And from the human viewpoint, it looked ridiculous. And the idea of resurrection was repulsive to them, because they couldn’t imagine a rotted, decayed, stinking, corrupted bunch of whatever, left in a grave, coming all together again and coming out.
#Flesh n bone blaze of glory rapidshare free#
And the body just went to dust, and the spirit was free to be absorbed in the universal deity, the cosmic god, whatever that was.Īnd so, that’s where they stopped. You see, they had believed that the body was a prison for the spirit. They’re talking like skeptics, not like honest doubters. “All right, Paul, you want to tell us about resurrection, bodily, physical resurrection of the dead, well, explain to us how that can possibly happen. And now he is going to deal with another element of their questioning, because as soon as he has established the reality of the resurrection, they’re going to say just what they say in verse 35, “Some will say, ‘How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?’” The whole of the Christian life hinges on this. “The resurrection is the Gospel,” he said earlier. So, Paul has reaffirmed the resurrection. I just fulfill my sensual needs, and I wouldn’t get involved.Īnd thirdly, we saw that if here’s no resurrection, we lose a great incentive to sanctification or holiness, because the thing that keeps us desirous of obedience is the fact that we must face Christ with a sense of accountability. Well, why would I do that if there’s no resurrection? I just eat, and drink, and die and forget it. We saw also that resurrection is a great incentive to service. If there’s no resurrection, there’s no hope of reunion, then people who come to Christ with the desire to be rejoined with those they love won’t bother. Now, this is a vital thing, and we saw in the last section that if we don’t believe in bodily resurrection, then we lose some great motivation and some great incentive in the Christian life, don’t we? We saw last time that we lose an incentive to salvation.
God will not desert the body He will raise it at the last day. The body is something that will be with us throughout eternity in a changed and a transformed way. It is not just a prison from which the spirit is freed forever to go back and be absorbed in some universal cosmic deity. But the New Testament knows nothing of that, because the body is something exalted even to the place where it becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit of God. Now, the Greeks wanted to say that the body was a simple prison, was an evil, fleshly, materialistic, decaying thing that only imprisoned the spirit. In other words, the ultimate act of salvation is the raising of those at the last day who are Christ’s. Jesus looked, for example, at the very extremity of His ministry to men when He said this, “No man comes unto me” – John 6:44 – “except the Father draw him, and then I will raise him at the last day. God created man as a whole, and God will redeem man as a whole – body and spirit. So, even the saints today with Christ, those who have gone on, are there in spirit, waiting for the body that will come at resurrection to clothe the nakedness that they now experience. The believer desires, in the next life, to be clothed upon with a house that is a heavenly body. Paul says that would be a kind of nakedness. So, the idea that a spirit could exist eternally without a body is not at all akin to Christianity. In fact, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 – you don’t need to look it up just to mention what it says – in verses 2, 3, and 4 he says that we desire to be clothed with a body that is from heaven, and that if we were not clothed, we would be found naked. There will be an ultimate salvation of even the body is what he’s talking about. The apostle Paul says in Romans 8:23 that there is a redemption of the body. So, Jesus talked about bodily resurrection. Jesus said in John chapter 5 that there will be a bodily resurrection of the just and the unjust some to life and some to damnation. Now, this is a cardinal element in Christian theology. Christ’s resurrection then becomes the guaranteed of our resurrection.
The idea of resurrection is very basic, then, to Christianity. And we’ve already learned, in the first 34 verses repeatedly, that the resurrection of Christ is the basis of our resurrection that we, too, will rise. The basis of the hope of our fate is in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are aware that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the foundation of Christian testimony, the foundation of the Gospel. It’s very much evident, by the time we reach the fifteenth chapter of Corinthians, in the thirty-fifth verse, that the apostle Paul wants us to believe in the bodily resurrection. Let me remind you of some facts about resurrection.
0 kommentar(er)
