Resurrection of the Dead
Way of the Bible
English - February 16, 2023 12:00 - 43 minutes - 29.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 36 ratingsChristianity Religion & Spirituality christianity faith believing god following jesus eternal life god's kingdom creation god's will Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
#087 Welcome to Episode #087 of Way of the Bible podcast. This is our seventh of eight episodes in our eleventh mini-series entitled, Mystery of Christ | Galatians to 2 Thessalonians. On this episode we’re going to overview the topic of resurrection. What is it and why is it significant.
What we will be examining today are passages from both the Old and New Testaments that speak of a coming resurrection of all who have fallen asleep, or put another way, have died. The passages we will be looking at are not exhaustive but are a sufficient sampling to help us understand what God has said about this coming reality.
Resurrection is different than resuscitation. Resuscitation is merely the revival of life into the same mortal physical body that will eventually die again as is the cursed course of this world. Death came into the world as a result of Adam disobeying God’s clear command given in the Garden of Eden found in Genesis 2:16-17 – And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Paul tells of the significance of this disobedience by Adam in Romans 5:12 – Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. While we can choose to ignore this reality, truth is whatever death is we’re all going to experience it unless we’re snatched away by the Lord when he descends from heaven to call his church home.
We have many examples of resuscitation in both the Old and New Testaments when prophets raised people from the dead. All of those so raised eventually died again and were buried. The one who was in the grave the longest before his resuscitation was Lazarus. John 11:39 - Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”
What is interesting, is that in the scripture’s death is not annihilation but rather spoken of as being asleep with the soul of a person traveling to a holding place until the resurrection. In the Old Testament this holding place was referred to as Sheol and it had two compartments (hot and cool) separated by a chasm that couldn’t be crossed.