The Resurrection of the Body

The official count of our Easter Sunday combined attendance for both the 9 and the 11 o’clock services was 176. That is double our usual worship attendance. Thanks to all of you for cooperating and working to make our two Easter services a success. The Choir, Dennis, and Armand did double duty. We had a number of visitors. Several folks told me they felt good about the services.

I want to go over again what I presented to you on Easter concerning what the Bible teaches about the resurrection of the body. We believe not in the immortality of the soul, as if we are indestructible spirits that fly away from worn out bodies at death. We believe in the resurrection of the body. The same thing that happened to Jesus after he died will happen to us, Jesus’ people. He died. He was in some existence for three days that he called “Paradise.” When the thief on the cross asked to be remembered by Jesus, his response was, “This day you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Then he came back to be seen and to interact with his followers in a resurrection body, a transformed version of the body that had died on the cross. They knew him. He was different. They weren’t sure when they first saw him in his resurrection body, but he showed them the nail scars, he ate fish, and said, “A ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” (Read Luke 24:36-43.)

Jesus’ resurrection was, as Bible scholar N. T. Wright says, “life after life after death.” It was a three-step process: death, an intermediate state, and then the resurrection. That three-step process will happen to us, also. (Read 2 Corinthians 5:1-10.) It is clear that immediately after death, like the thief on the cross, we will be with the Lord. After that, when God brings down the curtain on history, we will be raised to face judgment and be given resurrection bodies. Death will be no more. This is the way Paul described it in 1 Corinthians 15:51-54. “We will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."