As I write, the new year is growing older and the diet I promised to endure on 1st January is no closer to reality.
Too many tray bakes in the church office, and too much snacking at late night elders’ meetings. The answer to some peoples’ stress is going to the gym. The answer to mine is chocolate, and I feel my Sunday jacket tightening.
Praise the Lord that we will be given new bodies when Christ returns! That is not an excuse for lacking bodily discipline here and now, but it is a wonderful prospect. Paul says to the Romans: ‘He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.’ (Rom. 8:11)
We can be sure of our future bodily resurrection because the Spirit will accomplish for us what He has already accomplished for Christ. The same Spirit who lives in us raised Jesus from the dead.
Christ’s resurrection body was of a different order. He told Mary not to hold onto Him because He had not yet ‘ascended to the Father’ (John 20:17), suggesting that His resurrected body no longer belonged to this current age but was ‘heavenly’ and fit for the age to come. It had new powers. He could appear and disappear, but He was still physical, and recognisable as the earthly Jesus. He could eat and drink, and invited Thomas to put his finger into the still-visible scars of Calvary, though clearly the more grotesque scars of crucifixion had given way to bodily perfection. His was a body fit for the glories of the new heavens and earth.
And what happened to Christ will happen to us. In that glorious resurrection chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul describes Jesus’ resurrection as the ‘firstfruits’ (1 Cor. 15:20) of a multitude of bodily resurrections that will take place at the final trumpet. Our new bodies will be ‘imperishable’, ‘glorious’ and ‘spiritual.’ (1 Cor. 15:42-44)
By ‘spiritual’ Paul does not mean some kind of shadowy, will-o’-the-wisp existence. Christ’s ‘heavenly’ body is the prototype. We will still be physical, able to eat and drink the feasts of glory, but our bodies will have the powers of the age to come, free once and for all from the limitations and distortions of sin. We will be more truly human that we are today, taking on the full wonders of the Second Adam’s resurrection body.
And that is where we must stop and pause. The rest is a mystery, as are so many of the nuances of the ‘end times’, but the kind of enticing mystery that draws you in, remembering C.S. Lewis’ idea that each new chapter in the new creation story will be more wonderful that the one before.
So, what happens when we die? Many well-read believers are still unclear about that reality, perhaps through the confusion that the grief of losing a loved one brings. ‘Where are they now?’ is a question I have been asked numerous times. Paul tells us that ‘to be absent from the body is to be (simultaneously) present with the Lord.‘ (2 Cor. 5:8) When we die, our souls leave our bodies to go immediately into the intimate presence of Christ.
We remain as ‘the spirits of righteous men (and women) made perfect’ (Heb.12:23) until Christ utters the command at the last trumpet that will split open the graves of all those who have died in Him, and our glorious, imperishable, spiritual bodies will rise to unite with our souls, ‘and so we will always be with the Lord’ (1 Thess. 4:17).
What a prospect! Not one that should stop me from the diet I am delaying, but one that has the power to inspire every step I take, in this current, often weary, mortal body, knowing that one day I, we, every child of God, will be clothed in immortality.
