Resurrection of the Body – Part 2

Introduction
When I was a kid I loved to eat and drink all the things that kids love. I loved pepsi and lucky charms and fruit loops and pop tarts and sugar daddys and cotton candy and corn dogs. I’m getting a stomach ache. I loved this stuff - and for the record I still occasionally go to the dollar store and buy a box of sugar daddys and then regret it.

And if you were to ask me when I was a kid, is all that stuff good for you? I’d say, “No, of course not.” And I’d say that between alternating fist fulls of skittles and m&ms. I had a knowledge of something that is objectively true (it’s not a matter of opinion), that could be scientifically proven, that has been documented in medical journals - lots of sugar is bad for you. True. But it had very little impact on my life.

There was a gap between what I claimed was true (lucky charms is bad for me) and my diet (eating lucky charms).

Now in a very similar way, there is a gap between our official theological confessions and our actual life practices. We say one thing and do another.

Is God in control of all things? Yes. **And then in the same sentence, we say, “I so worried that I’m doing a terrible job at parenting and my kids won’t turn out.** And then there is fear and anxiety and stress?”
Is it true that your identity is secure in Christ? Yes. Do I look okay? What does she think about me? How can I make this person think highly of me.
Does God know what you need and can he provide it? Yes. How am I going to pay this bill. What should I do about my job? Where are we going to get the money to pay for this doctor visit? How will I send my kids through college.

Now that doesn’t represent any new thought. All of us know this gap exists. And we’ve been talking the last few weeks about Paul’s exhortation to close the gap about a specific theological truth. Since the resurrection is IN FACT a reality it ought to change the way we live.
Corinthian Review
All through the book of 1 Corinthians Paul has been addressing all these problems, these human problems. You’ll find some version of these problems in every church: lawsuits, sexual sin, insensitivity to others, spiritual pride, elevation of preferences. All those problems are here in this church. Why? Because the pride problem is a human problem. Where humans are, these gap problems will exist.

But 1 Corinthians 15 is the remedy. It’s the pride reverser. It’s the heart aligner. It’s the hope restorer. Paul says, the gap-closing solution to this mess is the resurrection.

Now the resurrection isn’t a magic stone. You can’t just say, “I believe in the resurrection.” and then all of the sudden all your problems are solved. The truth of it has to begin to take hold. It’s like fertilizer that slowly works its way into the soil and has slow effects over time. It has to seep into you in such a way that you see the implications in the actual decisions you make. You have to have moments of awareness where you become conscience of the gap and decide to close it.

I actually remember a lucky charm moment like this in my life. I remember sitting in a human anatomy class in college and our teacher was explaining what sugar did the pancreas and kidneys and the link to heart disease and the penny dropped. I always knew that sugar was “bad” I could never feel it. I felt fine. How could it be that bad if it makes me feel this good. But now I understood. Through a few analogies, a few photos, a few case studies, a few statistics, a motivational understanding was achieved. It made sense to me.

And the second class was over I remember going to the cafeteria and out of sheer habit, pouring my customary bowl of lucky charms and I was watching the delicious floating marshmallows ready for that first sugar hit and then all of the sudden it clicked.

This decision right here is what we were just talking about. I always thought of myself as a healthy person. But this decision was an unhealthy decision. This decision I was making right now mattered. I always joked it off thinking it didn’t matter but it did matter. And I remember pouring it out and grabbing an apple instead.

Paul’s giving us a lesson on spiritual anatomy and for me, some of this is starting to take root. It’s slowly begin to change my spiritual diet. It’s having an effect on how I love, what I love, where I put my focus. I’m starting to make connections, “Oh you mean this very thing, this thing I’ve always been doing that I’ve shrugged off as no big deal, this is the very thing you’re talking about - I see now that it’s inconsistent with the resurrection and it matters.”

And what’s Paul’s advice in this chapter if it hasn’t changed you? That means you haven’t been exposed to it long enough.

Your heart is like a tea bag that needs to seep in this resurrection truth.
You need it to stay in it long enough for it to begin to transform you.
You need to allow it leech out of you those things that are inconsistent.
You need to allow the Spirit of God to transform you. We need to expose the false things that we believe to be true and replace them with what is actually true.

And so that is what we have been doing the last couple weeks. Allowing this largely unfelt future reality to come upon us. And we continue today in that same vein. Last week we looked at three analogies that Paul gave us in the text which describe what our future bodies WILL BE LIKE. What is our resurrection body like?

If you were here last week you will remember that our resurrection body is compared to a seed in two ways: First, it will undergo a mysterious resurrection transformation. There is a mysterious transformation that could never be guessed based on looking at the seed only. Secondly it must die before that transformation can take place.

Then Paul compares the resurrection to a zoo. Walk through a zoo and you see so much variety in all these different animals. And that beautiful diversity will be experienced in the resurrection state.

And finally Paul compares the resurrection the glorious nature of the heavenly bodies. We gaze in awe when we behold the stars because of what they are but their shining is for God and to God and because of God. When we look at a star, the star itself is great but its greatness is a window through which we see the far greater greatness of God.

So that was last week. That is what the resurrection body will be like according to Paul. And today Paul is going to build on those ideas. Let’s continue to let this soak in and change us. So after comparing the resurrection body to a seed, to the bodies of animals to the stars he says,

Last week we talked about what our bodies are like through analogy, this week he’s going to tell us what are bodies are not like by using comparison and contrast. Our heavenly bodies are not like are earthly bodies in these ways….It’s such a helpful learning tool.

This is a great teaching tool. If I got a job as a bank teller, I’d imagine that a part of my training, they would instruct me on how to identify fake money. Now right now I don’t know hardly anything about fake money. So the best way to teach someone in my position is to compare and contrast.

So you’d pull out a fake and a real and you’d say do you see this one. Now that your familiar with it, look at this one. See the difference? And he’d begin pointing out the features that don’t make sense.

And that’s Paul’s technique. He knows we are totally uneducated. He knows we have such microscopic, weak understanding. None of us have any experience with our future resurrection bodies BUT we do have something going for us. We have lots of experience with our current bodies and so Paul teaches us about our future bodies by comparing and contrasting to our present bodies.

So the question Paul wants to answer for us today is quite simply, “How do our future bodies differ?”

This is the first contrast

This is a great comparison. Perishable vs imperishable! I love the descriptiveness of the word perishable. Things that are perishable have a shelf life. It means there is a window in which they are usable for their intended purpose and then it’s usefulness fades and eventually it becomes totally and completely repulsive. To say that we as humans are perishable means that we are like a gallon of milk in the refrigerator. When you twist off the cap its fresh and delicious and then over the course of the next two weeks it slowly, almost imperceptibly by degrees begins to sour. And there’s nothing worse than twisting off a cap and smelling the rotten milk. It has perished. It has ceased to become useful.

Compare the perishable nature of a gallon of milk to something that is imperishable. A raw element on the periodic table is about the closest thing we could think of to something that is imperishable. A tank of hydrogen is imperishable. Put a rod of copper in a vaccuum. It’s imperishable. Give it 10,000 years, give it a million years and those gasses, that rod of copper will be unchanged, exactly the same as they had originally been designed, no change whatsoever.

That’s the closest thing we know to something that is imperishable, functionally eternal.

Take that concept and translate it over into our physical bodies. Think about an imperishable body! One that repairs itself, not decently, not pretty good, but perfectly.

If getting cut is a possibility in the resurrection body then this text teaches that a cut would heal perfectly.
If its possible to get sunburned in heaven then the resurrection body would heal that perfectly with no permanent effects.
Aging would be a non-concept.
There would be no concept of disease, sickness, unhealthy.

One of the great descriptors we get of the eternal state comes from Revelation 21:4. It’s a crazy text in just the description of how awesome it will be.

Think about an imperishable body. Think about a body that doesn’t age, that never falls out of it’s prime, that never ceases to be useful for it’s intended purpose. I’m looking forward to that body whose expiration date is eternal - one that never sours.

Here’s the second contrast:

Here the comparison is between dishonorable and glorious. Now we’ve talked about the common idea in Greek culture that the body was bad and that all that mattered was Spirit - these were some of the seed ideas of gnosticism that would come a hundred years later.

And so when we read about a body that is sown in dishonor and raised in glory it might sound like Paul is in agreement (at least in part) with this idea that the body is evil. But that isn’t the case. In Paul’s way of thinking, something that is dishonorable is something that is rendered ineffective for it’s intended use.

Now to illustrate this point, there are at least three places in the NT where Paul reveals his understanding of the word dishonorable. One of the clearest examples is in 2 Tim 2:20.

In 2 Timothy 2 Paul compares people to vessels in the house. He says in a great house you have all sorts of vessels some of them are honorable and some of them are dishonorable depending upon the material from which they are made. The vessels made of gold and silver and precious stone are the ones that are honorable and end up on the kings table. They serve the king in an honorable way. How exactly to they give honor to the king? When someone comes into the chamber and sees the fine silverware, the gold cups, they say, man, look at the costly material used in tableware. Diamond studded forks, gold serving spoons. But they don’t ultimately praise the flatware or the cups, they praise the king who is so wealthy he is able to use a gold cup for the common purpose of drinking. The cup - merely by being used - is honoring the king.

Now by contrast, you have other vessels that are used for carrying out the trash, the latrines, the animal feeding troughs.

In order for the vessel to honor the king, it has to be made of honorable material. A cup made of playdough would not end up on the table of a king. The material matters!

The material impurity in Timothy is interpreted for us…

Dishonorable material is material tainted by sin. Timothy is saying you are more useful in honoring God, the more free you are from sin.

BAnd so Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 15 is that the resurrection is the ultimate washing machine, it’s the ultimate stain remover, the ultimate furnace which melts us down and remakes us into a vessel blindingly brilliant without impurities. It cleanses us of all dishonor.

We are resurrected into diamond challises, into pure diamond goblets that if they existed here on earth, people would fall down and worship them but in heaven they sit on the kings table for the purpose of bringing him honor.

And how do they bring the king honor? Because they are made of honorable stuff. And honorable stuff…

By reason of the fact that it is simply possessed by the king, brings honor to the king.
By reason of the fact that this honrable thing is simply used brings honor to the king.
By reason of the fact that king unthinkingly lifts the goblet to his lips, by reason of the fact that pure vessel holds the liquid that the king will drink, it brings incredible honor to the king.

Our resurrected bodies, totally free of sin, will be vessels, finely and finally suited to sit in the presence of the Son of God, not shamefully, not dishonorably, not inappropriately, but honorably. The text says glorious.

What a thought!

A glorious body, a body that has weight, significance, substance, magnificence. A body that has intrinsic worth and objective value. A body that is used to bring honor to the king. That is something that is glorious.

That is resurrection glory by friends. That is what Jesus Christ purchased on the cross, this resurrection transformation from dishonorable to honorable. Can I get an amen?

Thirdly we read:

Thirdly, we read that this resurrection body will be powerful. This isn’t talking about power like a marvel character. We aren’t going to have superpowers. Paul is contrasting human weakness. No matter how godly you are, your body suffers from weakness. In fact, the weakness of the body is often what keeps us from being able to do more good. The previous idea of dishonorable to honorable spoke of the problem of sin. But here we aren’t talking about the problem of sin. We are talking about the weakness and limitations of the human frame, the mechanical and chemical limitations of a body.

The best place to illustrate this is the person of Jesus because is human sans sin. Jesus was everything that it means to be human without sin. And when we look at Jesus we surprisingly see weakness.
Physical weakness. (From lack of food, not enough sleep, sickness, disease, age)
We are told in the gospels that after long hours of preaching and teaching and healing people that Jesus was weary of the crowds. There was this conflicting thing going on inside of him. He loved the people, the mission of God was strongly upon him, and yet his body was tired, his brain was no longer fresh and thinking clearly. He needed some space. This is a function of biology. I have a fish aquarium in my office and I’d love to fill it with about 400 fish but the fish will die because they can’t handle those close quarters. And humans are like that too. Just being next to lots of people takes a toll. You go to Disneyland or the fairgrounds for 8 hours and your waiting in long lines and by the end of the day your cooked. Even Jesus experienced these feelings. He just needed to get away, to get alone, to have some quiet time with the Father. Why because his body was weak.

But Paul says, yes, that is your current weakness but you will be raised with power.
Spiritual weakness (Temptation)
Spiritual weakness is not sin. It’s temptation. Among the most surprising things to discover is that part of being sinlessly human means being tempted.

Temptation is a form of weakness. We are told that Jesus was tempted. If Jesus was tempted in every way we are then it would be true to say that he was tempted sexually, tempted with food, tempted with drink, tempted with love, tempted to steal.

How can that be? It sounds wrong to say that and yet that’s what Hebrews 4:15 says, tempted in every respect, yet without sin. Think about the type of temptation that arises as a result of being human. Temptation often comes when our weak bodies have needs. We get hungry or thirsty. We get cold. We get hot. We get cramped. All those are functions of being human.

Temptation occurs when we encounter opportunities to meet those bodily needs in ways that would dishonor the Lord. Jesus was tempted by Satan to turn the rock into bread. Why? Because he was starving to death. His body was screaming at him. The body knows nothing of the difference between bread obtained through sinful methods vs bread obtained through righteous methods. The screams of the body will die down no matter what kind of bread it gets.

Jesus’ limited human body desperately needed food and as that biological need began to shout loudly, the temptation to meet that bodily need in a way that would dishonor the Father increased. This, I believe is a limitation of being human, a limitation of the weakness of the human body.

But not so with the resurrection body. You won’t find yourself in dilemmas like these where your weak body is screaming with need.
A Body of Power
Now just imagine a body of power.

What if you had unlimited physical capacity or at least a much increased capacity. A glorified body will be much less limited in it’s capacity to do good, in it’s stamina toward glorifying God. Even the best days of worship, the body tires, even the best days of service on the mission field and you feel your body saying, “I need to go to bed.”

Even on your best days, the needs of your body derail you and you are tempted. Imagine if that is all gone, if it all goes away. You are cleansed of your dishonor and given power, endurance, stamina to glorify God.

This is the power of the resurrection, my friends. Can I get an amen?

The most important comparison is the final one - spiritual vs natural. We would do well to spend a little time thinking about this word spiritual. The word spiritual evokes in our minds many different things, but almost certainly all of the things it evokes are incorrect.

Let me just prove to you that whatever you have in your mind is probably incorrect. Define spiritual in your mind. Think of something spiritual. Okay, now we are going to read verse 44.

Using our standard definitions of the word that phrase spiritual body makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a total oxymoron. It’s like saying a visible invisible body. A super heavy, ultra-light body.

For most of us spiritual is a synonym for ghost or at least non-material. When our loved ones die, we tell our kids something like, "His body died but his spirit went to heaven." And there is a sense in which that is true, but there’s a larger sense in which that is not true. We might say his Spirit will one day get a body but we’d never say the body was Spiritual. He’s got a long body, a short body - he’s got a spiritual body.

And here’s the untrue part. Spiritual and material are NOT opposites. That is why Paul can say we will be resurrected with a Spiritual Body. A Spiritual Material Body? That should make sense.

What is a Spiritual Body?

So we need to do a little work to reclaim the intended definition of the word. There are two aspects of the word spiritual that we need to reclaim.

In the same way that we say something is factual. We mean that the statement contains fact - that fact is the essence of something factual.

In the same way when we say something is spiritual we mean that whatever we are talking about, contains the Spirit of God - that the Holy Spirit is the essence of something that is spiritual.

Remember how Paul uses the word back in 3:1. Here they are bickering back and forth about whose greater based on this or that mark of spirituality and he’s saying you are totally void of the Spirit which means you are totally unspiritual.

Spiritual in this sense means controlled by the Spirit, derived from the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit or something along those lines.

So that is why the NT talks about Spiritual Gifts. It doesn’t mean invisible gifts. It doesn’t mean ghostly gifts. It means gifts that come from the Spirit of God. They derive from the person of the Holy Spirit.

So that’s one aspect of the word spiritual. But there’s a second that this passage in particular really emphasizes.

Of course there is an element of the word spiritual that is non-material. The Bible says, “God is Spirit” which at least in some sense means he doesn’t have a physical body as we currently understand it. It would be pointless to go an expedition trying to photograph a Spirit because we know that whatever Spirit means, we know it at least means non-photographable (spell check didn’t like that word - but you get the point).

Spiritual things are non-material things. When we say something is material we mean that it is made up of matter. We meant that if you break it down, at some point you end up with some combination of the raw materials on the periodic table of elements. Those are material things. They are made of matter.

But the important, very important point here is to acknowledge that being immaterial does not make it unreal. It is equally real. Both Christians and non-Christians acknowledge plenty of real things that you cannot see with your eyes and are not made up of matter.

A simple example of this is the electromagnetic spectrum.

You have this energy wave that follows a sin curve and depending on how tightly that wave oscillates, the wave takes on different characteristics. And this tiny narrow band of the wave is visible light. Everything our eye detects is in this tiny band. But there’s all sort of ‘light’ that is real, we just can’t see it. You have gama rays, xrays, ultraviolet light, infrared light, microwaves, fm radio am waves. All this other stuff exists, we just can’t see it.

I used to work for an internet service provider and the data-center would monitor solar weather because even though you couldn’t see it, a giant solar flare releases a ton of energy that could knock out servers or scramble RAM so we’d try to be aware of what might be coming because that way if you had erratic computer behavior and lots of solar activity, you’d be wasting your time trying to hunt down code bugs since the problem was the giant ball of helium gas in the sky that turns out is a little difficult to control.*

It’s totally real and totally invisible.

Here’s an example using infrared. We could take a mouse and look at half the mouse in our normal visible light and then half the mouse and look at him in infrared light. If we could see in infrared, this is what the mouse would look like.

Now which half of the mouse is more real? Neither. In terms of realness, both are exactly the same. They both equally real. They both are equally absolute, certain, self-evident, factual. But only one of them can be seen.

Those rays influence us, they interact with us, when we microwave our food, all the sudden the food gets hot and we think how did that happen? There’s not heat in the microwave like when you open an oven. The microwave interacts with us, we just can’t see it.

Catch this. Here’s the point: this inability to detect these parts of the electromagnetic spectrum is a limitation of our BODIES. Our eyes are not tuned to those frequencies.

And in the EXACT SAME WAY, our bodies are not tuned to the spiritual frequencies of heaven. That is Paul’s exact point. Look again at verse 45.

So that’s where we get the title of the message, from dust to glory.

We currently have dusty eyes, eyes that see dust, elements, earthly things. But a body will be given us with new abilities.

And so Paul when Paul says we will be raised with spiritual bodies. He’s saying our bodies will not be less real; they will be more real. They will be more able to interact with the world around them. They will be able to interact with both the spiritual world and the physical world. In our analogy here, if the spiritual world was represent by the infrared spectrum then, a spiritual body would be one that would be able to see both visible light and infrared light. You WILL be raised with infrared eyes so to speak. You will be resurrected with spiritual eyes, spiritual legs, spiritual muscles.

That is what Paul is trying to say.
Summary and Application
Here’s the most startling thing Paul says, “Today, we bear the image of Adam. One day we will bear the image of the man from heaven.”

This is real. Your resurrections bodies will be real bodies that have increased ability to do almost everything.

They will be imperishable.
They will be glorious.
They will be powerful.
They will be spiritual.

Which means with our new eyes we will be able to behold God, with our new bodies we will be able to stand in the presence of God as undefiled, glorious, vessels of honor, diamond challises ready to contain whatever purpose God determines to fill us with, unfatigued by the normal wears and tears of life, infinitely eager to worship God.

This is the reality folks.

We need to get firmly seated a category in our minds for real, invisible things that will one day be visible with our new bodies that are given new abilities to interact with spiritual forces. This is the historic teaching of the Christian faith and we affirm it, love it and hope in it. Let’s pray.