You Will Be Resurrected, Part 1

Dr. Alan Dunn

Many are asking questions concerning our future in a post-pandemic world. I am unqualified even to attempt to answer those questions. I have no idea what our future will be. Well, that’s not true. Scripture does tell us about our future. There are some questions that the Bible does answer, specifically, about the future resurrection of the dead. I can attempt to answer some of those questions.

Who Will Be Resurrected?

All men will be resurrected: the righteous and the wicked, the justified and the condemned, the saved and the damned, those with fruitful faith and those with dead fruitless faith. The Old Testament teaches that all men will be resurrected. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but others to disgrace and everlasting contempt [Dan 12:2]. The New Testament likewise points us to a general resurrection of all men. Jesus prophesies in John 5:28-29, Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment. Paul says, there shall certainly be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked [Acts 24:15]. John sees the resurrection in prophetic vision in Revelation 20:11-15. He saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne… and the dead were judged…the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them.

Sometimes some people pressure preachers to be “relevant,” “practical,” “helpful.” We think we know what our “problems” are, and we read Scripture to find out how to fix our lives, as though it is some kind of owner’s manual. However, this pandemic is exposing our real “problem,” which requires a true, relevant word from God. Indeed, it is only God who can tell us the nature of our “problem” and only He can provide the relevant provision. Our problem? Death due to our sin. What could be more relevant to people presently experiencing a plague? Death puts all our other perceived problems and aspirations in perspective. There is no message more relevant to us than the gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The risen Lord guarantees that if we are going to die, we are also going to be resurrected.

What Will Be Resurrected?

As the image of God, God has made us to be psychosomatic, soul plus body, beings. We do not image God as fully human unless we exist as embodied souls. Death is so radically dehumanizing. Physical death is the severance of the body and the soul [Jas 2:26]. We continue to exist after death in what theologians call “the disembodied state” or “the intermediate state.” [1] Our souls will have self-consciousness and the capacity to interact with other disembodied beings personally. At the moment of death, we who die in Christ will be absent from the body and at home with the Lord [2 Cor 5:8]. In the disembodied state, we will wait for the resurrection of the dead. Our very humanity demands that we exist as psychosomatic beings. Paul describes our desire for our resurrected bodies in 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:8. He weaves the ideas of replacing the tent of this body with the building made by God, and of rectifying the state of being naked, that is, disembodied, with being clothed with our dwelling from heaven. Our very humanity necessitates that we live as psychosomatic beings, before and after the resurrection.

“At the last day, such of the saints as are found alive, shall not sleep [die], but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other; although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever. The bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonor; the bodies of the just, by His Spirit, unto honor and be made conformable to His own glorious body” [The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, 31:2-3]. Our bodies will be resurrected. We will see continuity. We will have “the selfsame bodies.’ Yet we will see discontinuity. Our bodies will have “different qualities.”

Jesus speaks of those in the tombs [John 5:28]. He knows what it is to be in a tomb. He died and was buried in a tomb. When Jesus rose from the dead, He showed His disciples His scarred body. They knew that Jesus’s resurrected body was the same body that they saw being crucified and then laid in Joseph’s tomb. The resurrected Jesus was the “selfsame” Jesus who was with them before He died but now with a body having “different qualities.” Listen to what the exalted Jesus tells John in Revelation 1:17-18, Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades. When Jesus was in the tomb, He did not lose His personal identity, and neither will you. When your dead body is placed in the ground, it will be you who is being buried. That dust in the grave is a person who is in the abnormal state of death.

The resurrected person will be the same person who lived in this present age but changed, with a body having “different qualities.” I invite you to read Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15, the most extensive treatment of the resurrection in Scripture. In verse 35, Paul repeats questions he is being asked: How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body to they come? In verses 36-38, he depicts the body that is placed in the ground as analogous to a seed being planted. As the seed undergoes a transformation into a plant, so too the buried body will be transformed in the resurrection. It will have the “selfsame” personal identity, but “with different qualities.” In verses 42-43, Paul continues to contrast the body that we bury with the body that we will have in the resurrection. We bury a perishable, dishonored, weak body that will rise as imperishable, glorious, and in power. We who have stood by the death-bed and casket of a loved one readily understand the meaning of perishable, dishonored, and weak. Yet we have hope. Our loved ones who die in Christ will be raised in glory! In verse 44-49, Paul contrasts the natural, earthy body with the spiritual, heavenly body. Here Paul is contrasting the body fit to live in this age in union with the original Adam and the body fit to live in the age to come in union with the last Adam, the resurrected Jesus. Verse 45 parallels Adam at the point of his original creation and Jesus at the point of his resurrection. We who are in Christ will bear the image of the heavenly – the glorified Jesus.

Beyond Paul’s comparisons between our death-conditioned bodies and Adam’s pre-fallen body with the glory of our resurrected bodies in 1 Corinthians 15, others passages give us an idea of what our resurrected bodies will be. Jesus tells us that the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father [Mat 13:43] and then Jesus was transfigured. His face shone like the sun [Mat 17:17:2]. In Daniel 12:2 we read of the resurrection of the dead and verse three brings those who awoke to everlasting life into view: And those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. Light is associated with that life and glory which is ours in Christ.

What can we say concerning those who will awaken to disgrace and everlasting contempt? Some rely on Alighieri Dante’s The Inferno to answer that question. Dante describes nine levels of hell using images derived from Greek mythology and his own fertile imagination, not Scripture. He morbidly imagines various grotesque torments of the damned. Artistic depictions of Dante’s damned paint men as having the same bodies that we presently have. But if the resurrected bodies of the righteous in Christ will shine like the sun, can we expect that the bodies of the wicked outside of Christ will likewise “have different qualities” fit to inhabit hell? I believe so.

Who will be resurrected? All men. You and me and everyone else who has ever lived, is living, and is yet to live. What will be resurrected? Our bodies. Those in the tombs will rise. Scripture gives us more hints regarding the resurrected bodies of the saints but says little about the resurrected bodies of those who die outside of Christ. We tremble as we speculate about what kind of body would be required to exist eternally in a realm of outer darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth [Mat 25:30]. There are two more questions that we can answer from Scripture concerning the resurrection of the dead: “How will the dead be resurrected?” and “When will the dead be resurrected?” Those will be the concerns of part two of this two-part series.

We are psychosomatic beings and we are right to be concerned for our bodily well-being in the midst of the CV19 pandemic. If we are justified to be concerned for our bodily health in this temporal age, how much more for our bodily well-being in the eternal age to come? Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment [John 5:28-29]. You will be resurrected.

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[1] The bodies of men after their death return to dust, and see corruption [Gen 3:19; Acts 13:36]; but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them [Eccl 12:7]. The souls of the righteous being then made perfect in holiness, are received into paradise, where they are with Christ, and behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies [Luke 23:43; 2 Cor 5:1,6,8; Phil 1:23; Heb 12:23] ; and the souls of the wicked are cast into hell; where they remain in torment and under darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day [Jude 1:6,7; 1 Pet 3:19; Luke 16:23-24]; besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none {The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, 31:1].