied in the book of Hebrews: “Christ has entered . . . into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Hebrews 9:24). And according to Revelation 5:6, when he is seen in heaven he is seen as “a Lamb standing, as though . . . slain.”

Arise, my soul, arise.
Shake off your guilty fears.
The bleeding sacrifice
In my behalf appears.
Before the throne my Surety stands.
Before the throne my Surety stands.
My name is written on his hands.

The glorified wounds of Jesus will be the most beautiful physical reality in the coming age. Not galaxies, not mountains and oceans, but the hands of Jesus.

So, step 1 in my answer to the question, “Why must there be a bodily resurrection of God’s people?” is that Jesus Christ himself today has a glorious risen body.

Step 2: Jesus’s Presence

There must be a bodily resurrection of God’s people because, in this bodily form, Jesus wants us to be with him and to see his glory.

One of the sweetest things Jesus ever said is in John 17:24. He prayed,

Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

No longer as “in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). He could have just said, “I want them to see my glory.” But that’s not all he said. And I’m so glad that that’s not all he said. In a sense, all we need forever is to see the infinite and inexhaustible glory of Jesus. But there’s more than one way to see and enjoy the glory of Jesus: from a distance, like a mighty mountain range, or personal and up close. And what he said was, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am.”

I argued in my sermon on the Sunday before last that the greatest hope of a Christian is a close, personal enjoyment of Jesus Christ in all his supremacies. I think that’s what Jesus is saying in John 17. In and through all the materiality of the new heavens and the new earth, the capstone, the ultimate goal, the end of all things, is God glorified in our close, personal enjoyment of all that he is for us in Jesus. That’s why Jesus said, “Father, I want them to be with me.” Yes, they will see my glory. But they will see it with me. Paul focused on the same thing. As the climax of the glorious second coming, he said, “We . . . will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). That’s the climax. That’s the ultimate joy.

So, why must there be a bodily resurrection of God’s people? Step 1: because the risen Jesus today has a body. Step 2: because in this bodily form, Jesus wants us to be with him and to see his glory.

Step 3: Jesus’s Likeness

There must be a bodily resurrection of God’s people because, when we see him as he is, we will be made like him, including his resurrection body.

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Philippians 3:20–21)

Why does the visible, bodily form of Jesus require that we be like him in this bodily form? One answer is given right there at the end of Philippians 3:21: He makes us like his own glorious body “by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” When millions upon millions of long-dead Christians rise from the dead, on that day the power of Jesus will be seen as awesome. One reason we will be given bodies like Jesus’s body is to put the power of Jesus on display.

“Because of your resurrection, be immovable in truth. Be abounding in work. Don’t dillydally.”

Somebody objected to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 and said, skeptically, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (verse 35). “Don’t you know, Paul, that this is a ridiculous teaching? Ninety-nine percent of those dead bodies have decayed and turned into soil, which turned into plants, which were eaten by animals, which humans have eaten as fish and beef and chicken and venison. This is a ridiculous teaching, Paul, to think that God can raise those bodies from the dead. They don’t even exist.”

Paul has a name for people who think about God like that: fool. “You foolish person! . . . 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” (1 Corinthians 15:36–38). “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). And when the Sadducees mocked the resurrection, Jesus said to them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). Better to be like Abraham in Romans 4:17: “He believed [in God], who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” So, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:43, “[The body] is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.”

One reason that we will be made like Jesus when we see him is so that it will be clear that the power that raises millions of dead Christians belongs to the risen Christ.

There’s another reason why the visible, bodily form of Jesus requires that we be like him in this bodily form: namely, because Jesus died precisely so that we would use our bodies to glorify God.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)

Your body was bought at the cost of the blood of the Son of God. That was the price Jesus paid. And the reason he paid it is so that you would use your body to make God look good now and forever and ever in the resurrection. He bought your body forever. He did not pay his blood for your body only to see it thrown away at death. So, when we see him in his crucified and risen body — standing as a Lamb who was slain — how fitting it will be that our blood-bought bodies would be made new so that we can use them forever and ever to make Jesus and his Father look great.

So, why must this perishable body be raised imperishable?

Step 1: because the risen Jesus today has a body (Philippians 3:20–21). Step 2: because in this bodily form, Jesus wants us to be with him and to see his glory (John 17:24). Step 3: because when we see him as he is, we will be made like him, including his resurrection body (1 John 3:2).

Step 4: Jesus’s Creation

And finally, there must be a bodily resurrection of God’s people because the celebration of our glorious likeness to Christ is the purpose of the whole material creation.

Astronomers make wonderful and wild calculations about the universe. They say things like this: “If you counted one star per second, nonstop, it would take you over three hundred trillion years to count the number of stars in the universe.” They have a name for that number: ten sextillion, or ten to the 22nd power. So, it’s safe to say, whatever the numbers are, that the material universe is really big.

And the question is this: What’s it for? There’s more than one answer. But one answer, the ultimate answer, is that it exists finally to celebrate the glory of the children of God, which is the glory of Christ. Listen to these stunning three verses from Romans 8:19–21:

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. [We’re not waiting for it. It’s waiting for us.] For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him [God] who subjected it, in hope [and what’s the 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.

This tiny planet, with its several million redeemed sons of God, is not waiting to obtain the glory of the new heavens and the new earth. It’s the other way around. The creation is waiting and groaning to obtain our glory — your glory — the glory of the children of God, reflecting the glory of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Romans 8:17 says that we will “be glorified with [Christ].” And verse 29 says that we will be conformed to the image of the Son of God. And now we can see that the glorification of the children of God includes new glorious bodies like his glorious body. Why? Step 4: Because God intends that there be a new material universe and that it obtain its newness and its glory by obtaining “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Our material newness provides the glory into which the entire universe will enter.

The celebration of our glorious likeness to Christ is the purpose of the whole material creation.

Therefore, “this perishable body must put on the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:53). “It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory” (1 Corinthians 15:43). Or as Jesus said, “The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43).

Resurrection as Incentive

As Paul ended his chapter on the resurrection, he came down out of the height of this glorious vision of reality and landed his plane in your living room and said, “Therefore . . . be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Because of your resurrection, be immovable in truth. Be abounding in work. Don’t dillydally. Don’t be a slacker. Life is short. Seize it. Squeeze out of it everything you can for the glory of Christ. That’s why you have a body.

Let the glory of your resurrection, and the ultimate purpose of the universe to celebrate your eternal likeness to Christ, give purpose, direction, and death-defying incentive to your life, because you say with the Nicene Creed,

We look for the resurrection of the dead,
And the life of the age to come. Amen.