Embodied Eternity - 1 Corinthians 15:35-49

Welcome to the Willington Church podcast. At Willington Church, we exist to follow Jesus Christ personally and carry on His ministry. You're listening to our Sunday sermon podcast. You can watch our full services over on YouTube. It is good to be with you today on this wonderful spring day. Don't know about you, but my favorite season might be spring. I enjoy the carry blossoms, the new flowers, the aroma, of life coming out of the earth and into the air. I'm not, you know, allergen or anything. Sorry to you who have allergies. I love going out on days like today and just smelling that the world is new again. There seems to be life springing up from places that we didn't even know life was. What looked dead suddenly is full of life and green and color and wonder. But at the same time, we're reminded even in seasons like this, that life is not forever. It doesn't last. In the past week, I attended two funerals. We shared stories and memories of the lives that these two women lived and the love that they shared with family and friends. With tears of sorrow and tears of joy, we remembered the fullness of life that they had. They both loved Jesus and I know that they are with him now. But the reality remains. They both died. My friends, we have a problem. We will all face death someday. Have you thought about what our experience will be like after we die? Have you considered that? In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul has established that Jesus Christ died, was buried and rose from the dead. He argues that since Christ has been raised, we also will be raised like him when he returns. In today's passage, Paul details the particular manner in which we will live that new resurrection life. It will be a bodily experience, similar to life now, but wholly different from anything we can imagine. We will live, embodied, eternal life. Paul challenges the expectations of resurrection life. It's something that the Corinthians misunderstood and it's likely something that we misunderstand as well. We have all sorts of expectations and understandings. Some good and grounded in God's word. Some being pulled from other religions or popular media or our own imaginations. Resurrection is a continuation of our existence as bodily beings and it is a renewal of our bodies as we are made to be like Jesus in every way. Embodied eternal life is how we were made to live. We're going to see this in today's passage through the original creation and through recreation. First, resurrection is continuity from creation. The passage opens in verse 35 with two questions. But some will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? The Greeks thought there was no resurrection and we've been considering that for the last few weeks. These questions seem reasonable. How could a dead and decaying body be raised? And even if it could, why would you? It would just rot all over again. That was their understanding. To the Greek mind, the body was considered inferior and even evil. It was the soul, the immaterial, if anything. That was good. They believed we needed to be free from the flesh. On the other hand, the Jews argued that the resurrection was a return to the same body that had died so that life would just pick back up. But this comes to the same issue as the Greeks. This body is prone to failings. Somehow our bodies need a change. And so, in verse 36, Paul offers a pastoral and diplomatic response to these questions. You foolish person. I think that's how I'm going to start doing my pastoral counseling now, too. So if you need to see me, be ready. Now, sometimes we need to be shaken awake out of our ignorance. And Paul loved the Corinthians. He didn't want them believing something that was not true or not believing something that was true. As we saw last week in verse 34, these wayward Corinthian believers needed to wake up and understand the reality in which they were currently living and the reality to which they were headed. The Corinthian believers should have known better. And so should we. Since our Lord is raised from the dead, personally, bodily, visibly, and triumphantly. The whole of our existence is to be like Jesus in every way, including our bodies. The raised one is the one who will raise us to be like Him. To help us understand the nature of this bodily resurrection, Paul turns to creation. He uses an analogy of a seed in the earth. He knew it was hard to grasp, so he builds an illustration into the text for us. Paul echoes what his risen Lord had already said in John 12. "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit." Jesus was alluding to his own death and resurrection. Through his death, many would be made alive. We are partakers in Christ's sacrifice. We are the fruit of his salvation. There is a spiritual resurrection that takes place when we put our faith in Jesus and believe the gospel. Now, Paul builds on Christ's comparison. The body with which Christ was raised was similar to, but different from, the body in which he died. His disciples recognized Him, but they knew that He wasn't the same. A change had taken place. In the same way, Paul is stating that our resurrected bodies will not be the same as they are now. A change will take place. This is why the seed is a great analogy. A farmer buries seeds, but isn't just expecting more seeds to suddenly come out of the earth. The farmer expects a plant full of ripened fruit. The farmer knows burial is only the beginning. And isn't that how belief in God starts as well? We trust Jesus. We recognize Him as our Savior. We submit to Him as Lord. In baptism, we are put under the water to symbolize our death, our burial, and we are raised out of the water to symbolize our new life in Christ. This is the beginning. This is why Paul includes burial in the first importance of the gospel at the start of chapter 15. He says, "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures." And then Jesus went around and was recognized by people. Significantly, his resurrected body bore the marks of his crucifixion. Jesus instructed his disciple Thomas, saying, "Put your finger here and see my hand and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe." Jesus encouraged his disciples who were afraid when they saw his new resurrected body. Jesus said, "See my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Touch me and see. For Spirit does not have flesh and bone as you see that I have." Similar, but not the same. God raised him in new physical life. God created us with physical bodies. It's how we experience life. And He said that it was very good. Paul has so much creation language baked into this chapter. This is why he states in verse 38, "But God gives it a body as He has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body." God has designed the body of the seed, He carries on with the analogy, to be able to sprout life from what seems like death. It is encoded in the nature and the natural design of the seed of the plant. God's resurrection power is already tucked into the grain to become more than it is now, raised from the earth through the power of God. And Paul expands this divine determination from the seed to all of creation. Verse 39, "For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish." God has made all things unique in their kind. Humans are distinct from the animals and the birds and the fish that God has created. One kind does not lead to another kind. Each is distinct. And Genesis 1 accounts for these kinds in creation. Genesis 1 11 says, "Plants yield seeds according to their kind." Verse 21 says, "Fish and birds have their kind." Verse 25 says, "The beasts of the land have their kind." "Each body designed as God saw fit." And so Paul goes on, not just the earthly bodies, but the celestial bodies. Here in verses 40 and 41, Paul highlights the sun and the moon and the stars that are different from the earthly bodies and different from one another. Star differs from star in glory. As we discover new stars, we give each one a name. You have serious, the brightest star in the sky. Vega becoming prominent as summer approaches. Beetlejuice with its reddish hue and regal, the blue supergiant. We have Polaris, the northern star, used for travel and navigation to say nothing of our own sun, blazing with light and heat and perfectly positioned in order for us to survive and thrive. Or think of the glory of the moon that governs the night. We just flew four astronauts around the moon and in a press conference afterwards, Commander Reed Weisman said he asked for the chaplain after returning to earth, saying, "I'm not really a religious person, but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything or experience anything. It's very hard to fully grasp what we just went through." The pilot, Victor Glover replied, "The only thing I would add is that I am a religious person, but everything else is the same." We all know the glory of creation, the wonder of this world that we inhabit and the world beyond. We gaze up at it and we marvel. And God knows each star by name. He created them for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and He said, "Let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth." God has purpose in His creation and in the bodies which He has given to His creations. But then notice how God created humanity, Genesis 1, verse 26. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image after our likeness." Made in the image of God. God has determined that in these bodies we reflect His nature and His likeness. Really, we're modeled after the Son of God, Jesus Christ Himself, who perfectly represents God to us and reveals God to us as He became human. In Hebrews 1, verse 3, we read, "The Son of God is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature." Or it can be translated, "Jesus is the engraved essence of God." And it was on the blueprint of Jesus that humanity was designed. We are made to be like Jesus. We are made to reign over creation as representatives of God on earth. I mean, it's all the glories of the earthly and the celestial bodies. We reveal His glory most fully. Save for Christ Himself. Especially and necessarily in our physical existence. Our bodies are not bad. Our bodies are made to glorify God. He did not make a mistake with the body that He gave you. But remember our problem. Everything is dying. Everybody and everybody is dying. Things are not very good anymore. We have a death problem. How did this happen? Well, we rejected God as our God. We tried to be God's in our own lives. We tried to glorify ourselves and stand above God as though we knew better. And we can make it present tense as well. We currently cast off the life that we were made for. And in our efforts to fashion life for ourselves, we have become stained with sin and our bodies are cursed to die. We are unable to live the fullness of life that we were made for. How can we engage in God's purpose if we are dead and dying? What can be done to solve our death problem? This brings us to the second half of our passage. Resurrection is renewal through recreation. Paul makes two contrasting lists between the current state of our body and the coming state of our body, and between the human condition and the heavenly condition, verse 42 to 44. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is stone is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is stone in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is stone in weakness. It is raised in power. It is stone a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. God makes things fit for their purposes. So to the Corinthian question, Paul is not concerned with whether God can redeem the physical body after it has died. God can take what has a certain form of glory or existence and transform it into a new form of glory and existence. But it is not, take note, the physical becoming the spiritual. It is the natural body that is becoming a spiritual body. The physical nature, the body essence, is consistent, but it is made new. It is made different. God doesn't discard our bodies. He remakes them into a form that is greater than what it currently is. It is perfecting the body, not escaping from the body. By design, we are embodied spirits. That is our existence. Paul writes in the second letter to the Corinthians that an unbodied human spirit is naked. It is unclothed. Without our physical bodies, we are not what we were made to be. But now, we are stuck in these bodies of death. We cannot create life for ourselves because we reject God. We reject life himself on the day that the first man and woman betrayed God when Adam and Eve sinned and broke God's word, they spiritually died and their bodies would die later too. We come from a long line of dying humans. If you look back in the Genesis, Genealogy, chapter 5, and if you are wondering how genealogy can be interesting, just notice that every single person ends with and he died. And he died. And he died. And he died. And he died. And he died. If there is one thing humans are really good at, it is dying. But that is not good at all. We need resurrection. We need to be raised from the dead. We are perishing. We are not living in the honor of God's design. We are weak and fragile. We are only natural. We have been wrecked by sin and this ailing body is no longer capable of our purpose. Resurrection necessitates a change in us. This is why Paul writes verse 45, I am back in 1 Corinthians. Thus it is written, the first man Adam became a living being, the last Adam became a life giving spirit. Paul again appeals to Genesis to the creation of humanity. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living creature or a living being or a living soul. We receive life. We don't create it. We can't create it. But we receive life from the life giving one. But our rejection of God, the giver of life means we have been cut off from life. And so we die. And if we die without being restored to God, we will experience death forever. We will be separated from life and we will never experience life as we were designed to live with God in harmony and perfection forever. We will be left out. We need redemption for our bodies and redemption for our souls. The only way that we attain this imperishable, glorious, powerful, spiritual body is through Jesus Christ. The God who is imperishable took on human form and entered a perishing world. And I bet most of us have memorized that oh so beloved verse, for God so loved the world that He sent His one and only son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish. But have eternal life. God doesn't want us to die. God wants us to live forever. The glorious one, God Himself, took on the dishonor of becoming human. Humanity is the peak of creation. And yet that God would take on created form, human form? In theology it's literally called the humiliation of Christ, that He would be anything like us. And yet that's what He did. Christ was born in human likeness, dishonored by literally condescending as the word coming down from His heights of heaven as king of the universe to walk amongst us. And we further dishonor Him by rejecting Him and mocking Him and ignoring Him. He endures our dishonoring so that He can lift us up in glory through His own resurrection. Christ is the powerful one, the one who upholds the universe by the word of His power. God speaks and wills into existence the things that are. This powerful Jesus took on the form of a servant. He came to seek and to serve and to save. God who is spirit entered into physical creation, limiting Himself for our sake, not limiting in who He is, but in the way He was expressing Himself. In Himself in human form Jesus takes on the wholeness of humanity so that He can redeem through His death and resurrection the wholeness of our being. That includes our bodies. When we believe God and embrace Jesus as our only path to everlasting life, God forgives our sin and restores our life because it's restoration to Him. He is everlasting life. Jesus taught that God, Father, Son and Spirit, the Trinity, the Three and One. God is the one who gives life to those who believe. In John 5 it's recorded, "For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom He will." And in John 17, verse 3 Jesus says, "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." That's eternal life. The unspoken agent of resurrection in this passage, the one who is doing the resurrecting, is God Himself. Don't forget, we are dead. We cannot raise ourselves. He has to act. And He does in great love for us. God is the creator of not only the natural and current world, but of the spiritual and future world as well. So Jesus' resurrection is physical. And thus our resurrection will be physical. When Paul compares the natural body and the spiritual body, we can read it as, it is "The Son in a body fit for natural things. It is raised in a body fit for spiritual things." One body suited for this world, transformed to be a body suited for the world to come. That's why Paul then compares our human body with the heavenly body of Jesus and how our bodies will be transformed to be like his one day. Verse 46, "But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual." The first man was from the earth, the man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. This is where the Corinthian believers have missed the point. They think that they are spiritual and better than others who are not spiritual because of all of the gifts that they have and the powerful signs they are performing. That's what our series through first Corinthians has shown us. God blessed them with incredible spiritual reality, but they didn't understand that they weren't quite done yet. They missed the fact that they had not been raised in bodies that resemble the man from heaven, Jesus Christ Himself. They are still in their natural bodies, although they have been raised spiritually already with Jesus through repentance and belief in Jesus. The Holy Spirit had taken up residence within them, but they were still operating in natural bodies. Bodies that will die and return to dust. And so too are we. Whether we're a Christian or not, our body is going to return to dust. It's the Christian who has been raised to spiritual life, but still has to grapple with the natural world and with natural bodies that face natural consequences. We return to the dust when we die and we are buried in the earth. This is the curse of death. And so we long for the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8 tells us that all of creation waits with e. or longing, with groaning for its own redemption and more than that for our redemption. Everything in creation knows that we were made for more. It is us who don't quite get it. Even the Holy Spirit groans for us as we await our redemption. God will renew the bodies of those who believe. Our resurrection body will be as Christ's body, raised physically in a way that is like the old, but so much more. The plant, grown from a buried seed, is much more wonderful than the seed from which the plant sprung. The resurrected life while finding its roots in this life will be that much more wondrous than this life we live. Our body will be that much more wondrous than this natural body. It will be glorified as Christ's body was glorified. But it is only through God taking on a body like ours in Jesus that we get to be remade into a body like His. A body that will not die. A body that cannot perish. Jesus, this man from heaven, left heaven to walk the earth, to take on a body of dust so that we, the people of dust, can become people of heaven. Verse 49, "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven." It's because Jesus was born in the likeness of man that we are reborn in the likeness of Christ. Romans 8 says, "For those whom He forenew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the first born among many brothers." This was the goal of creation all along. The image of God is Christ Himself. And we are given the grace to be remade in that image, to fully embrace what we once threw away. But Jesus does not throw us away. He came running to embrace us. He came from heaven to earth to raise us out of the dust in fullness of mind and body and spirit. He renews. This is what Paul notes in his letter to the Philippians, "But our citizenship is in heaven. And from it 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." We talked last week about how Christ ascended and will return one day, and it'll be when all things are subject to him. That's when we will be caught up and transformed. An immigrant becomes something new when they receive their citizenship in their new country. We become something new when we receive our citizenship from heaven through Jesus. For the life we live in the physical and restored new creation of heaven and earth. And so we live this life in preparation of what is yet to come. And because we know that there is life to come, full, embodied, eternal life, we don't have to worry about what might happen to our bodies in this life. We take care of ourselves, absolutely. We honor this body that God has made. But fear loses its grip. Sickness is only for a time. Brothers and sisters around the world face death because of their faith in Jesus. But they know that they have this promise of real, full life forever. Their bodies will be raised. Jesus cannot be stopped. So what's stopping you? What's keeping you from living in the purpose of God for your life? God invites us to live with him forever. That's life. To experience the renewal of our bodies and to live both spiritually and physically forever. Don't walk away from that. Don't give up life and face embodied eternal death. Don't wait for the last minute and miss the deadline. Jesus took death head on so that we can be saved. And if we are saved, is there something keeping us from sharing the joy that we have in Jesus and the promise of new embodied life forever? Is there a fear that is holding us back? The mission of the Christian is to live this life knowing the next is on the way. That doesn't mean throwing our hands up and waiting for everything to burn. It means preparing. It means pleading with others to come with us. We use these bodies now for the mission of Jesus because Jesus has completed his redemption mission and all that's left is for him to come back. Suddenly every day is an opportunity to live embodied eternal life. Will we do that? What are we living for? Do we live with the end in mind? We chase after all kinds of things to make ourselves feel alive, but only God can actually make us fully alive. God will restore our bodies so that we can be everything he made us to be, so that we can walk with him again, just like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden in Jesus, our physical reality is made perfect. And we live with the hope of that perfected future resurrection. But in the meantime, I'll go to more funerals. And if Jesus delays his return for long, someone will come to mind. But death is not the end. This body of mine will be raised to full life one day. And when these physical eyes are perfected, I'll lay my eyes upon my perfect Savior who has saved my soul and restored my body. And when my physical legs have been perfected, I will run to Him. And my physical body has been perfectly restored to my redeemed spirit. I will be as He is. And I really hope that I'll see all of you there. Let's pray together. Father, what an incredible reality it is. But despite our rebellion and rejection of you and despite our running away from you, you have never given up on us. Lord God, holy Father, that you would send your Son Jesus Christ who knew the cost would be His life. What an incredible thing, Jesus, that you would give your life so that we could have it. And what a promise that you have risen from the dead, breaking the hold of death and the power of sin so that we can walk in freedom and honor and forgiveness. Lord God, that we could be called, "Father, your sons and daughters, your children." Holy Spirit, I pray, for those who are in this room or hearing these words and are not yet your children, I pray, Holy Spirit, that you would make us children of the Father. I pray that you would redeem our minds. Lord, for those who don't know you yet, I pray that they would not escape you. I pray that they would see your wonder and your majesty and your glory and your power and your might that you have done all that is necessary for us to be redeemed. And Holy Spirit, I pray that for those of us who belong to the Father already, that you would remind us of these promises and set our eyes on the things of forever and that we would walk in the newness of life that is ours already as we set our eyes on the resurrection life that is going to be ours to come. We love you Jesus, we know you have done what is necessary for us to have this salvation. We praise you and we honor you. And it is your most powerful name that we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening. We encourage you to check out the reflection questions in the show notes and spend some time in prayer. We have in-person services on Sundays at 8.30am, 10am and 11.45am. And we'd love to see you in person. If you'd like to learn more about what goes on here, follow us on Instagram at Willing Den or visit our website at www.Willingden.org.